#762: Scaling a brand while maintaining local differentiation with Renaud Delaquis, Coastline Academy

Summary

---

The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®

Episode #762: Scaling a Brand While Maintaining Local Differentiation with Renaud Delaquis, Coastline Academy
Date: November 5, 2025
Guest: Renaud Delaquis, Head of Product Marketing, Coastline Academy
Host: Greg Kihlström

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the challenges and opportunities of scaling a service brand to thousands of local markets while maintaining local authenticity and differentiation—a crucial concern for brands navigating the digital age and rapid growth. Greg Kihlström is joined by Renaud Delaquis, who shares Coastline Academy’s unique blend of high-tech and grassroots approaches to nationwide expansion, local trust-building, and operational agility, especially in a traditionally low-innovation industry like driving education.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Guest Background and Coastline Academy’s Model

[02:02-04:20]

• Renaud Delaquis introduces his atypical career path from visual artist to product marketing in edtech.
• Coastline Academy differs from traditional driving schools:
  • Functions as a platform, like Uber but with employee instructors for quality control.
  • Operates across ~2,000 cities with a light, scalable model—few brick-and-mortar locations.
  • Acquisition of traditional schools supplements their expansion.

Notable Quote:
"The challenges that we have as a driving school and pairing that with a national brand ambition... there's a lot to talk about. I'm very passionate about it."
—Renaud Delaquis [02:55]

---

2. Local Authenticity vs. National Scale

[03:45-05:53]

• Traditional schools benefit from having locations that people regularly see; Coastline lacks this advantage.
• To compete and build genuine connections, Coastline relies on two main approaches:
  • Digital Marketing: Leader in paid ads—outsized opportunity since competitors underinvest in digital.
  • Hyperlocal Engagement: Sponsors high school teams, supports local charities, focuses on true community integration.

Notable Quote:
"As a digital marketer... we went like a full 180... The number one tactic that we found is sponsor high school teams, support schools, support boys and girls club... I get to give money to a football team because they need new uniforms instead of just giving it all to Google. And that's incredibly rewarding."
—Renaud Delaquis [06:33-07:03]

---

3. Operationalizing Local Outreach at Scale

[07:45-09:34]

• Scaling grassroots efforts involves both sophisticated tools and local empowerment:
  • Use sales/marketing tech for data-driven outreach (e.g., building lists of local coaches).
  • Automation supports personalized, scalable campaigns.
  • Local instructors (often rooted in their communities) are given autonomy and resources to foster local relationships.
  • Internal systems, including “marketing packages,” make participation easy for local staff.

Notable Quote:
"We invest a lot in the people of the company... What they do is a high trust service... So how can we equip them to make these connections?... We have hundreds of instructors all over the place."
—Renaud Delaquis [08:22-09:11]

---

4. Staying Ahead Amid Industry Inertia

[10:55-13:44]

• Renaud notes that driving education is not a high-innovation space; most competitors are slow to react.
• Coastline’s strategy:
  • Acquire legacy schools (owners often seeking retirement, few buyers exist).
  • Outlast or outpace competition until local “flywheels” of referrals and awareness kick in.
  • Example: San Diego’s market turned from weakest to strongest within one year due to compounding local tactics.

Notable Quote:
"We do our thing until the flywheel starts spinning in an area. And then at that point, like our growth happens very quickly... at some point we're taking over this market."
—Renaud Delaquis [13:03-13:15]

---

5. Balancing Brand Building, Word-of-Mouth, and Profitability

[13:44-17:49]

• Coastline leverages both paid marketing and organic word-of-mouth (“viral” effect) but tries to accelerate the process to avoid long generational lag.
• Acquiring first-time buyers is costlier in new markets, but critical for building both profitability and reputation.
• Two levers for efficiency: spend more, or optimize spend via technology and internal process improvements—without sacrificing safety or quality.

Notable Quote:
"A new market is... we will lose money in a new market. Like, we are fully aware of this... But the way that we reduce our costs on the operation side right now is through technology. Every year we see a new bit of technology that has a massive impact for us internally."
—Renaud Delaquis [16:02-17:43]

---

6. The Role of Technology and AI in Scaling

[17:49-19:15]

• AI drives productivity: engineering output grew by 80% year-over-year without adding headcount.
• Coastline remains intentionally small on engineering/marketing teams to stay agile and quickly adopt new tools as they emerge.
• Focus is on augmenting, not replacing, human contributors.

Notable Quote:
"Our engineering team is shockingly small for a company our size... but our output has grown by 80% in the last year. So we're like, cool. That is essentially either half the cost or twice the output."
—Renaud Delaquis [17:51]

---

7. Advice for Marketing Leaders on Scaling and Agility

[19:17-20:23]

• Embrace experimentation with new technologies—large companies are often too slow and bureaucratic to innovate quickly.
• Smaller organizations can leverage iterative experimentation, learning from failures, and pouncing on emerging opportunities.
• Having a failure budget or “innovation quota” is recommended.

Notable Quote:
"Just being small is such an advantage in this time because those bigger company will take forever to shift."
—Renaud Delaquis [20:20]

---

8. The Value of Failure, Experimentation, and Iteration

[21:44-22:59]

• Renaud draws on his artist background: most attempts don’t work, but breakthrough successes offset many failures.
• Advocates for keeping a written playbook for failed attempts—timing or execution may cause failure now but could work in a future context.

Notable Quote:
"Most of what I do doesn't work, but I make it up with volume. And whenever something works... I will scale this so that this makes up for all the losses that I made... Maybe I have two new marketing channels out of the 15 that I tried. But...I don't remember the...13 that failed."
—Renaud Delaquis [21:58-22:59]

---

9. How to Stay Agile Consistently

[23:42-24:39]

• Renaud’s personal approach: always have one innovation initiative on your weekly top five tasks.
• Be a holistic generalist, prepared to recognize and seize new opportunities quickly.
• Use a “holistic” (hearkening back to his yoga project roots) understanding of the entire marketing landscape to know where new tools or tactics can have impact.

Notable Quote:
"Try something every week... have one of these things be innovative with no expectation of it working, but you're doing this for your own learning."
—Renaud Delaquis [23:42]

---

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On rewarding local outreach:
  "I get to give money to a football team because they need new uniforms instead of just giving it all to Google."
  —Renaud Delaquis [07:00]

• On legacy competitors:
  "If a school has been there since the 80s, they have generational clients... I can't compete with that in a very short timeframe."
  —Renaud Delaquis [11:52]

• On organizational learning:
  "I just keep a percentage of my budget—what I call a failure budget—and that's just money for me to try something."
  —Renaud Delaquis [23:13]

---

Key Takeaways for Leaders

• Blend high-tech and low-tech: Use scalable digital tools but combine with authentic, local, “human” engagement.
• Sponsor and participate in local communities: Not just digital presence, but meaningful involvement earns trust.
• Empower your local team members: Autonomy and internal support systems allow on-the-ground staff to build relationships.
• Use technology to amplify, not replace: AI and automation boost productivity and free up human creativity.
• Experiment relentlessly: Create organizational permission for failures; keep records for future attempts.
• Stay agile: Always dedicate resources—time, budget, focus—to experimenting and staying ahead of coming trends.

---

End of Summary

Transcript

[Renaud Delacchi]

The Agile Brand.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. With customer expectations constantly evolving, how can large organizations avoid using obsolete methods and instead embrace agility to thrive and drive meaningful growth? Agility requires both adapting to change and.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Anticipating it in the first place. It demands a willingness to experiment, learn.

[Greg Kilstrom]

And iterate quickly, especially when it comes.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

To connecting with your target audience in new and innovative ways.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Today we're going to talk about the.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Challenges and opportunities of scaling a brand nationwide while maintaining a strong local presence.

[Greg Kilstrom]

It's a balancing act that requires a.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Deep understanding of both digital innovation and grassroots tactics.

[Greg Kilstrom]

To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Renaud Delacchi, Head of Product Marketing at Coastline Academy. Renaud, welcome to the show.

[Renaud Delacchi]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself.

[Greg Kilstrom]

And your role at Coastline Academy?

[Renaud Delacchi]

Okay. My background is all over the place. I have a very atypical journey. I started off as a visual artist. That's what I'm formally trained in. But that somehow led me to Paul build my first product which was a an online yoga platform which I'm not even into yoga. So like there's already a separation between the product. But one thing led to another. I met someone in India that then sent me a contact for a driving school in the US And I don't know how this happened, but it was just a perfect fit. And so that's how I started with Cosign. I've been with them for three years, been in marketing for 15 and honestly I've had this has been a dream job for the last three years. The challenges that we have as a driving school and pairing that with a national brand ambition. Yeah, there's a lot to talk about. I'm very passionate about it, so I can't wait to get into it.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah, Yeah, I love it.

Yeah. As someone who's had a nonlinear career path myself, I was a photography major and somehow ended up in Martech, so.

[Renaud Delacchi]

Me too.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Right.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah.

[Tech Systems Sponsor Voice]

So.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

So yeah, let's, let's dive in here. So first, you know, as I mentioned in the, in the intro, there's, there's this balance that needs to be played between this, you know, national or even global reach and yet targeting local locations. So, you know, Coastline Academy has a presence in over 500 cities. How do you think about maintaining authenticity and building genuine connections with. Within those local communities while simultaneously having this national brand identity?

[Renaud Delacchi]

Yeah. So I think before we get into this, it's worth explaining the business model for Coastline because it's a little bit different than a traditional driving school. So we operate a lot like a, a plumbing company would. Right. So we have, we are essentially a platform. We have on one side, people looking for driving lessons or driver's ed, and on the other side, people looking, people who can offer driving lessons. There are a lot like Uber would. But the key distinction here is that they are actually our employees, our car. Just because we need to make sure that the quality is on par with.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

With all those requirements. So this allows us to have service areas and without being tied to brick and mortar locations. So having this, this very light model, we're able to scale it very quickly. So now realistically, I think we just hit 2,000 towns and cities across nine states. So like we're growing. We are growing quickly. We are also in acquisition mode and we are acquiring brick and mortar locations. But just to kind of set the tone, that's how like we don't have 2,000 brick and mortar locations.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Got it.

[Renaud Delacchi]

But that comes with another problem. Right. A big marketing channel for traditional driving schools would be their location. Because you pass in front of it, you see it, and it just becomes part of your subconscious. And so how do we compete with a thousand driving schools and have this authenticity that people don't feel like we're just this like tech startup getting into their town while maintaining growth. And this, there's two main channels that we do for this. On the first hand, I'll say digital is. Digital marketing is the number one revenue generating channel for us. Right. So we invest a lot in paid ads for the main, like the main reason being that those driving schools actually don't spend a lot there. So there's not a whole lot of competition in this market or in this channel. And that is like one of the opportunity that we have going for us. Right. We have, we have very sophisticated marketing tactics in place. Like, we have automation, we have some AI tools that are optimizing our ads for us.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

So we have this as an agent of growth on top of the acquisition, which is also an agent of growth for us. But then on the local side, we still need to have a very local presence. Like we need to be part of those communities. And the way that we went about this is by being as low tech as we can. And I really like this as a digital marketer is we went like a full 180. We're like, hey, how can we allocate this marketing budget in a way that will have a real impact on these, on these community that will market to our audience, which is teenagers or parents of teenagers. And the number one tactic that we found is sponsor high school teams, sponsor like give money to school, support schools, support boys and girls club, like get involved in charities, get involved in, like just do all these things that, or a net positive for this community. And for me as a, as a marketer, that's like the most rewarding thing is I get to give money to a football team because they need new uniforms instead of just giving it all to Google.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Right, right.

[Renaud Delacchi]

And that's incredibly rewarding.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah, yeah. So with that, I mean there's, there's the, the positive about Google is that you give money to Google and then you can, you know, just make it go wherever you want locally or whatever. So, you know, there is no, at least to my knowledge, no centralized network of high school, you know, teams and stuff like that.

[Greg Kilstrom]

So from a, from an operational scalability.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Standpoint, you know, how does, how does that work? Because I mean, that's, I agreed, like, that's. You're making not only an impact on the community, but you're getting in front of, of your audiences in some, some impactful ways. But how does that, you know, how do you, how do you scale that at a, both a local and a national level?

[Renaud Delacchi]

Yeah. So there's two ways. And again, I think this will be a common thread throughout this conversation is always high tech and low tech. Yeah, the high tech is we have, thanks to all those sales reps out there, we have so many tools to allow us to build lists, very good lists of who we want to target. And so finding out who all the football coaches are in the areas that we serve that's relatively easy for us to do.

[Tech Systems Sponsor Voice]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

So and then to have campaigns, automated campaign to reach out to them is also something that we can totally do. So we have a series of tools that's allowing us to do this at scale. But on the other hand, we also have highly motivated instructors and managers who are there locally. And part of our strategy in the last few years and especially moving forward is to give a lot of autonomy to those, to those instructors. Like, we invest a lot in the people of the company because whenever we hire an instructor in an area, chances are they are very often they'll be a retired educator or they'll have some root in this area. And what they do is a high trust service. Right. Like you're trusting your kid to learn how to drive, which is incredibly dangerous when you think about it and somehow incredibly safe because we have barely any accidents. But still like, so we have, we have this contact there locally, so how can we equip them to make these connections? And this is something that we can do at scale. We have hundreds of instructors all over the place. So how can we create internal systems to encourage them and to empower them to do these things and pairing that with technology so we can just whip up like a marketing package for them, banners, send everything that they need. So for them to actually sponsor, like this is something that we're working on right now, but it seems to be working.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tech Systems Sponsor Voice]

If you listen to the agile brand, you're here because you want a lead. You want insights to help you build smarter experiences, stronger brands and customers who keep coming back. That's why you're going to love Simply CX, a brand new podcast from Microsoft. Hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience lead, SimplyCX takes you inside the conversations that are shaping the future of customer experience and engagement. Each episode features industry experts and business leaders from companies like CarMax, TD bank and T Mobile exploring the innovations transforming CX. We're talking omnichannel journeys that actually connect AI, that enhances human connection and how culture, collaboration and technology can work together to deliver trust, personalization and scalable growth. If you lead cx, influence cx or simply want to understand how the most admired brands stay ahead of SimplyCX belongs in your rotation. Hear real stories, practical lessons, and the innovative strategies that will define the next era of customer centric success. Elevate the way your organization connects with the customers who matter most. Start listening to SimplyCX every other Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts and follow host Nicole McKinley on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.

[Greg Kilstrom]

So I'm sure your, your competitors are.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Watching some of this stuff too, and paying attention. They may be doing other things or different things as well, or relying to your point on the brick and mortar location that people drive past and kind of see as almost like a billboard of sorts. But how do you stay ahead of the curve and as competitors kind of either co opt or do different things, how do you, how do you stay ahead? Whether that's using new technologies or just staying ahead of consumer behavior.

[Renaud Delacchi]

Yeah. So, you know, driving education, at least, especially driving school, it's not a high innovation space. So like, we don't even. Our competitors are not very reactive to what we do.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

But I think it's because they have the advantage of longevity on their side and they have something on their, on the brand awareness side. They have something that is very difficult for us to, to take over.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

Like if a school has been there since the 80s, they have generational clients. Right. They have like a father and a son that went to the same school. I can't compete with that in the, in a very short time frame.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

But that does give them security and very often it's a, they're also like, they haven't had to change in a very long time. So then the two opportunities that this give us gives us is one, we can just acquire them because very often they will look, they are looking for a retirement opportunities and there's not a whole lot of people buying, driving schools out there. So very often these businesses will just fizzle out. So we get to acquire them and give them a retirement opportunity or we just do our thing. Yeah, we do our thing until the flywheel starts spinning in an area. And then at that point, like our growth happens very quickly. If I give an example, San Diego we had, San Diego was a struggling market for us and within one year it became the best market that we ever had. And that's just because we kept doing these tactics. And at some point and you convince a handful of schools to go with us, you have a bunch of students who then tell their friends, we have all these marketing tactics that just compound and at some point we're taking over this market.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah, yeah.

Well, because I would imagine the, you know, the others have the, the longevity and the generational, but you can kind of get the word of mouth and the, the immediate. And, and then you, then you're kind of entrenched.

[Tech Systems Sponsor Voice]

Right.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Because then you then not only do you have that more, I Mean for lack of a better term, the viral aspect of, of word of mouth or whatever. But then you start building the generational awareness, you know, eventually. Right, so is that, is that kind of the plan there?

[Renaud Delacchi]

Yes and no. We are on one hand, yes. Because I do invest a lot in all those mechanisms for word of mouth and I've seen this grow a lot. At this point just reporting like a third of our clients say that they, that they joined because they heard because a friend recommended. Yeah, that's self reported. Who knows if that's true.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Right.

[Renaud Delacchi]

But still like this, we are putting a lot of effort into this but we are also very impatient. I don't want to wait five years for a full like cycle, a full high school cycle to go through. And you know, so we have, we have to put to pour some gasoline on this. And so that's why we, we try to convince first time buyers as much as we possibly can.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

All while building this national brand. Because at some point, and actually that's funny because I listened to your podcast with Kara with Tara Corey from Optimizely. Yeah. And I think her opening statement was exactly what we talked about yesterday. We over invested in paid marketing and just look and marketing to people who have purchased some 10 signals and we need to start this brand awareness so that we are at least in the conversation because people don't, especially in our field because people don't necessarily shop for, for driving schools you're going to go to whatever driving school you're going to go to Bob driving schools because that's where everybody goes.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

And you don't compare because if you go to one school you don't buy it ever again. So you don't know if your experience is good or not. So we have all these challenges. Oh and actually another challenge that's, it's you don't even buy your own package. Right. You're a teenager, you want to go to Bob's driving school. Your parents are the ones buying for it. So we have to indirectly market to parents too. So there's all these challenges that make it so it's incredibly valuable for us to have a first time buyer because then it makes the rest incredibly easy.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

So getting, getting that first time buyer though, you know, that seems like perhaps the most expensive part of the, you know, build, building that. So you know, how do you, how do you kind of balance growth and in that case profitability?

[Greg Kilstrom]

Because I would assume the very first.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Customer, the first set of customers in an area may be less profitable than once Kind of the flywheel starts moving. So, you know, how do you, how do you balance those two things?

[Renaud Delacchi]

Yeah, and that's absolutely right. A new market is, is like we will lose money in a new market. Like, we are fully aware of this because we know that we need to pay. Like either we have to spend time or money. And right now we're, we're opting for money because we have a model that works, that we believe in, and so we know we will recoup that investment later on. So the way that we approach this is either do we spend more money or do we become better at spending that money? And what I mean by that is, do we optimize our output? And so that's kind of our approach because we know how much we need to spend to capture a new client. And that unfortunately is just like we can't sell a driving lesson for that price in a new market, at least not at the scale that we want to operate in. So then the second best thing is how can we reduce our cost so that we can fit within this price while still maintaining the growth that we want? And so how we balance growth and profitability for us is by minimizing our expenses. What we do not reduce expenses is on the quality and safety side. That's something that we. Because the mission of the company is to create safer drivers out there. So this is still very mission centric. But the way that we reduce our costs on the operation side right now is through technology. Every year we see a new bit of technology that has a massive impact for us internally. And everybody talks about AI and everything like that. We've seen the advantage of AI for us, as an example, our engineering team is shockingly small for a company our size. And we did not hire a new engineer in the last two years, but our output has grown by 80% in the last year.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

So we're like, cool. That is essentially either half the cost or twice the output. And we are trying now to apply this at every level of the company. And so that's kind of our approach is how can we be this super nimble and agile company as we grow, but on the engineering side at least, and on the marketing side, we stay small on purpose because we know that we can. That by being small, we can actually just leverage these new technologies as soon as they come out.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah. And with that approach, you're not reducing the number of people doing the work, you're augmenting the people with AI, which I think is a smart approach. I mean, you may scale up to some degree at some point too, with humans, but instead of a reductive philosophy, in other words, it's an additive one. Is that, is that the approach?

[Renaud Delacchi]

Yeah. So, I mean, we, we keep saying we will grow into profitability.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

Right. And that's kind of the approach. Like we, we still need to grow. So we will hire people. Like our headcount is going up every year by, by a lot. But on the up on the platform side of the business, can we either not hire as many people or hire as many people as we've planned, but have an output that is so much higher than expected?

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

So these are the two things that we're sort of balancing. But either way we know we're going up. Like we're growing.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so, you know, for, for other, you know, there's lots of marketing leaders listening to this. What would your advice be to. Obviously they're going to be in various industries and business types, but, you know, what advice would, would you give to leaders that are, you know, maybe struggling to scale kind of some of the things that you were talking about, you know, scaling without while maintaining profitability. You know, what, what would you advise they do?

[Renaud Delacchi]

I would advise that they. Because I'm assuming most of them in this position would be a relatively small company.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

The biggest opportunity right now is to be playing with all the new technologies that are coming up. I don't think people understand. I mean, we talk about it a lot and there's a lot of really like shiny use cases out there. But like, until you do it yourself, for us, this is a transformative time for a company and we see that we are in a really good position to, to leverage this. And we're probably the best possible candidate in the, in our field, in our industry to leverage these new technologies and just dominate the market.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah.

[Renaud Delacchi]

And I think, and I've been in giant corporations, like, if I give an example, like I've been for, I was a product manager at a large retailer, like a multinational retailer, and they were investing in AI, but the way that they invested in AI was let's hire a PhD, like a professor of AI with like three post grad. And they took my director and they put it in charge of the AI program. Like that was a million, like millions of dollars spent for a very specific use case as opposed to us. Like, we just keep trying and failing and whatever works. If it doesn't work, we just keep, we just keep in mind why it didn't work because we know we're like six months away from having a new model and that it might work. Just being small is such an advantage in this time because those bigger company will take forever to shift.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Well, and to that point as well. I mean, you mentioned that when you're experimenting, not every experiment is going to go, you know, exactly according to plan. Right. So, you know, some people may call that failing or whatever, but, you know, I think what you're touching on is the value of learning from those things. So what does that look like to be in an organization? Because not every organization is okay with failure. They're okay.

[Greg Kilstrom]

They're okay in theory with experimenting and.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Trying things, but all the things have to work. Right? So what does it look like to be in an organization where it's. It's okay to try things and. And again, maybe they don't work as well as you thought they would.

[Renaud Delacchi]

I think it's. For me, it's a dream job and just going back to like my former, like, I. As an artist, most of what you do sucks. It's just like, that's just like, as an artist, that's how it works. Like, you'll try stuff because you don't know what you like. That's the price for innovation. And I think art is like the peak innovation because you're trying to please someone, but you don't even know what they want. You don't even know what you want. Like, it's just, you're trying to figure something out here. And so in business, I think it's the same thing. And in these times, you need to try things and not everything will work. In fact, I'd say most of what I do doesn't work, but I make it up with volume. Right. And whenever something works, I think when you pair that with the ability to scale whatever works, because the moment something works, I'm going to sink my teeth in this and I will scale this so that this makes up for all the losses that I made and the things that did not work. Right. And at the end of the year, like, Maybe I have two new marketing channels out of the 15 that I tried. But like, I don't remember the, you know, the 13 that failed.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Right, right.

[Renaud Delacchi]

And actually I might, I'll write this down. Like, maybe this is like two years from now, this will work. I mean, it's just the right. Maybe it wasn't the right time. Maybe I didn't have the right approach. But if I had to that feel like I just keep a percentage of my budget. What I call like a failure budget and that's just like money for me to try something. It's a long shot but if ever it works, I'm like cool. Whatever can take market shares away from Google in my marketing budget. I'm very happy with.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Yeah, yeah, love it.

Well Renaud, thanks so much for joining today. I really enjoyed talking with you about this stuff. One last question before we wrap up. Maybe to the point of the last, the last topic here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

[Renaud Delacchi]

I'd say try something every week. Always have. If you have a top five for your week, like what you want to do, have one of these things. Be innovative with no expectation of it working. But you're doing this for your own learning. I think this is incredibly important. It will be important for marketers and and anyone in product, especially in the years to come. You want to be a generalist and at least in your knowledge base you can still execute. But the power to execute will come with the new tools. So you need to be aware of where these new tools can fit. So I'm going to go back to yoga, have a holistic approach to marketing, understand everything that's happening holistically and then whenever something comes up, you understand exactly where it can have an impact. I think that'll be a winning strategies moving forward, understanding where the opportunities are and your ability to jump on them very quickly. And so prepare yourself with that in mind.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Love it.

Well again I'd like to thank Renaud Delacchi, Head of Product Marketing at Coastline.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Academy for joining the show. You can learn more about Renault and Coastline Academy by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the [e-mail] that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by MissingLink, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production company Co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.

[Renaud Delacchi]

The Agile Brand.

[Tech Systems Sponsor Voice]

Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Host]

Are already aware of.

[Tech Systems Sponsor Voice]

Finding the best technology, business, and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design, deploy, and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business, and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500. Tech Systems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology ROI, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, TechSystems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more at techsystems.com that's T E K systems.com now let's get back to the show.