What does it take for a well-established brand to successfully enter a new market? For Daphne Johnson, the answer lies in rethinking assumptions, embracing foundational work, and deeply understanding customer experience.
In this episode of Performance Delivered: Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success, host Steffen Horst sits down with Daphne Johnson, CEO and Growth Advisor at Daphne, to explore how legacy brands stay relevant and thrive in a fast-changing marketplace.
From Skating Rinks to Boardrooms
Before becoming a sought-after advisor for Fortune 100 brands, Daphne’s journey started with an unexpected foundation: competitive figure skating. That mix of discipline, creativity, and grit shows up in her approach to business transformation today.
Her career path took her through major roles at Food & Wine, American Express, AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon, where she built growth strategies, created partnership programs, and tackled massive change initiatives. Eventually, she founded her own growth consultancy, driven by a desire for more autonomy and impact.
Why Legacy Brands Struggle with Market Expansion
Daphne explains that one of the most overlooked hurdles for legacy brands is failing to define the real problem they’re trying to solve. Expansion isn’t just about translating your website or tweaking your product line—it requires deep introspection and alignment.
She shares a compelling story about a wellness brand that uncovered its most valuable customer differentiator: the tea service offered at check-in. That small detail, revealed through five in-depth interviews, reflected the brand’s commitment to relaxation and set it apart from competitors.
“You don’t always need a massive sample size,” Daphne explains. “When done right, five well-planned conversations can expose patterns and insight you’d never find in your revenue data.”
Tools, Tactics, and Trends
Daphne walks us through her Bullseye Customer Sprint approach—an open-source framework from Google Ventures that helps define and validate customer needs during expansion efforts.
She also highlights:
- The role of macro forces in shaping market opportunities (e.g., cultural context in Cuba)
- The importance of positioning and pricing analysis before entering a new segment
- The warning signs that signal a brand needs a growth consultant, from stalled revenue to weak marketing performance
And as the conversation wraps, she emphasizes two powerful growth trends:
- Strategic partnerships as a core lever for expansion
- AI integration in content, operations, and customer experience
Final Thoughts
Legacy brands have one major advantage over startups: a wealth of customer and operational data. But as Daphne reminds us, that data only becomes useful when paired with humility, curiosity, and a willingness to do the foundational work. If you’re a brand looking to expand, this episode offers real, applicable strategies grounded in experience—not hype.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro: This is Performance Delivered Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success with Steffen Horst.
[00:00:10] Steffen Horst: In today's episode, we're going to talk about how legacy brands conquer new markets. You to speak with me is Daphne Johnson, the CEO and growth advisor at Daphne, a boutique firm specializing sustainable growth strategies.
[00:00:23] Before founding Daphne, she led transformative initiatives for Fortune 100 brands like Verizon, American Express, and Yahoo. At Yahoo, she helped sales leadership identify new areas for growth and development. She spearheaded a channeled sales partnership with parent company, Verizon, ultimately leading to groundbreaking partnership in 5G data, content and advertising outside of her professional commitments.
[00:00:48] Daphne holds an MBA from Columbia University. Mentor students and startups at Tulane and Columbia and is a two time gold medalist in figure skating. Well, that's something we have to talk about at [00:01:00] some point here.
[00:01:00] Daphne Johnson: Yeah.
[00:01:01] Steffen Horst: Daphne, welcome to the show.
[00:01:02] Daphne Johnson: Thanks so much for having me, Steffen.
[00:01:04] Steffen Horst: Let's get the figure skating out first.
[00:01:06] Daphne Johnson: Sure.
[00:01:07] Steffen Horst: So talk about that. That's interesting.
[00:01:09] Daphne Johnson: Yeah. When I was younger, I was going to the rink often with my brother and my parents. My brother was a hockey player. And my mom figured, well, Daphne's at the rink all the time. We might as well put her in skating. It was a slow build for me. It took time before I started really getting used to it, but the combination of it being a little bit of an art, a little bit of a science was something that always intrigued me and I stuck with it.
[00:01:37] I became a competitive skater. I was a national level competitor. Then professionally when I moved to New York City, I skated with New York Rangers and the Ice Skate of New York.
[00:01:48] Steffen Horst: Nice. Well, that's pretty great. Thank you. Well, let's figure out how you get started in your career. Tell our listeners where did you start and what led you to founding Daphne?
[00:01:59] Daphne Johnson: [00:02:00] Absolutely. I. This is a little bit of a complex story for me because I always like to look back, to look forward, and when I was graduating from school, I was obsessed with psychology and visual arts. My major was communications and it was in the same program as graphic design. I really thought it was gonna end up at a creative agency.
[00:02:24] Then my love for food kind of triumphed over all of those things, and I started to apply to food related jobs. I was working in catering. I thought I was gonna be a food stylist, which I wasn't qualified for. And luckily I ended up at Food and Wine, which was the biggest, best place that I could have landed in the food world.
[00:02:46] And luckily for me, it was owned by American Express. And through that experience of working at Food and Wine, I really got the best education in marketing and was able to understand the basics of database [00:03:00] marketing, learning how to tap into card member insights to build robust marketing programs, was building programs for luxury advertisers that were in travel, food, lifestyle areas that I loved.
[00:03:13] I understood basically the bones of marketing through my experience there, and then I went to a OL to learn digital. I really saw the tides changing. I understood that I wanted a new experience, and I had the opportunity to work with Fortune 100 brands to architect their digital marketing programs on AOL's platforms.
[00:03:35] It was there that I really learned sales. It was a sales led culture at the time, and there was an agency legend named David Bell who was an advisor to a OL, and he really taught us the art of the pitch. And it was during this time that I fell in love with sales and I understood what it meant to becomeA a great salesperson and become a great sales leader and have a great sales culture, and all of those things really kind of stuck with me from that point onward. And I decided to go back to school. I wanted to solve bigger problems for the company and I went to Columbia to get my MBA. It was during that time where the company started transforming.
[00:04:19] It was acquired by Verizon. When I graduated, I was in a totally different role with the company. I was going to school and working full-time, and I started working closely with EMEA sales team to build out their sales strategy for the newly combined AOL and Yahoo Division, which was called Oath. And it was a struggle for me.
[00:04:38] I'm not gonna lie, I was not great at it, but I really learned a lot through that experience. Again, filed it away and decided I wanted to tackle an even bigger problem for the company. And because of the Verizon ownership, there was a lot of opportunity, a lot of synergy that was untapped.
[00:04:55] Intro: Yeah.
[00:04:55] Daphne Johnson: And I developed a partnership program between our parent company, Verizon [00:05:00] and Yahoo.
[00:05:00] Based on our shared customers, and it was an innovation based partnership using the access that we had through our joint sales teams. We're having really interesting conversations with partners on applications for 5G in terms of building out pilot programs for. Autonomous vehicles reinventing the retail experience.
[00:05:21] And it was through that partnership that we generated a lot of excitement, a lot of momentum, a lot of revenue, and it was collectively through that experience. Plus the last partnership I worked on at Yahoo, which was the Lowe's retail media partnership. Where I really kind of completed my lesson plan and partnerships and through marketing, sales, and partnerships in that collective tenure I had at American Express, Verizon, and Yahoo decided, okay, I really enjoy this collective work.
[00:05:53] I wanna do more of it. And now I realize I have the skills to be able to do this independently for other brands.
[00:06:00] Steffen Horst: Interesting. Wasn't there a thought about kind of joining a company that offered these three services to bigger brands, or was there the desire to have your own company and, and be at the helm and, and making decisions on what directions to move to?
[00:06:14] Daphne Johnson: Yeah, that's a great question. I really did look into a lot of different options. I took some time off. When I left Yahoo, I didn't immediately start running my own company. I went to Spain. I walked part of the Camino to Santiago. I did a lot of reflection and there was a combination of factors for me that really led me to this desire to.
[00:06:34] Have control over my own destiny and I felt, you know, having worked at these large organizations, I had already extracted so much value from those experiences and I wanted to really liberate myself from the confines of one particular company. And so it was a great opportunity for me to give it a shot, and it has been so excited and energized since that [00:07:00] point.
[00:07:00] Steffen Horst: That's awesome. Now when Legacy brands, I mean the word legacy already gives that away. So when brands that have existed for a longer period of time, look at what are we currently doing and what do we do to stay relevant in the future? What are the biggest challenges for those brands to do that? To go from We're successful at the moment.
[00:07:20] Daphne Johnson: Yep.
[00:07:20] Steffen Horst: But we might not be successful if we don't adjust to what's coming.
[00:07:24] Daphne Johnson: Yep. There are a lot of different challenges that I've come across and you know, believe it or not, the biggest one is defining the problem we're solving for. And so when they're thinking about entering a new market or expanding, you know, oftentimes they're very tactical and how they think about what they wanna do.
[00:07:43] And so they'll think about it in terms of, oh, we need to redesign the website to include additional languages, or We need to add this product to our sales catalog. I. And in reality, it's much deeper than that and it's much more [00:08:00] foundational than than that. And so a lot of legacy brands, what they don't realize is they need help defining what that problem is.
[00:08:08] They need to figure out what's worth solving for. I worked with a client recently who is a wellness brand based in the New York metro area. And she's been in business for 10 years and she's in the process of expanding. She reached out to us for some help doing that, and the first thing we did was start to talk to her patients, and we talked to five patients and five staff members really trying to understand.
[00:08:37] What's going on in the business, and it was through this series of in-depth interviews. It was only 45 minutes for each person who asked them everything that they were comfortable sharing with us in terms of why they sought treatment, where else they were considering treatment. We were asking 'em what their best experience was.
[00:08:56] Their worst experience was. It was through these [00:09:00] conversations where we started to unpack the granularity of their experience. We were really shocked that three of the patients brought up the T service. That was part of the check-in process and what I. May seem like a really little detail was really eye-opening for us because that T service really symbolized the attention to detail from the business owner, but also this feeling of relaxation and tranquility that was critical and differentiated her from a lot of her competitors.
[00:09:33] And they were not only able to tell us a lot of details about the types of teas, but then they also gave us a lot more information about the physical space in general, including the treatment rooms. And so, you know, really that level of detail was a magnifier on the entire patient and brand experience that we would never have stumbled upon in just looking at the revenue.
[00:09:55] And so when we're trying to find the problem we're solving for, we really do a lot of [00:10:00] work defining and understanding the customer first before we start going and mapping solutions.
[00:10:07] Steffen Horst: Interesting. Now, on that simple size that you interviewed, five people, sounds pretty small. Yeah. Is it normal to work with so little amount of people to get information?
[00:10:18] Does it depend on the company and then what the project is like?
[00:10:21] Daphne Johnson: Yeah, this is a great question and we use this framework. It actually comes from Google Ventures, and it's an open source framework that anyone can use and tailor to their business.
[00:10:32] Daphne Johnson: and it's really, it's called a Bullseye customer sprint.
[00:10:35] It's typically used for businesses that are trying to go after new customers. It's great for expansion exercises. In this case, we used her existing patients because we had access to them. And so it was easy and made sense for us to use them as the baseline. And what you start to see with five, even though it's a small number, is when you do them back to back, you start to hear these [00:11:00] patterns in their language and those patterns are enough to give you that second point of validation that you need from the revenue or other types of data that you're looking at.
[00:11:12] So you don't really need to have an exhaustive number. It's just you really need to qualify those people. It's defining who you're trying to interview is really important.
[00:11:23] Steffen Horst: Yeah.
[00:11:23] Daphne Johnson: Making sure you're recruiting the right types of people, making sure you're asking the right questions. So. It's really the part leading up to the interviews.
[00:11:32] It's like when you're painting a house, spending time doing the tape around the perimeter and laying down the plastic sheeting. That's what I would equate it to is that prep work that is required to make the interviews themselves very fruitful and robust and successful.
[00:11:49] Steffen Horst: That's actually my follow up questions there.
When you go into these interviews, do you go into these interviews with assumptions of what you think you might wanna do and you're just looking for the feedback to confirm [00:12:00] your assumptions? Or do you go there with a complete clean slate and you just kind of intake all the feedback that you're getting?
Daphne Johnson: You do have a hypothesis, right? It's human nature to have an understanding of what you think you know, and it's always good to document that because oftentimes your hypothesis is not correct when you're actually doing this with new customers. You use prototypes and you show three different prototypes, and you get the customer feedback on these different prototypes so you can understand what value they see in your product.
[00:12:30] In this case, you know, we didn't show them prototypes, but we did ask them the same set of questions. And so you start to see these interesting. You basically get to prove or disprove your hypothesis in there, and you're really trying to uncover key areas and gaps of knowledge. Right? And so that might be.
[00:12:50] Competitors in this case, we did ask about competitors. It was really hard to get them to name a competitor, and that was a signal to us that we needed to [00:13:00] dive deeper into that. You know, we thought we understood like why people were coming. We thought we understood how far they were traveling, but it was really surprising to us.
[00:13:09] Each person gave us different information about what their experience was. That totally blew our socks off and we couldn't have predicted.
[00:13:17] Steffen Horst: Yeah. Interesting. Now, what key factors go into building a successful market expansion strategy?
[00:13:24] Daphne Johnson: Yeah. I think there are a number of factors that I would consider, and they're really core foundational factors, and that's the kind of work that we do.
[00:13:33] It's really foundational and we believe that these are not basic things. They're fundamental to success. So when we think about at a high level, we're zooming out and looking at these macro forces, so. An example of this was a Cuban sustainable fashion brand that I started working with when I was a student at Columbia, and they were brand new at the time.
[00:13:56] They were creating products out of whatever they had access [00:14:00] to. I went to Cuba as part of this independent study and was really interesting to me, the lack of. Both infrastructure from a traditional sense, but also just the cultural differences. Think about in a very isolated place that doesn't have advertising at all, businesses weren't even allowed to exist in Cuba legally until 20 21, 20 22.
[00:14:25] And so the cultural macro climate was very apparent to me. I started working with them when I left Yahoo, and we spent a lot of time really defining these differences. A lot of the products feature. Cuban slang not is perfecto, which means nothing is perfect. And while you may be able to translate that easily from Spanish to English, the sentiment is really important and the context is super important.
[00:14:51] So the macro forces become an even more critical component. The second thing is really understanding where you fit in the market. [00:15:00] And so, you know, when we do a lot of work with customers. We really spent a lot of time defining the competition. And you know, someone I like to point to as a great resource for this, we'd really like to tap into different frameworks is April Dunford, who has done a lot of work around positioning and helping brands understand their differentiated value.
[00:15:20] And so we do a lot of work around that to really make sure, like before you're investing time and money and resources in. Your business to understand the competitors and maybe how that's shifted depending on the market that you're trying to enter. So for example, this wellness business we've been working with really spent time doing a pricing analysis.
[00:15:41] A lot of their competitors had pricing available online, so it made it very easy for us to understand and see the different market segments and where her business fit and where it has shifted compared to where it was. 10 years ago when she started the business.
[00:15:58] Steffen Horst: Interesting. [00:16:00] Now, at what point does an established business realize it needs a growth consultant to navigate expansion?
[00:16:06] Daphne Johnson: That's a great question. There are typically signs of distress or misalignment and legacy businesses actually have a lot of data trails that they can follow, whereas like startups don't have the benefit of that history. So, you know what you're trying to understand, how to know if you need a growth consultant.
[00:16:24] You're trying to understand two core things. Where are you in your growth cycle? You know, are you up, are you down, are you flat? And what is broken? In your growth loop. So where's the chain link missing in that? And so there are a lot of, a lot of symptoms there. You can start to understand those two things.
[00:16:42] The first one, on the financial side, it's very easy to understand if your financial performance is struggling. If you've had several consecutive quarters of stagnant and dec decline in revenue when we were working with this wellness. Client, we were really looking at the number of visits [00:17:00] as one of the key metrics to understand what was happening because she accepts insurance and it was hard to just look at revenue because of the insurance data made it very difficult for us to see.
[00:17:10] So we, we looked at visits and one thing we saw was. The last two years, the visits had plateaued. And when we asked her about that, she confirmed that she had run outta space physical space. So it was a supply constraint that we were able to identify very quickly, you know, make sure we were understanding really what was happening there.
[00:17:31] And then the second part of it is really the marketing itself. And we see this. Often where the marketing that used to work doesn't work anymore. So people think, oh, I just need to try a different tactic and I just need to try the other thing that's the other people are doing right now, and it's actually not the case.
[00:17:48] So if you're having problems, if you're seeing like a lack of repeat purchase or your customers aren't leaving positive reviews for you, or let's say you have a sales team and you have sales led growth, and [00:18:00] your sales team is complaining about long deal cycles. It means like your customer doesn't know how to buy you, and so it could be a positioning problem and you need to really revisit that.
[00:18:09] And so there are a lot of different symptoms both on the sales and marketing side that can be really helpful in diagnosing and then realizing, oh, hey, I need some help to solve these.
[00:18:19] Steffen Horst: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, what should legacy businesses know before they start working with a growth consultant?
[00:18:25] Daphne Johnson: think they need to have a lot of self-awareness about their business and themselves before they engage in any kind of work with a growth consultant.
[00:18:34] And there's a philosophical aspect of this on the ambition side, am I trying to build a brand or am I trying to just build a business? Those are two different things. So if you're actually trying to build a brand and have that brand create value, then yes, that is something that will likely, eventually lead you to a growth consultant.
[00:18:55] The commitment, A lot of brands, if they're running legacy businesses and they [00:19:00] have enormous amounts of teams that they're managing, they may not have the time or the resources to focus. That's something we really like to be direct about. I was having a conversation with a major New York metro area publisher about doing work, and they were trying to enter the entertainment business in a bigger way, doing a rebrand for one of their brands.
[00:19:22] I. And what it came down to, they didn't end up moving forward because they didn't actually have anybody to engage with on their side. They were so busy they didn't have the bandwidth to actually engage in the work that they wanted to do. So sometimes it's a matter of timing as well. I'd say the third component is the level of risk.
[00:19:43] What scale of project are you comfortable taking on at this time? And you know, how do you also build confidence and competence in the right way based on that level of risk? So you wanna tackle a project where you can really build some skills, build some [00:20:00] knowledge, build some data, and use that as a foundation moving forward.
[00:20:05] Steffen Horst: Now, obviously when someone hires a growth consultant, they're hiring an outside source to help them, you know, expand, overcome a challenge, whatever kind of the goal is of, of the engagement. What do you usually tell your clients what the involvement on their end has to be? Because it's not just. We bring in Daphne, and then Daphne does the work and at some point she comes and says, Ebola, here it is, and take it.
[00:20:29] And I'm out of here. Right?
[00:20:31] Daphne Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. I like to have a really honest conversation and I work with a lot of different types of businesses, both legacy businesses, smaller businesses, medium sized businesses. So what I really like to have a conversation about is around the level of engagement that they're interested in and we offer as a company.
[00:20:49] Three different levels of engagement. And so it may just depend on how involved they wanna be in the execution. And so they may just be interested in an advisory relationship if [00:21:00] that's the case. And you know, I think we also like to really align on what other people from your organization would you like to be involved in the project.
[00:21:08] And that becomes critical if you're trying to really do something. Transformational. So I typically require that they have an executive that's dedicated to the overall success of the projects. And then together we identify two or three stakeholders that are supportive of it. And then there are usually specialists that provide data, for example, or might have knowledge about a product that is critical to the success of the product.
[00:21:35] So project. So it is usually a combination of different people from the organization and making sure we're aligned. Then on the structure side, we really align on what that cadence looks like and the timing that we're trying to aspire to, and being realistic about what we can accomplish in the time together versus what they're gonna have time for outside of it.
[00:21:57] So sometimes we use the time together to actually [00:22:00] do the work, depending on what they feel like the bandwidth that they have at that moment in time.
[00:22:04] Steffen Horst: Interesting. Now, are there specific topic that you have come across? Over and over. So kind of project over and over, maybe especially at the moment because there's, there's one or two things that companies should be, I don't know, I don't wanna say concerned about, but they should think about, for example.
[00:22:21] Daphne Johnson: Yeah, I'd say that it really goes back to knowing your customer, and I think what it comes down to is a lot of businesses have been in business for 10 plus years and they feel very comfortable about where they're at, and they don't realize that the tides. Have shifted while they've been preoccupied, making sure the business is staying on the rails.
[00:22:47] And so what happens is they don't know what they don't know about the grant landscape, and in fact, they are not aware often of what their competitors are doing. And so we really start with some of those [00:23:00] foundational pieces around doing these CX interviews plus a really in-depth competitive analysis with pricing.
[00:23:07] To understand where they fit. And I'd say the positioning aspect of that has been a critical exercise for the last two partners I've worked with. Helping them understand that they are in a different segment now, or they should be in a different segment of the market than where they were. Previously or in this new market that they're entering, that they need to consider a totally different customer that has a completely different need, yeah.
[00:23:35] Than what their previous customer was valuing from them.
[00:23:39] Steffen Horst: Now, looking ahead, what trends do you see shaping how legacy brands grow and evolve in the future?
[00:23:45] Daphne Johnson: Again, looking back to my past when I was at Verizon and working on the Yahoo, Verizon partnership at that time, there was a lot of excitement over 5G and really, partnerships in general were a key growth lever for both [00:24:00] companies.
[00:24:00] They both had robust. Partnership teams that were responsible for different outcomes that were separate from the sales organization. And at that time, 5G was really getting a lot of interest. And as those consumer use cases were picking up, as people were starting to realize like, wow, this is a game changing technology.
[00:24:21] It was that excitement about the impact on consumers that really drove the adoption. What I see now is that the same excitement exists in ai, and I have an AI currently in the content creation space, and they're very much exploring how they can improve customer experiences. And so it's a two-pronged prognosis I think.
[00:24:45] Partnerships continue to be a really important part of growth, and it's something that a lot of businesses haven't defined well or you know, don't typically spend a lot of time on. And it's the first team to get cut and they focus on the core [00:25:00] revenue. And the second part of that is transformational technology like AI.
[00:25:04] Gonna continue to be part of the conversation of four partnerships and legacy businesses are always gonna be wanting to connect with those technology partners. So I feel really privileged to be sort of in this position of matchmaker right now where my AI client is looking to connect with legacy businesses.
[00:25:22] And it's great 'cause that's usually when that juxtaposition happens. Like really interesting, innovative things result.
[00:25:29] Steffen Horst: Great. Well, Daphne, thank you for joining me on a performance, our podcast, and sharing your knowledge on how legacy brands conquer new markets. If people wanna find out more about you, what you do at Daphne, how can they get in touch?
[00:25:41] Daphne Johnson: Thanks Stephan. I appreciate you asking and they are welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn, uh, Stephanie Johnson, and look for the profile with Figure Skater as a keyword.
[00:25:51] Steffen Horst: Well, thanks everyone for listening. If you like to performance of a podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application.
[00:25:59] If [00:26:00] you wanna find out more about Symphonic Digital, you can visit us@symphonicdigital.com. Or follow us on X at Symphonic hq. Thanks again and see you next time.
[00:26:10] Outro: Performance delivered is sponsored by Symphonic Digital Discover, audience focused and data-driven digital marketing solutions for small and medium businesses@symphonicdigital.com.
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