Little Spoon’s Caryn Wasser on the Reason Brand-Led Growth Beats Performance Marketing

Brand marketing is getting its time to shine in the latest episode of the Marketing Vanguard podcast as we sit down with Caryn Wasser, chief brand officer at Little Spoon. 

Tune in for an energizing conversation on how a brand drives growth and revenue and why its place in scaling a business should never be underestimated. Plus: exclusive insights on how she built a $150 million brand from a windowless WeWork room to become the largest online baby and kids food company in the U.S. 

What You’ll Learn:

• How to design a chief brand officer role from scratch by letting business needs dictate strategy, not industry conventions.
• Why “brand-led growth” requires being obsessively rooted in consumer truth over chasing marketing trends.
• The operational framework for treating marketing as a full-funnel, interconnected system where every team member owns business impact.
• How to maintain authentic brand positioning when scaling into retail without compromising identity.
• Why early-stage founders should pursue board seats and executive roles at startups over staying at legacy companies.
• The counterintuitive approach to celebrity and influencer partnerships.

Caryn Wasser is chief brand officer at Little Spoon, the largest online baby and kids food company in the U.S. With a background spanning traditional advertising at Grey, creative innovation at Anomaly, and client-side brand building, she brings deep expertise in brand-led growth strategies and omnichannel expansion. 

Over nearly seven years, Wasser has scaled Little Spoon from a two-person startup to a $150 million revenue business across 11 product categories, recently expanding into major retail partnerships like Target. 

Her insights on building authentic brand strategy from the ground up, leading integrated marketing teams, and disrupting legacy categories by staying rooted in consumer truth serves as the CMO playbook for those navigating rapid growth and competitive market challenges.

Episode Highlights: 

[00:00] Brand as a Core Growth Engine, Not a Halo Effect — Caryn underlines the fact that a brand must function as the fundamental driver of business growth rather than a peripheral marketing function that creates awareness around existing products, directly challenging the traditional marketing structure where brand and performance teams operate in silos, limiting their ability to compound results across channels. 

Many marketing organizations fail to achieve exponential growth because they treat brand building and conversion optimization as separate disciplines competing for budget and resources. The key implementation step is to restructure your marketing team as a unified operating system where every marketer understands how their work directly impacts the full funnel and business outcomes.

[12:52] Why It’s Important to Root Marketing Strategy in Consumer Truth — Caryn emphasizes that chasing conversion metrics without anchoring them to genuine consumer needs creates temporary gains followed by inevitable business plateau or decline, as you become an “adrenaline junkie” pursuing short-term wins disconnected from brand foundation. Not to mention, business stops growing because they’ve optimized for the wrong metrics.