Sur La Table’s First National Brand Campaign

Repositioning the Brand Through Emotionally-Led, Integrated Storytelling

Overview

In 2025, Sur La Table launched its first-ever national upper-funnel marketing campaign, representing a significant strategic shift for a brand historically driven by promotional and lower-funnel marketing efforts. The campaign marked a new era for the organization, introducing a more emotionally resonant and customer-led approach rooted in the belief that our customers don’t simply cook to live, they genuinely love to cook.

Built around a reintroduced internal brand manifesto and the campaign platform “For Those Who La-La-Love to Cook,” the initiative represented more than a seasonal campaign launch. It became a foundational moment in Sur La Table’s evolution toward integrated marketing, premium storytelling, and upper-funnel brand investment.

As Senior Brand Marketing Manager, I led cross-functional campaign orchestration across agency partners, internal marketing teams, merchandising, retail operations, and executive stakeholders to ensure the campaign delivered a cohesive experience across every customer touchpoint.

The Business Challenge

Prior to this campaign, Sur La Table’s marketing mix leaned heavily toward promotional and lower-funnel activity with limited investment in upper-funnel brand awareness. While the brand maintained steady awareness, leadership recognized an opportunity to strengthen emotional connection, modernize storytelling, and re-establish Sur La Table’s positioning as the destination for people who genuinely love to cook.

At the same time, the organization was navigating a broader shift toward more integrated and customer-led marketing planning. Channel teams historically operated in silos, and many campaign plans had already been established before the new brand platform was introduced.

The challenge became twofold:

1. Launch Sur La Table’s first national awareness campaign successfully across multiple channels and stakeholders.

2. Integrate the new campaign platform into an already-moving organization while creating a seamless customer experience across every touchpoint.

My Role

I led integrated campaign orchestration across the initiative, acting as the connective tissue between executive leadership, agency partners, channel owners, merchandising, creative, and retail teams.

My responsibilities included:

• Leading agency and vendor relationships across campaign development and execution

• Briefing creative teams and ensuring alignment to the new brand platform

• Integrating campaign messaging and storytelling into existing channel strategies and customer journeys

• Aligning influencer, retail, digital, and partner teams around a unified campaign experience

• Driving consistency across TV, OOH, email, social, paid media, PR, catalog, and in-store signage

• Managing stakeholder alignment across teams with competing priorities and differing business objectives

• Helping operationalize a more integrated marketing approach within the organization

Strategic Approach

The campaign strategy centered on a key customer insight: Sur La Table customers identify as passionate cooks, bakers, and entertainers. Cooking is not simply functional for them, it is emotional, creative, and deeply personal.

Rather than focusing primarily on promotional messaging, the campaign leaned into emotionally-led storytelling that celebrated the joy, identity, and ritual of cooking.

The “For Those Who La-La-Love to Cook” platform became the connective thread across all customer touchpoints, allowing the organization to deliver a more cohesive and emotionally resonant experience across channels.

A major strategic priority was ensuring the campaign extended beyond traditional brand media and lived consistently throughout the customer journey, from national TV and out-of-home placements to influencer partnerships, retail signage, catalog storytelling, social media, and lifecycle marketing.

Execution

The campaign launched across a fully integrated ecosystem that included:

• National TV

• Out-of-home advertising

• Holiday catalog

• Direct mail

• Email marketing

• Paid and organic social

• Influencer partnerships

• PR and media support

• Retail and in-store signage

• Paid media

• Digital customer journeys

One of the largest operational challenges was integrating the campaign platform into marketing channel plans that had already been developed prior to campaign approval. This required working backward across teams and rapidly aligning channel owners, agencies, and stakeholders to ensure consistency without disrupting execution timelines.

The campaign also helped establish stronger cross-functional collaboration between previously siloed teams and reinforced the need for a more centralized integrated marketing function moving forward.

Results

The campaign delivered measurable improvements in upper-funnel brand performance and engagement, including:

• +5-point lift in brand awareness

• Improved mid-funnel engagement and click-through performance

• Increased organizational alignment around integrated marketing planning

• Stronger emotional consistency across customer touchpoints

• Established foundation for future upper-funnel and integrated brand investments

Beyond performance metrics, the initiative became an important cultural and organizational inflection point for the company, helping shift the marketing organization toward a more integrated, customer-led, and emotionally-driven approach to brand building.

Key Takeaways

This initiative reinforced the importance of integrated marketing leadership in large-scale brand transformation efforts. Successful campaigns today require more than strong creative, they require organizational alignment, operational orchestration, and consistency across every customer touchpoint.

Most importantly, the campaign proved that emotionally resonant storytelling grounded in authentic customer insight can strengthen both brand perception and commercial performance when integrated thoughtfully across the full customer journey.