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.