Closing the Customer “Say-Do” Gap, with Molly Strawn-Carreño, Director of Brand Growth at AYTM | Ep. 429

Daniel Murray
Daniel Murray
July 1, 2026

What if your most “customer-obsessed Marketing” is built on stuff your customers don’t actually do?

Molly Strawn-Carreño is Director of Brand Growth at AYTM, and she’s spent years getting researchers and Marketers to finally speak the same language. She sits down with Daniel to break down what real market research looks like now that AI is in every Marketer’s toolkit.

They dig into the “Say-Do Gap,” aka the canyon between what people tell you (like in a survey) vs what they actually purchase (like, organic strawberries for the kids, very much NOT-organic broccoli for the husband). Molly shares how to word your questions so people give you the truth instead of an aspirational highlight reel.

Plus she calls out exactly where AI earns its keep in research (chewing through mountains of historic data, narrowing 50 options down to 3) and where AI face-plants (predicting the next weird trend, because no model saw tinned fish charcuterie boards coming).

And she lays out the Marketing hill she’ll die on: Marketing and sales have to work together, and good Marketers own the entire customer lifecycle, not just the second a lead converts.

Wrike brings structure, visibility, and accountability to work, so companies can make better business decisions, improve efficiency, and reduce risk. Learn more at https://wrike.com/tmm

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/molly-strawn

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Daniel Murray
Daniel Murray