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Every breakthrough marketing campaign, every product innovation, and every successful business pivot has one thing in common: someone was willing to take a risk. But risk-taking without a framework is reckless.
The companies consistently outperforming their competitors have discovered that building a culture of experimentation—where failure is expected, measured, and learned from—creates the conditions for sustainable growth.
Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy, the AI-powered consumer intelligence platform, has observed this pattern across hundreds of organizations he has advised. On The Speed of Culture podcast, Britton spoke with Fara Howard, Chief Marketing Officer at GoDaddy, about how experimentation enables risk-taking and why handing the customer the key to your brand is the most powerful growth strategy available.
Howard, who brings over 20 years of marketing leadership across Dell, Vans, and Amazon Fashion before joining GoDaddy, shared a framework that fundamentally changes how organizations think about success and failure. Her insight that at least a third of experiments do not win—and that this is not just acceptable but essential—challenges the zero-failure mentality that stifles innovation at most enterprises.
For business leaders seeking to build organizations capable of consistent innovation, Howard's approach provides both the strategic rationale and the tactical playbook.
Howard articulated a framework for experimentation that reframes how organizations should think about outcomes. In her model, roughly a third of experiments fail, a third produce neutral results, and a third succeed. This is not a flaw in the process—it is the process working correctly.
If every experiment succeeds, the organization is not experimenting—it is optimizing within known parameters. Genuine experimentation requires testing hypotheses that might be wrong, exploring approaches that might not work, and investing in ideas whose outcomes are genuinely uncertain.
The organizational benefit of this framework extends beyond the winning third. The failures produce learning that informs future experiments. The neutral results reveal boundary conditions that sharpen strategic thinking. And the wins, because they emerge from genuine experimentation rather than safe iterations, tend to produce outsized results that justify the entire portfolio of investments.
For CMOs and marketing leaders managing budgets under constant scrutiny, this framework provides essential air cover. When leadership understands and endorses an experimentation model, individual campaign failures are evaluated within the context of a portfolio rather than in isolation.
This distinction is critical because the fear of individual failure is the primary barrier to the kind of creative risk-taking that produces breakthrough results. Consumer intelligence platforms like Suzy accelerate the experimentation cycle by enabling rapid consumer testing that shortens feedback loops and reduces the cost of learning from each experiment.
Howard's philosophy at GoDaddy centers on a deceptively simple principle: give the customer the key to your brand. Rather than crafting marketing narratives from conference rooms and hoping they resonate, Howard advocates for letting real customer experiences drive brand storytelling.
This approach manifested in GoDaddy's strategic shift toward branded entertainment and authentic storytelling through initiatives like the "Made in America" docuseries, which showcases actual customer success stories rather than manufactured brand narratives.
The results demonstrate something that Britton has emphasized throughout his career advising Fortune 500 companies: authenticity is not just a marketing value—it is a measurable business driver. When brands tell gritty, authentic stories about real people using their products, the engagement metrics consistently outperform polished corporate campaigns.
The reason is rooted in consumer psychology. Today's consumers, particularly Gen Z and millennial demographics, have developed sophisticated filters for identifying manufactured marketing messages. Content that features real entrepreneurs building real businesses with GoDaddy's tools bypasses those filters because it delivers genuine value rather than corporate messaging.
For brand leaders evaluating their content strategies, the lesson is to invert the traditional creative process. Instead of starting with what the brand wants to say and finding customers who fit that narrative, start with what customers are actually doing and build the brand story around those authentic experiences.
GoDaddy's "Open We Stand" campaign, launched in March 2020 as the pandemic shut down small businesses worldwide, illustrates how experimentation culture translates into crisis response capability. Rather than retreating to safe messaging, GoDaddy assembled a coalition of 70 companies offering support to small businesses and created a cross-channel movement that featured entrepreneurs who had started companies during previous recessions.
The speed and ambition of this response was only possible because the organization had already built the muscles for rapid experimentation and creative risk-taking. Teams accustomed to launching experiments, measuring results, and iterating quickly could apply those same capabilities to crisis response.
Organizations that operate in approval-heavy, risk-averse cultures cannot pivot this quickly—their decision-making infrastructure is designed for stability, not speed. This has broader implications for how companies should think about marketing organizational design.
The capabilities built through experimentation culture—rapid ideation, quick testing, comfort with uncertainty, fast iteration—are the same capabilities required to respond effectively to market disruptions, competitive threats, and unexpected opportunities. Investing in experimentation infrastructure is simultaneously investing in organizational resilience.
As Britton explores in Generation AI, the pace of change driven by AI and emerging technologies will only accelerate, making organizational agility an increasingly critical competitive differentiator.
One of Howard's most practical insights concerns organizational structure. She advocates for bringing creative organizations as close as possible to business strategy, arguing that this proximity dramatically improves the quality of creative output.
The traditional agency model—where strategy is developed internally and creative execution is outsourced to partners working at arm's length—creates translation losses that dilute both strategic intent and creative quality.
When creative teams understand the business context intimately—the competitive dynamics, the customer insights, the financial objectives—they produce work that serves business goals more effectively without sacrificing creative ambition.
This principle extends to how GoDaddy manages its internal creative agency alongside external partners. The model prioritizes deep business understanding within creative teams while maintaining the creative tension and fresh perspective that external partners provide.
The balance between these capabilities determines whether marketing execution is merely competent or genuinely distinctive. For marketing leaders building or restructuring their organizations, the implication is clear: organizational charts that create artificial distance between strategic planning and creative execution are productivity traps.
Every layer of separation between consumer insight and creative output introduces interpretation error that reduces campaign effectiveness.
Howard's career trajectory—from sales to Dell to Vans to Amazon Fashion to GoDaddy—reveals patterns about the capabilities that define effective marketing leadership in the current environment. Rather than specializing narrowly in a single discipline, the most effective CMOs combine deep functional expertise with broad cross-category experience.
Howard's recommendation for emerging marketers reflects this: develop functional expertise in specific areas like social media, content, or marketing technology as an entry point, but maintain relentless curiosity about adjacent disciplines and industries.
The marketing leaders who will thrive as AI transforms every aspect of the profession are those who combine specialized knowledge with the adaptability to learn and apply new capabilities quickly. This cross-pollination of experience produces insights that specialists cannot generate.
Howard's experience at Vans—a brand defined by subculture communities—directly informs her approach to customer empowerment at GoDaddy. Her experience at Amazon Fashion—where data and customer behavior drive every decision—shapes how she builds experimentation programs.
Each career chapter contributes capabilities that compound in subsequent roles. As Britton frequently observes in his AI keynotes to enterprise leaders, the marketing profession is transforming more rapidly than at any point in its history.
The leaders who will navigate this transformation successfully are those with both the depth to execute and the breadth to adapt.
Experimentation culture drives growth by creating organizational permission for creative risk-taking, which produces breakthrough innovations that incremental optimization cannot achieve. When teams operate within frameworks where a third of experiments are expected to fail, they pursue bolder ideas, test more hypotheses, and generate learning faster than risk-averse organizations. The portfolio approach ensures that winning experiments produce outsized returns that justify the full investment in experimentation.
Giving customers the key to your brand means centering brand storytelling on authentic customer experiences rather than manufactured marketing narratives. Instead of telling customers what the brand represents, brands observe how customers use products and services, then amplify those genuine stories. This approach builds trust because consumers can identify authentic content versus corporate messaging, and authentic stories consistently outperform polished campaigns.
Marketing organizations should balance risk-taking with accountability by establishing experimentation frameworks with clear metrics, time horizons, and learning objectives. Each experiment should have defined success criteria, but individual experiment failures should be evaluated within a portfolio context rather than in isolation. The key is measuring the learning value of failures alongside the financial value of successes.
Creative integration matters because proximity between creative teams and business strategy eliminates translation losses that dilute both strategic intent and creative quality. When creative professionals understand competitive dynamics, customer insights, and financial objectives directly—rather than through layers of briefing documents—they produce work that serves business goals while maintaining creative ambition and distinctiveness.
Fara Howard's experimentation framework at GoDaddy offers a blueprint for organizations seeking to build cultures where innovation is systematic rather than accidental. In a business environment defined by accelerating change and increasing uncertainty, the ability to experiment rapidly, learn from failure, and scale successes is becoming the primary competitive differentiator.
Hear the full conversation on The Speed of Culture podcast. To explore how experimentation culture, consumer insights, and AI are reshaping business strategy, connect with Matt Britton through his speaking platform or explore his national bestseller Generation AI.
