Marketers love frameworks. Here's the one you're missing.

Sales and marketing teams love frameworks.

When I was in business school, I did an 8-month internship in sales at a pharmaceutical company. More than 25 years later, I still remember the objection handling framework they drilled into us at sales training:

As marketers, we learn frameworks all the time — from copywriting (PAS), to growth marketing (pirate metrics, AARRR), to strategic planning (Porter's 5 Forces). And when a good one lands, it doesn't just give you a process. It gives you a lens. A way of seeing and tackling problems you couldn't quite name before.

Last year, I grabbed a smoothie with a friend who runs a marketing franchise at a large company. He was raving about a proprietary framework a consultant had implemented — talking about it the way people talk about a tool that finally makes everything click.

That's what a great framework does. It gives you a proven process, a shared language, and a higher likelihood of success — whether you're a seasoned expert or brand new to the work.

I've built one of my own.

I've been testing and validating it for years. It's called the 7C Frictionless Brand Growth Framework — a complete, sequenced operating system for attracting, converting, and retaining the customers your brand is working so hard to reach.

The seven components are: Culture (brand and/or company), Customer Intimacy, Circle of Influence, Customer Experience Design, Customer Experience Delivery, Customer Success, and Customer Loyalty.

And here's what makes it so useful: when I look at brand moments that have a lot of people talking — the missteps, the misfires, the misdiagnosed growth problems that don't make headlines but cost real money — I can almost always trace it back to a breakdown in one or more of these phases.

Let me show you what I mean.

That viral video of the McDonald's CEO calling their new burger a "product" — before taking the most hesitant bite you've ever seen? That's an authenticity failure which shows up as a Customer Experience Delivery problem. The campaign reached people. It just didn't convince anyone.

When OpenAI agreed to let the U.S. Department of Defense deploy its AI models in classified operations, a boycott campaign called "QuitGPT" launched almost immediately — and over 1.5 million users pledged to cancel their subscriptions. Just before, Anthropic declined a similar deal, with its CEO stating he couldn't "in good conscience" grant the Pentagon unrestricted access. That's a Culture — brand values — problem for OpenAI. And a brand values win for Anthropic.

When the LGBTQ+ community criticized Will's coming out scene in the final season of Stranger Things, calling it clumsy and clearly written without real insight into what that moment actually feels like? That's both a Customer Intimacy and a Circle of Influence problem. The intention was right. The cultural intelligence wasn't there.

I recently audited a brand that wanted to target Spanish-speaking consumers — but many of those consumers never called to get the information they needed to take the next step. Why? Because the experience for Spanish speakers was incomplete. Fragmented. An afterthought. That's a Customer Experience Design problem.

I worked with a client whose customers with a specific identity were encountering barriers in their day-to-day work that their peers with a different identity simply didn't face — and those barriers were directly suppressing their results. That's a Customer Success problem.

In every one of these cases, the brand had resources. They had strategy. In most cases, they had genuine intent.

What they didn't have was a framework that connected the dots and supported an infrastructure of how to grow by earning the loyalty of today’s customers.

That's the gap the 7C framework closes.

So — do you know where your brand is breaking down that’s costing your brand growth and diminishing your ROI?

Read the full framework breakdown →

And if you want to go deeper — explore the Friction Finder Growth Audit to pinpoint exactly where friction is suppressing your growth and where to focus first to remove it.

This week on the podcast, I sat down with Myles Worthington, CEO of Worthi, to talk about the general market problem that's hurting brand growth — and what to do about it. In framework terms? It's a Customer Intimacy problem. And the conversation is worth your time.

General Market Strategies Are Hurting Your Brand Growth. What Smart Brands Are Doing Instead Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Talk soon,

Sonia