#764: Closing the gap between brand promise and brand experience with Mark Wagner, Horizontal Digital

Summary

---

The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX

Episode #764: Closing the gap between brand promise and brand experience with Mark Wagner, Horizontal Digital
Guests: Greg Kihlström (Host), Mark Wagner (Senior Director of Strategy, Horizontal Digital)
Date: November 7, 2025

---

Episode Overview

This episode, recorded at Sitecore Symposium in Orlando, Florida, delves into the persistent challenge of closing the gap between a brand's promise and the actual customer experience. Greg Kihlström welcomes Mark Wagner of Horizontal Digital to explore how advanced technology—particularly AI and composable platforms—enables brands to monitor, interpret, and act on real-time customer sentiment, ensuring brand voice alignment at scale. The conversation centers on the Sense Agent, a new AI-powered tool developed in partnership with Pet Supplies Plus, and broader insights on leveraging AI to drive growth, value, and authentic customer relationships.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Horizontal Digital and the Sitecore Partnership

Timestamps: 02:09–04:12

• Background: Mark Wagner introduces Horizontal Digital as an “experience-forward digital consultancy” with a boutique, yet globally-reaching approach.
• Core Focus: Their services blend strategy, design, data, and technology, solving business and customer challenges across verticals like healthcare, financial services, and retail.
• Sitecore Partnership: Celebrates a two-decade collaboration with Sitecore, emphasizing consistency and deep integration as a competitive advantage.
  • “Horizontal and Sitecore have been incredibly consistent and steadfast while many other organizations and consultancies have come and gone.” (Mark Wagner, 03:47)

---

2. The Business Challenge: Bridging Brand Promise and Customer Perception

Timestamps: 04:12–05:27

• Pet Supplies Plus Case Study: The Sense Agent tool emerged from a need to quickly collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback—not just online, but in physical retail as well.
• Challenges Identified: Addressing brand perception, sentiment deviation, and service issues efficiently, as traditional approaches were “cumbersome and expensive.”
  • “The idea was really born out of a need to more quickly and easily collect and understand and act actually on what these customers are saying and doing at the physical retail level as well as addressing things online…” (Mark Wagner, 04:58)

---

3. From Monitoring to Action: Powering Strategy with AI

Timestamps: 05:27–07:19

• AI as a Strategic Driver: The Sense Agent moves beyond simple dashboards—AI enables composability and interoperability, accelerating next steps for marketing and operations.
• Tangible Benefits: Automates “mundane workflows,” expedites content creation, identifies product issues, and triages service concerns, liberating teams for higher-level creativity and judgment.
  • “The cool part about the Sense agent is this composability...the action really comes in when Sense mobilizes next steps for marketing. It can accelerate existing work tasks...and help tune [the brand].” (Mark Wagner, 05:51)
  • “All this legwork is taking the pressure off of teams’ mundane workflows. So I think that's the real magic about it.” (Mark Wagner, 07:06)

---

4. Technical Deep-Dive: How the Sense Agent Works

Timestamps: 08:36–10:25

• Multisource Data Aggregation: Aggregates reviews and ratings from various channels via API integrations.
• Brand-Specific Nuance: Instructs the AI using proprietary brand content, clarifying the intended brand voice and promise, allowing models to spot deviations and subtle customer cues.
• Advantages Over Rules-Based Systems: Modern LLMs can pick up nuanced sentiment and early signs of churn or service issues—where older, rules-based approaches fell short.
  • “Through the language model...we instruct it to pick up on deviations from the intended brand promise, as well as signals where people may be defecting or churning.” (Mark Wagner, 09:19)
  • “This is all wrapped neatly inside of a Sitecore Marketplace app that makes it available right from the cloud.” (Mark Wagner, 10:08)

---

5. Composable Architecture & Speed to Market

Timestamps: 10:25–12:08

• Composable Platform: Sitecore’s “plug and play” cloud environment streamlined development, supporting external data ingestion and rapid app integration.
• Tailored Solutions: Enables lightweight, use case-specific solutions without the overhead or rigidity of legacy social listening tools.
  • “The environment that the Sitecore cloud platform makes it easy to plug and play as well. It's very composable.” (Mark Wagner, 10:57)
  • “We can tailor it to our very specific niche use cases and I think we actually did it faster too.” (Mark Wagner, 12:04)

---

6. The Future: Agentic AI and Proactive Brand Experience

Timestamps: 12:09–13:48

• Agentic AI: AI agents are evolving from passive analysis to active participation. Future iterations of the Sense Agent could not only diagnose issues but suggest or even generate corrective content and action plans.
• Workflow Automation: Envisions AI helping create briefs, content calendars, campaign ideas, product feature roadmaps, and operational ticket queues—always with a “human in the loop.”
  • “The future is automated or identified, as I like to say. Workflow is a key component of that...” (Mark Wagner, 12:52)
  • “Humans are always in the loop on these...workflows, but it just really helps create some fluidity and intelligence gathering, decisioning and action.” (Mark Wagner, 13:39)

---

7. Practical Advice for Leaders Implementing AI

Timestamps: 13:48–15:27

• Three-Step Approach:
  1. Cross-Functional Teams: Mobilize the brightest, most industrious team members—operate lean, startup style.
  2. Define & Measure: Spend time on clear customer needs, align solutions with business strategy, define hypotheses and measurements.
  3. Iterate Rapidly: Encourage many ideas, iterate without fear, ship fast, track outcomes, document failures, and learn steadily.
  • “Mobilize your brightest, most industrious, cross-functional team… Do it lean startup style. Spend time really defining that product-market fit… get messy, get collaborative, get iterative…” (Mark Wagner, 14:21)
  • “Enhance what works, kill what doesn’t, internalize your learnings and keep going.” (Mark Wagner, 15:13)

---

8. Looking Ahead: The Ever-Increasing Pervasiveness of AI

Timestamps: 15:27–16:06

• Next Year’s Discussion: Predicts AI will become so embedded in daily workflows that it's hard to imagine a world without it—just as the web and smartphones became ubiquitous.
  • “I think it would be how we can't really imagine a world without the daily involvement of AI in our thinking or doing... It's getting harder and harder... to picture what life was like.” (Mark Wagner, 15:42)

---

9. Maintaining Agility as a Leader

Timestamps: 16:06–17:04

• Continuous Learning: Begins each day acknowledging he knows nothing; approaches work as a student with a “voracious appetite” for new information—through podcasts, articles, conversations, and hallway serendipity.
  • “I start my day reflecting on the universal truth that I enter...knowing nothing. I'm a student of everything, and…the field of infinite possibility lies before me.” (Mark Wagner, 16:15)
  • “Agile is all about change and we all need to be part of that agility.” (Mark Wagner, 16:58)

---

Notable Quotes

• “Agility requires more than just rapid execution. It demands a real time, nuanced understanding of customer sentiment and the ability to translate that intelligence directly into action.” — Interviewer (01:08)
• “AI is now sort of the talk, and it's actually how these companies need to walk.” — Mark Wagner (05:51)
• “The future is automated or identified, as I like to say. Workflow is a key component of that.” — Mark Wagner (12:52)
• “Get messy, get collaborative, get iterative… Enhance what works, kill what doesn’t, internalize your learnings and just keep going one by one.” — Mark Wagner (14:41)
• “I start my day reflecting on the universal truth that I enter the day in the world knowing nothing... Agile is all about change and we all need to be part of that agility.” — Mark Wagner (16:15, 16:58)

---

Key Timestamps for Segments

• [02:09] Mark Wagner’s background & Horizontal Digital’s approach
• [03:00] Sitecore partnership & long-term consistency
• [04:58] The business challenge at Pet Supplies Plus
• [05:51] How Sense Agent leverages AI for strategic action
• [08:58] Technical process of data aggregation and analysis
• [10:57] Sitecore’s composable cloud architecture benefits
• [12:52] The future of agentic AI and proactive workflows
• [14:21] Three-step advice for leaders implementing AI
• [15:42] Mark’s prediction for AI’s ubiquity a year from now
• [16:15] Mark on daily agility and continuous learning

---

Tone and Takeaways

The tone is practical, insightful, and optimistic—focused on unlocking value through technology while keeping humans central to strategy and action. The episode highlights the transformative promise of AI-powered CX platforms, while giving actionable frameworks and inspiration for leaders navigating the messy, dynamic journey toward true brand agility.

For further details and a direct listen, see the show notes or visit The Agile Brand’s platform.

Transcript

[Mark Wagner]

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 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. And now onto the show.

[Interviewer]

What if your brand's voice is drifting off key in the ears of your customers and you're the last one to know? Agility requires more than just rapid execution. It demands a real time, nuanced understanding of customer sentiment and the ability to translate that intelligence directly into action. We're here at sitecore Symposium in Orlando, Florida and today we're going to talk about closing the gap between brand promise and customer perception. In an era of endless customer reviews, social media posts and feedback channels, how can a large organization truly listen at scale and ensure its voice remains consistent and effective? To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Mark Wagner, Senior Director of Strategy at Horizontal Digital. Mark. Mark, welcome to the show.

[Mark Wagner]

Greg. Thank you for having me. It's awesome to be here.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Looking forward to talking about all this with you. And yeah, I always love doing these interviews at shows like this. So excited to be here as well. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Horizontal Digital?

[Mark Wagner]

Absolutely. I'm Senior Director of Digital Strategy at Horizontal Digital. It's an experience forward digital consultancy that partners with all kinds of organizations and brands, big and small. We think of ourselves as a boutique consultancy and tech integrator with global reach. We have global reach around the world. Personally, I've spent many years in digital product design and strategy and I've had the fortune to work on both the business side, financial services, retail, manufacturing as well as the consultancy side that has been mostly involved in large scale digital transformation for for companies of all shapes and sizes.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Great.

[Interviewer]

So, and I know you covered a little bit about Horizontal, but maybe tell us a little bit more about the partnership with sitecore and, you know, some of the core challenges that you solve for some of your typical clients.

[Mark Wagner]

Yeah. Horizontal services are built on this notion of experience forward, an approach that creates intelligent, connected experiences that strengthen the relationship between the brands and its customers. And it's oftentimes a combination of strategy, design, data and technology that all come together to help our clients across those industries. Like I mentioned, healthcare, financial services and retail and ultimately, you know, we're solving their key business and customer challenges. Oftentimes it's, you know, customer facing experiences that need to be addressed or enablement and organizational challenges as well. And ultimately we're here to try to drive growth, impact and value and positively impact those customers that touch those experiences and the organizations that are serving them every day. And we call it our experience os. The sitecore and horizontal partnership have been a very instrumental component of that successful approach for over 20 years. The unique thing is that horizontal and horizontal and sitecore have been incredibly consistent and steadfast while many other organizations and consultancies have come and gone. And I think that's a true testament to the organization. And it's frankly one of the key reasons I'm actually here. I love being part of steadfast organizations.

[Interviewer]

Love it, Love it. Yeah, that's a, that's a long term partnership there. So that's, that's great. So let's, we're going to talk about a few things here, but want to start with, with strategy and really what I kind of teed up in the, in the beginning is, is aligning brand voice and customer perception. So again, we're here at sitecore symposium and your team just won the inaugural partner challenge for the Sense Agent you created with Pet Supplies Plus. Plus you have an amazing booth exhibit thing as well. But let's, let's start with the big picture. What was the, the core business challenge that Pet Supplies plus was facing with customer feedback and brand consistency that sparked the idea for the Sense Agent?

[Mark Wagner]

The idea was really born out of a need to more quickly and easily collect and understand and act actually on what these customers are saying and doing at the physical retail level as well as addressing things online, things like addressing brand perception, the sentiment deviation from what they want their brand to be perceived as in the marketplace in terms of how people are talking about it and service issues. As you may know, this can be a very cumbersome and expensive task for retail brands.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. And your CEO described the Sense Agent as turning intelligence into action. From a strategic standpoint, how does a tool that analyzes sentiment and brand voice move beyond something that could be perceived as a simple monitoring dashboard and really become a strategic driver for a company's overall customer experience strategy?

[Mark Wagner]

Great question. I think we're leveraging AI. That AI is now sort of the talk and it's actually how these companies need to walk. I think the cool part about the Sense agent is this composability of the actual platform. It's on the plug and play of the instructions and the prompting. The interoperability of the sitecore platform and the tooling make it easy and fluid to customize the needs based on the specific use cases such as churn, sentiment, brand deviation, service issues and the action really comes in when Sense mobilizes next steps for marketing. It can accelerate existing work tasks and it can do what AI does well already. You know, suggest and create content around marketing campaigns or strategic briefs that resonate with that perception and brand and help tune it if you will identify product issues and possibly help ideate on new features or ways to change those products and then potentially triage specific service issues that might be impacting the customer experience at different levels. All this legwork is taking the pressure off of teams mundane workflows. So I think that's sort of like the real magic about it. It's not always super exciting, but it is very impactful and that can accelerate decision making using more human creativity, judgment and strategy instead of tactical cognitive tasks that can be taken off of our plates.

[Greg Kilstrom]

If you listen to the agile brand, you're here because you want to lead. You want insights to help you build smarter experiences, stronger brands and customers who keep coming back. That's why you are going to love SimplyCX, 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, Simply CX 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 Simply CX every other Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts, and follow host Nicole McKinley on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.

[Interviewer]

Let's talk a little bit more about the how then. And the sense agent analyzes reviews across multiple sources. Maybe walk us through the process, how it aggregates the data. And more importantly, you know, how does the AI distinguish between simple sentiment, you know, positive or negative, and the more nuanced alignment with the specific brand voice?

[Mark Wagner]

Yeah, absolutely. I can talk through a few of the steps. I have an amazing team that helped put this together from a technical perspective, so I'll do my best.

[Interviewer]

Sure, sure.

[Mark Wagner]

Leverages, you know, leveraging the site core platform, we instruct that agent on proprietary brand content through the stream platform. We give it a direction on how a brand promise is supposed to be communicated and its intended expression, and that's all proprietary. Give it examples of what this might be, what it might look like, how it might sound, and that helps build a corpus of understanding for the AI. And through the language model, which is the magic of AI, we instruct it to pick up on both those deviations from the intended brand promise, as well as signals where people may be defecting or churning things in the language that indicate that the AI and the LLMs are now sophisticated enough to pick up on that. Where rules based actions weren't able to in the past, data is integrated through the API that plugs into the various sources. We started with customer ratings and reviews, and we hope to expand from there. And, you know, the AI again, categorizes and scores them. The language, you know, is purpose built with a notion that it can, you know, pick up on that nuance and help help kind of shape and frame specific ideas or actions out of, out of that intelligence, if you will. And this applies to, like you said, general sentiment, but also those signals in the market. And this is all wrapped neatly inside of a sitecore Marketplace app that makes it available right from the cloud.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, building on that, then, you know, as you just said, it's built on sitecore's architecture. That was part of the challenge, so to speak, was to build something on the sitecore architecture. How did the platform's capabilities, particularly the extensible AI, enable the team to do this and do this better because of the architecture? And what did it allow you to do that might have been more difficult or impossible before?

[Mark Wagner]

Yeah, that's the great question. Again, a lot of these tools are really helping accelerate workflow at the core. The environment that the sitecore cloud platform makes it easy to plug and play as well. It's very composable. So I think that we're in this age of massive composability and sitecore, even as today we're learning, continues to be more flexible and fluid in that regard. Regard with external, you know, everything from external data ingestion to, of course, you know, the way the app is brought to life in the marketplace. Stream was constructed in a way that makes it easy to input that proprietary data and structure that in a way that makes it easily consumable with the AI. And, you know, through, you know, your proverbial prompting and report generation, which is another kind of core feature of Sense, just makes it a lot easier than building it from scratch. And it feels more lightweight than, say, a typical social listening tool that needs to be plugged in. It's all contained. That workflow is all governed and contained within that platform. And it just makes it easier. We don't have to integrate another complex API. We can tailor it to our very specific niche use cases and it actually, I think we actually did it faster too.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Nice.

[Interviewer]

Nice. So let's talk about what's next. You know, we've talked about some, some great work that you and your team have, have done. Some of the terms, you know, at the keynotes this morning. Certainly the term agentic AI came up as, as it's coming up quite a bit everywhere. Agentic AI suggests a move from passive analysis to active participation by these AI tools and these AI agents. Looking ahead, where do you see this technology evolving? Could a future version of Sense Agent not only report on brand voice deviations, but also proactively suggest or even generate content to correct or course correct?

[Mark Wagner]

Absolutely. If I didn't already mention it before, the future is automated or identified. As I like to say, workflow is a key component of that. The actions that the system can take to enhance and accelerate the jobs of the teams already working kickstarting messaging or campaign ideas or creative briefs, including brand boards or content calendars. You know, there's always a human in the loop helping push that forward. Product feature optimizations and innovations for retail, creating kanbans and idea backlogs for those product features and innovations. And then of course, ticket queues for service operations or actions that need to be taken from a service perspective, where customer experience obstacles are tackled one by one. Of course, like I mentioned before, humans are always in the loop on these processes and these workflows, but it just really helps create some fluidity and intelligence gathering, decisioning and action.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And so you Know, for those leaders listening who are like all of us, inundated with talk about AI and AI this and AI that and agentic and all those things, you know, what's a piece of advice that you'd have for them? You know, as they're considering, certainly they're faced with a lot of options and a lot of key decisions to make. What should they consider, you know, as they implement AI to better understand their customers and what's a practical first step they should take.

[Mark Wagner]

Another great question. Thank you for all these awesome questions. You know, I see it generally right now and three steps that may change as I continue to learn and we continue to evolve at horizontal, but there are actually three steps. Mobilize your brightest, most industrious, cross functional team members to solve for those challenges or those opportunities and do it lean startup style. Spend time really defining that product market fit, identifying those customer needs, the pain points and goals align to the business strategy to determine if there's a there there, define that measurement, define the strategy and the hypothesis and, and again spend time doing that and then get messy, get collaborative, get iterative, get ideas, lots of them out on the table fast. Get into the habit, reflexive habit of doing that without, without fear and you know, get the narrow solution in market and then track those outcomes, document those failures because there's going to be failures. Enhance what works, kill with what doesn't, internalize your learnings and just keep going one by one by one.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, love it. So as, as we wrap up here, a couple, couple last questions for you. Let's say next year at symposium, you know, we'll, we're sitting here. What is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?

[Mark Wagner]

I think it would be how we can't really imagine a world without the daily involvement of AI in our thinking or doing. You know, do you remember a world without the web, mobile phones, social media? It's getting harder and harder, at least for me, to picture what life was like. And I'm old enough to remember not having those things. So I think that's maybe my best answer.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

[Mark Wagner]

Again, a great question. First, I start my day reflecting on the universal truth that I enter the day in the world knowing nothing, I'm a student of everything, and that the field of infinite possibility lies before me. And then I engage in a voracious appetite of constantly learning new things through podcasts like this, articles, journals, discussions, threads, books, conferences, forums and hallway conversations. Lots of free form serendipity in the hallway. I think those are critical things to keep keep that agile mindset fresh and flexible. These things happen daily. It's a daily workout and it's I try to make it a daily habit. And you know, agile is all about change and we all need to be part of that agility. And I think that that is sort of my my own personal learning journey that I have embraced.

[Interviewer]

I love that. Well, again, I'd like to thank Mark Wagner, Senior Director of Strategy at Horizontal Digital, for joining the show. You can learn more about Mark and Horizontal and sitecore by following the links.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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.greggkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.

[Mark Wagner]

The Agile Brand.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. 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. TechSystems accelerates business transformation for their customers Whether you're looking to maximize your technology roi, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn [e-mail] that's teksystems.com now let's get back to the show.