About Frictionless Growth Lab
And you may never know they were considering you.
They didn’t see themselves in your messaging. Your marketing didn’t answer their questions. Or something about the experience made choosing your brand harder than it needed to be.
They moved on.
At Frictionless Growth Lab, I help brands uncover the hidden friction that keeps ideal customers from considering, choosing, and staying with them.
Then I turn those insights into growth strategies, messaging, content, and experiences that help brands win more of the customers they want to serve.
Because friction is the enemy of growth.
It shows up whenever the people a brand wants to serve aren’t reflected in the assumptions shaping its marketing and customer experiences.
Consumers are always asking themselves a question, consciously or subconsciously:
“Is this for someone like me?”
Their identities, needs, expectations, and preferences shape how they answer it. And when brands overlook those differences, they can unintentionally make themselves irrelevant or harder to choose.
That’s why I developed my approach to Mosaic Marketing: to help brands recognize those differences and create marketing that helps more of their ideal customers answer yes.
The founder
I’m Sonia Thompson, a growth and customer experience strategist. I’ve spent my career exploring what makes people choose brands and what gets in the way.
Before starting my own business, I spent nine years in marketing at Johnson & Johnson, where I gained firsthand experience with the decisions, systems, and challenges involved in growing global brands.
I have an MBA from Florida A&M University, am a Six Sigma Green Belt, and am the author of Delight Inside.
Since 2012, I’ve worked independently with brands and organizations across industries to better understand their customers, strengthen their marketing, and improve the experiences that drive growth.
But the perspective behind Frictionless Growth Lab started long before my marketing career.
Where it began
I’m left-handed.
Growing up, I remember trying to cut paper with scissors designed for right-handed people.
They worked perfectly well for most of my classmates.
The scissors weren’t designed with someone like me in mind.
And as I got older, I started noticing the same pattern elsewhere.
As someone who eats gluten-free, I’ve sat in restaurants where finding something safe to eat felt like solving a puzzle.
When I lived abroad, I couldn’t get the products I relied on delivered.
And as a Black woman building a business, I’ve followed blueprints that were never created with someone like me in mind.
Different situations. Different kinds of friction.
An experience can work beautifully for one group of people while creating unnecessary barriers for others it was intended to serve.
What feels like a small inconvenience to one person can reveal a much bigger opportunity for a business.
I began recognizing that same pattern in marketing: brands investing in attracting customers while making assumptions that kept some of their ideal customers from seriously considering them.
That’s the problem I wanted to help solve.
I founded Frictionless Growth Lab to help brands recognize friction they may not see, understand how it’s affecting their business, and turn those insights into opportunities for growth.
Seeing friction is the starting point. Removing it is where the growth happens.
When your marketing isn’t converting as effectively as it should, or customers are encountering barriers your team hasn’t identified, the Friction Finder Growth Audit uncovers where friction exists and what to prioritize.
Explore the Friction Finder Growth Audit →Your ideal customers don’t all have the same questions, priorities, or paths to purchase.
Mosaic Message Mapping helps brands understand what different audiences need to hear, then map relevant messages across the places those customers discover, evaluate, and choose brands.
Explore Mosaic Message Mapping →Mosaic Studio creates original content, programming, and experiences rooted in the needs, experiences, and perspectives of the customer communities you want to grow with.
The work starts with understanding what those customers need from your brand and what’s missing. From there, I develop original ideas or partner with brands and agencies to create content and experiences that make the brand’s relevance clear.
Whether it’s a Mosaic Original, a Brand Original, or content for an existing initiative, the goal is to give more ideal customers a reason to consider and choose your brand.
Explore Mosaic Studio →Some challenges don’t fit neatly into a predefined engagement.
Through strategic projects and ongoing partnerships, I help marketing and brand leaders navigate complex decisions, uncover opportunities, strengthen customer experiences, and turn insights into action.
Explore strategic consulting →Beyond client work
The work of Frictionless Growth Lab extends beyond client engagements.
Through my podcast, long-standing columns in Forbes and Inc., YouTube videos, a newsletter, and original frameworks, I explore the assumptions that shape modern marketing—and the growth opportunities brands miss when those assumptions go unchallenged.
Across these platforms, my goal is to give marketing leaders new ways to understand their customers, question established practices, and make better decisions about how their brands show up.
Because better marketing starts with understanding people better.
Explore the Strategy library →
Some of the customers your brand could be winning have already decided you’re not for them.
The opportunity is to understand why—and change what happens next.
That’s the work I do at Frictionless Growth Lab.
