Industry experts untangle the messy middle
By Fiona Couper on Thursday 25 September 2025
With CMOs under pressure to deliver both brand building ‘fame’ or productivity gains from performance and conversion, this morning’s breakfast panel focused on how to untangle the messy middle and reduce the gap between trigger and purchase.
‘Messy middle’ is a term first termed by Google to describe the chaotic, non-linear journey from trigger to sale, a journey especially tangled in B2B and financial services.
The invited panel represented a broad mix of FS sectors - and maturity across the martech stack:
- Jane Parry, Group Chief Marketing Officer, Canaccord.
- Kathryn Lewis, Head of Asset Management Brand & Digital Marketing, M&G Investments.
- Ailsa Graham, Head of Brand and Channels, Tesco IMS.
- Marko Katavic, Director of AI and Decision Intelligence, Moneybox.
Setting the scene, the panel gave an overview of their current situation and challenges.
With 2025 data from Gartner revealing that only 22% of marketers report a high customer data platform utilisation (despite high expectations for personalised experiences due to the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Spotify), the panel discussed key stumbling blocks involved - and how to unblock them1.
For some, getting tech stacks to talk to each other and getting changes through compliance remain evergreen, often insurmountable challenges. For others, being clear about different data sets helped hugely operationally, with existing customer data kept distinct from prospect data.
Is friction a positive or negative influence?
The conversation then moved on to friction. Despite a friction-free business being the holy grail for many marketers, the panel discussed how a certain amount of friction can have a positive effect on customers at the right time. Acknowledging that the FCA’s guided advice requirement is intended to be a catalyst for reducing friction, it was discussed how too smooth and fast a journey can lead to user distrust.
With only 14% of banking customers describing their banks as being ‘extremely effective’ at delivering contextually relevant experiences, we moved to discussing the importance of humanity in influencing an ‘in market’ audience2.The panel discussed the importance of finding data analysts that could keep the experience human-centric, and deliver insights in a timely fashion that added value. Another panelist reminded us that as only 5% are ever in the market to purchase, there is a meaningful role for ‘always on’ content and thought leadership.
This neatly led into discussion around AI changing the rules of the game, especially around search. For most marketers on the panel AI was being explored to take away some of their business’s more mechanical tasks, enabling employees to fulfil more value-added activities.
Final thoughts turned to taking an approach to AI that can help the business strategy. All agreed that the need for well-branded assets and thought leadership, from trusted sources was even more vital than ever.
With thanks as always to our brilliant panel for their candour and insight; to Ruffer for hosting in their fabulous new offices and to the Financial Services Forum for convening best practice.
If you would like to discuss your messy middle please get in touch at hello@teamspirit.co.uk.
