At eTail West, amid conversations about AI, personalization, and the future of performance marketing, one theme surfaced that felt both practical and provocative:
Growth doesn’t come from building more journeys.
It comes from building smarter moments.
In a candid conversation between Amy Erdelsky, Strategic Account Executive at Wunderkind, and CJ Jacobs, Digital Marketing Manager at 5.11 Tactical, the focus wasn’t on flashy innovation. It was on evolution — the kind that requires operational discipline, strategic courage, and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to let go.
What 5.11 shared wasn’t just a case study. It was a roadmap for brands stuck in static marketing frameworks while trying to scale into something much bigger.
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Scaling a Brand Without Abandoning Its Core
5.11 Tactical’s trajectory over the last six years is striking. When CJ joined the company, it had roughly 30 stores and a relatively modest eCommerce footprint. Today, it’s a quarter-billion-dollar DTC business, with a B2G arm nearly as large.
That growth alone would be impressive. But it happened while the brand navigated a significant repositioning.
Originally born in Yosemite as a climbing brand, 5.11 evolved into a tactical supplier, serving law enforcement and government agencies. Now, it’s broadening its aperture again — returning to its roots as “5.11,” expanding into lifestyle and reaching a much wider consumer audience.
That shift introduces a fundamental tension: how do you speak to new audiences without alienating the core customer base that built your business?
For marketers, this is where personalization stops being a buzzword and becomes a survival strategy.
The Personalization Myth: More Segments ≠ More Relevance
We’ve been talking about one-to-one marketing for over a decade. CJ himself recalls sitting at eTail years ago hearing promises about true personalization just around the corner.
What most brands actually built, however, wasn’t personalization. It was segmentation at scale.
More journeys. More rules. More manual effort.
And eventually, more complexity than teams could sustain.
CJ described the core issue plainly: the tools technically existed, but they required immense manual labor and constant oversight to function well. The result? Many brands defaulted to surface-level personalization — first name fields, minor audience splits — because fully orchestrating one-to-one journeys felt like climbing a mountain that was simply too steep.
The lesson here is subtle but critical: static journeys, no matter how detailed, will always lag behind dynamic customers.
When your brand is expanding into new demographics, new use cases, and new storytelling, static logic breaks down even faster.
The Tech Stack Maturity Curve
When CJ joined 5.11, the company wasn’t equipped to scale. Systems weren’t integrated. Data wasn’t flowing cleanly. The early years were about building infrastructure capable of supporting nine-figure growth.
Then came the optimization phase — layering in tools, extracting performance, pushing personalization as far as the stack would allow.
Now, interestingly, 5.11 is in a third phase: consolidation.
Rather than continuing to add tools, they’re reducing complexity and allowing platforms to work together more intelligently . In CJ’s words, many systems today are capable of doing more — and often doing it better — when they’re not over-orchestrated by humans.
That shift reflects a broader industry truth. The next era of marketing performance won’t be defined by how many tools you operate. It will be defined by how well you allow intelligent systems to operate on your behalf.
The Hardest Shift: Letting Go
Perhaps the most powerful moment of the session came when CJ addressed something few performance marketers openly admit: the discomfort of relinquishing control.
For years, marketing technology promised more levers — more targeting precision, more manual optimization, more audience cycling. And marketers fell in love with the measurable cause-and-effect of tweaking variables and watching revenue move.
Now, AI-driven systems are asking something radically different: trust the algorithm.
Trust broad audiences.
Trust automated decisioning.
Trust that the system may recognize patterns faster than you can.
At 5.11, embracing that discomfort — consciously allowing AI and automation to take greater control — has resulted in revenue jumps that manual optimization simply couldn’t achieve.
That’s not just a tactical insight. It’s a philosophical one.
The future of performance marketing may not belong to the marketer who pushes the most buttons. It may belong to the marketer who knows which buttons to stop pushing.
From Static Journeys to Smart Moments
What does this mean in practice?
It means shifting from rigid, pre-built lifecycle flows to adaptive, intent-driven engagement.
It means evaluating new tools not by how much power they give you, but by how much manual effort they remove.
It means accepting that scaling personalization through headcount has limits — and that human capital alone can’t chisel personalization out of marble fast enough.
Most of all, it means building systems that recognize and respond to moments in real time — not journeys that assume a customer will behave the way you predicted months ago.
For brands navigating growth, repositioning, or audience expansion, this is no longer optional. It’s foundational.
The Real Competitive Advantage
In volatile markets, growth doesn’t come from speaking louder. It comes from speaking more intelligently.
5.11’s path — from under-integrated systems to scalable infrastructure, from manual optimization to AI-enabled decisioning — reflects the maturation many brands are facing right now.
The uncomfortable truth is that performance marketing is entering an era where control feels counterproductive.
And the brands willing to embrace that discomfort — to let go strategically — are the ones most likely to unlock the next stage of growth.
Because the shift from static journeys to smart moments isn’t about automation for its own sake.
It’s about building a marketing engine that evolves as fast as your customer does.
Watch the session below.