Kammie Kasten -- Director of Marketing at FireRock Building Materials

Branding decides how your audience feels about your company. A great promotion or marketing campaign may be enough to get a new customer through the door, but how that customer thinks about the brand determines whether or not they'll return. And many agencies can help you with that. While a lot of agencies are good at certain things, 80% of them wouldn't be suitable for you. Good agencies take care of the process, communication, and don’t miss deadlines — and if they do miss them for some reason, they explain why it happened. Even today, because of that, smaller agencies are a better choice. In this episode of YouShouldTalkTo, our host Daniel Weiner welcomes Kammie Kasten, Director of Marketing at FireRock Building Materials. Kammie and Daniel talk about brand marketing and the importance and challenges of brand measurement. They discuss the impact of the supply chain on marketing efforts and why people are increasingly going to smaller agencies. Guest-at-a-Glance 💡 Name: Kammie Kasten, Director of marketing at FireRock Building Materials. 💡 Noteworthy: Kammie graduated from Clemson University, majoring in communications at Clemson. After graduating, she moved into the agency world, and her first agency job was as a social media planner. Kammie then worked at Big Communications as an interactive producer, social media strategist, and digital strategist, and finally, as an AVP marketing strategy at Regions Bank. Since July this year, she has been marketing director at FireRock Building Materials. 💡 Where to find Kammie: Linkedin l Website Key Insights ⚡ Brand marketing doesn't get the credit it deserves. Brand marketing is the process of establishing and developing a relationship between a brand and a consumer that promotes the entire brand, using products and services as evidence to support the brand promise. According to Kammie, brand marketing should not be neglected. "In the digital space, people are always looking for a cost-per-acquisition measurement. And unless you're using a mixed media model that can measure all those touch points that somebody might have in the journey (and even then, there are limitations to that), it's not giving fair credit to brand marketing efforts that are not necessarily driven by new accounts or phone calls at the bottom of the funnel. I still love brand marketing, and I think it's valuable. I think it's also valuable for younger generations who value the ethics of an organization, and they wanna know that they're supporting an organization that aligns with their values." ⚡ Agency experience can make you a better agency partner if you're in marketing. Kammie has had many interesting experiences, including big agency experience and transitioned to the brand side. Today, she is the marketing director at FireRock Building Materials, and she points out that her previous experience has helped her a lot in this job. "At the end of the day, it makes me sympathetic, but it also makes me a better partner and a more accountable marketer because I've seen the inside. I've seen the spend machine. I can sniff out a turd, but I also think it means that I know how to approach an agency. […] A lot of times, you go through a discovery phase of trying to understand what their (clients) problem is, and you realize it's something that's not within your realm of experience; it's not an agency problem. But then, you're going to spin and try to change the perception of a brand when they have a quality issue, or they have an internal culture issue; you can't solve for those things."