Brand marketing is getting its time to shine in the latest episode of the Marketing Vanguard podcast as we sit down with Caryn Wasser, chief brand officer at Little Spoon.
Tune in for an energizing conversation on how a brand drives growth and revenue and why its place in scaling a business should never be underestimated. Plus: exclusive insights on how she built a $150 million brand from a windowless WeWork room to become the largest online baby and kids food company in the U.S.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to design a chief brand officer role from scratch by letting business needs dictate strategy, not industry conventions.
- Why “brand-led growth” requires being obsessively rooted in consumer truth over chasing marketing trends.
- The operational framework for treating marketing as a full-funnel, interconnected system where every team member owns business impact.
- How to maintain authentic brand positioning when scaling into retail without compromising identity.
- Why early-stage founders should pursue board seats and executive roles at startups over staying at legacy companies.
- The counterintuitive approach to celebrity and influencer partnerships.
Caryn Wasser is chief brand officer at Little Spoon, the largest online baby and kids food company in the U.S. With a background spanning traditional advertising at Grey, creative innovation at Anomaly, and client-side brand building, she brings deep expertise in brand-led growth strategies and omnichannel expansion.
Over nearly seven years, Wasser has scaled Little Spoon from a two-person startup to a $150 million revenue business across 11 product categories, recently expanding into major retail partnerships like Target.
Her insights on building authentic brand strategy from the ground up, leading integrated marketing teams, and disrupting legacy categories by staying rooted in consumer truth serves as the CMO playbook for those navigating rapid growth and competitive market challenges.
Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Brand as a Core Growth Engine, Not a Halo Effect — Caryn underlines the fact that a brand must function as the fundamental driver of business growth rather than a peripheral marketing function that creates awareness around existing products, directly challenging the traditional marketing structure where brand and performance teams operate in silos, limiting their ability to compound results across channels.
Many marketing organizations fail to achieve exponential growth because they treat brand building and conversion optimization as separate disciplines competing for budget and resources. The key implementation step is to restructure your marketing team as a unified operating system where every marketer understands how their work directly impacts the full funnel and business outcomes.
[12:52] Why It’s Important to Root Marketing Strategy in Consumer Truth — Caryn emphasizes that chasing conversion metrics without anchoring them to genuine consumer needs creates temporary gains followed by inevitable business plateau or decline, as you become an “adrenaline junkie” pursuing short-term wins disconnected from brand foundation. Not to mention, business stops growing because they’ve optimized for the wrong metrics.
The critical step is to treat every data point as a proxy for a person: the mom with two kids, the single dad with twins, asking how your brand solves their core needs rather than how to acquire them cheaply, ensuring your marketing ladder resonates authentically with your actual customer. When brand and performance strategy align around genuine consumer truth, growth becomes sustainable and defensible against competitive pressures.
[14:23] The Art of Building Cross-Functional Connective Tissue — Caryn reveals that most marketing organizations experience massive insight leakage because community managers, paid performance marketers, and creative teams operate without regular forums to share learnings and translate community feedback into scalable creative strategies. A comment on an influencer post that receives 6,000 likes contains signals about resonance and messaging efficacy that should immediately inform paid creative strategy, yet most organizations never connect these dots.
The organizational challenge is that functional silos feel efficient in the moment but systematically prevent the compounding of insights across channels and teams, limiting growth potential. The solution is to mandate regular cross-functional meetings where department leads treat themselves as business owners debating insights, with explicit expectations that coordinators and associate marketers understand how their channel work affects the entire funnel.
[26:30] Need-Informed Influencer and Celebrity Partnerships — Caryn articulates that celebrity endorsements and influencer partnerships only create brand value when the partner genuinely needs and uses your product, rather than when they amplify your message through shiny-object positioning that dilutes credibility. Ask yourself this one question: does this person genuinely need this product and will that authentic need shine through in the storytelling?
This authentication filter means rejecting some high-profile opportunities and accepting that organic parent advocates may drive more sustainable growth than paid celebrity partnerships. When Wasser works with big-name influencers, it’s always because their authentic adoption story amplifies the brand’s true positioning rather than borrowing their credibility through financial transactions. This authenticity filter ensures influencer marketing compounds brand equity rather than creating hollow, temporary conversion spikes that fade when partnerships end.