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

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® – Episode #764

Episode Title: Closing the gap between brand promise and brand experience with Mark Wagner, Horizontal Digital
Release Date: November 7, 2025
Host: Greg Kihlström
Guest: Mark Wagner, Senior Director of Strategy, Horizontal Digital
Location: Recorded live at Sitecore Symposium, Orlando, Florida

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Episode Overview

This episode focuses on how brands can close the critical gap between the promises they make and the actual experiences they deliver to customers. Host Greg Kihlström and guest Mark Wagner discuss leveraging advanced AI-driven tools to capture, analyze, and act on customer sentiment across channels, ultimately ensuring brand voice alignment and driving consistent, meaningful customer experiences at scale. Key topics include the creation of the Sense Agent tool for Pet Supplies Plus, the power of composable AI platforms, the evolution of agentic AI, and practical advice for leaders embracing AI in CX strategies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Challenge: Brand Promise vs. Experience

• The Problem: Many organizations are unaware when their brand's voice drifts away from its intended promise, losing alignment with actual customer experiences.
  • Quote (Greg, 02:29):

    “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.”

• Real-World Example: Pet Supplies Plus sought a solution to quickly gather and act on customer feedback both in-store and online, highlighting the challenge of closing the brand-experience gap in retail.

Introducing the Sense Agent: Transforming Intelligence into Action

• Background: Horizontal Digital, in a long-standing partnership with Sitecore, built the Sense Agent—an AI-powered tool—addressing Pet Supplies Plus's brand consistency and feedback challenges.
• How It Works:
  • Aggregates customer reviews and feedback from multiple sources
  • AI and language models compare real-world sentiment and language with a brand's intended voice and promise
  • Surfaces nuanced deviations, detects customer churn signals, highlights service issues
• Impact: Provides actionable insights, automates tedious workflows, and frees up human teams for strategic and creative tasks.
  • Quote (Mark, 07:12):

    “The action really comes in when Sense mobilizes next steps for marketing. It can accelerate existing work tasks and do what AI does well... 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.”

The Technology: AI, Composability, and Sitecore Integration

• Architecture: Built as a composable, plug-and-play solution on the Sitecore platform, facilitating easy integration, customization, and scale.
• Nuances in Sentiment Analysis:
  • AI is trained on proprietary brand voice/content to detect not just sentiment but also subtle deviations from intended messaging.
  • Moves beyond rules-based monitoring to machine learning models that contextualize and categorize customer language and market signals.
  • Quote (Mark, 09:15):

    “We give it a direction on how a brand promise is supposed to be communicated and its intended expression... 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…”

• Advantages over Traditional Tools:
  • Faster prototyping and iteration
  • More lightweight and contained versus typical social listening platforms
  • Easily tailored to niche use cases

Looking Ahead: Agentic AI and Future Applications

• Agentic AI Trend:
  • The industry is moving from passive analysis to AI agents actively participating in workflows—content creation, campaign ideation, product ideation, and customer service support.
  • Sense Agent could, in the future, not only report on issues but also generate or recommend course corrections.
  • Quote (Mark, 13:00):

    “The future is automated or agentified, as I like to say... There’s always a human in the loop, but it just really helps create some fluidity in intelligence gathering, decisioning, and action.”

Practical Advice for CX Leaders Implementing AI

• Three-Step Approach for Adopting AI:
  1. Mobilize cross-functional teams: Use a lean startup approach to identify pain points, align on business strategy, and define hypotheses for AI solutions.
  2. Iterate fast and collaboratively: Encourage rapid, fearless ideation; test and refine in-market.
  3. Embrace learning: Document failures, scale what works, internalize insights, and repeat.
  • Quote (Mark, 14:29):

    “Get messy, get collaborative, get iterative ... Enhance what works, kill with what doesn't, internalize your learnings and just keep going—one by one by one.”

The Big Picture and The Future of AI in Branding

• Expectation for the Future: The daily involvement of AI in brand and customer experience strategy will soon feel as indispensable as the web, mobile phones, or social media.
  • Quote (Mark, 15:50):

    “I think it would be how we can't really imagine a world without the daily involvement of AI in our thinking or doing.”

Personal Practice: Staying Agile

• Continuous Learning: Mark embodies agility by starting every day with a “student of life” mindset and a commitment to constant learning through diverse information channels and spontaneous discussions.
  • Quote (Mark, 16:23):

    “I start my day reflecting on the universal truth that I enter the day in the world knowing nothing... I engage in a voracious appetite of constantly learning new things... Agile is all about change and we all need to be part of that agility.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Impactful AI:

  “It’s not always super exciting, but it is very impactful and can accelerate decision making, you know—using more human creativity, judgment, and strategy instead of tactical cognitive tasks.”
  — Mark Wagner (07:12)

• On Human-AI Collaboration:

  “There’s always a human in the loop helping push that forward... It just really helps create some fluidity in intelligence gathering, decisioning, and action.”
  — Mark Wagner (13:00)

• On Practical AI Implementation:

  “Mobilize your brightest, most industrious, cross functional team members... get messy, get collaborative, get iterative... track outcomes, document failures, enhance what works, kill what doesn’t...”
  — Mark Wagner (14:29)

• On the Future of AI:

  “It’s getting harder and harder... to picture what life was like [without the web, mobile phones, social media]. So I think that’s maybe my best answer.”
  — Mark Wagner (15:50)

• On Agility Mindset:

  “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.”
  — Mark Wagner (16:23)

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Timeline of Important Segments

• 02:29 – Setting the stage: The challenge of brand voice and customer perception
• 03:30 – Mark Wagner introduces Horizontal Digital and its role
• 04:21 – The Sitecore partnership and experience-forward philosophy
• 06:18 – The business challenge behind Sense Agent for Pet Supplies Plus
• 07:12 – Turning sentiment analysis into strategic action with AI
• 09:06 – Technical walkthrough: How the AI distinguishes nuanced brand voice issues
• 11:05 – Why Sitecore's composable architecture was critical to the solution
• 12:16 – The future and evolution toward agentic AI; proactive corrections
• 13:56 – Mark’s practical advice for leaders implementing AI in CX
• 15:35 – Prediction: Ubiquity of AI in branding and customer experience
• 16:23 – Mark’s agile learning practice and daily mindset

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Summary

This episode offers a hands-on, insightful look at how leading brands are closing the gap between what they promise and what their customers experience—by deploying composable AI solutions like the Sense Agent. Mark Wagner and Greg Kihlström examine the technology, mindset, and business approaches needed in this era of agentic AI: listening at scale, acting on nuance, and enabling teams to remain agile, creative, and strategic. For CX leaders facing a dizzying array of AI options, Mark’s process-driven advice is practical and empowering, while his agile, learning-focused philosophy underscores the human element central to thriving in this next era of marketing technology.

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Transcript

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The agile brand.

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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. And now onto the show.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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, welcome to the show.

[Mark Wagner]

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

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah. Looking forward to talking about all of 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. 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 companies of all shapes and sizes.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Great. I know you covered a little bit about horizontal, but maybe tell us a little bit more about the partnership with sitecore and 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. 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.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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 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 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.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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, you know. You know, using more human creativity, judgment and strategy instead of tactical cognitive tasks that can be taken off of our plates.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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, how does the AI distinguish between simple sentiment, positive or negative, and the more nuanced alignment with a 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.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Sure, sure.

[Mark Wagner]

Leverage Leveraging the site core platform, we instruct that agen and 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. We 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 that for the AI. And through the language model, which is the magic of AI, you know, 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, you know, things in the language that indicate that the AI and the LLMs are now sophisticated enough to kind of 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 the AI again categorizes and scores them. The language is purpose built with a notion that it can pick up on that nuance and 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 up neatly inside of a sitecore marketplace app that makes it available right from. Right from the cloud.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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, 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 a 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 with external. Everything from external data ingestion to, of course, 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 through 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.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, Nice. 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 agentified, 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. 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, you know, 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, these processes and these workflows. But it just really helps create some fluidity and intelligence gathering, decisioning and action.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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, 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 in 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, you know, to solve for those, those challenges or those opportunities and do it lean startup style. You know, 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 attract 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.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Love it. So as we wrap up here, a couple last questions for you. Let's say next year at symposium, 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.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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 I try to make it a daily habit. And Agile is all about change and we all need to be part of that agility. And I think that that is sort of my own personal learning journey that I have embraced.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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 in the show notes.

[Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom - closing remarks)]

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 the agile 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.

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