Building Better CMOs and Marketing Leaders

Full transcript CMOs are " really good at the M part," says Bennie Johnson, the CEO of the American Marketing Association. "We're really good at the marketing part. We struggle with the 'Chief' and the 'Officer.'" Why is that? Some possible reasons include the lack of professional certification for great marketers, the short tenures CMOs often have before moving on to the next job, or the fact tha...

Full transcript Helping families navigate senior care at A Place for Mom requires constant cross-functional alignment. For marketing veteran Chris Milone, leadership extends far beyond his own department. "You have to be a thought partner to the CEO," says the CMO. That philosophy was forged the hard way during his first stint as a chief marketer, when his boss pulled him aside to express disappoi...

At the heritage beauty house Estée Lauder, marketing is led by a re-inventor, who refuses to draw any line between marketing and digital: "Everything is digital," says Global Chief Digital and Marketing Officer Aude Gandon. However, Aude argues that there is a risk of becoming overly reliant on technology to do the job. For her, the tools only get smart when a marketer who actually knows the craft...

At the home improvement company Lowe's, the marketing team is fittingly led by someone who believes in rolling up your sleeves and getting the job done. CMO Jennifer Wilson describes her approach as "impact over optics." "I care about the brand and I care about the work and I care about the outcome to the customer," Jennifer says. "I put very little value on, well, what will everybody think of tha...

Being under the microscope during a corporate audit doesn’t have to be a source of friction for marketing leaders. Amy Hu, CMO at New York Life, argues that a foundation of curiosity and a commitment to delivering genuine value can transform these evaluations into strategic opportunities. Rather than viewing audits as a threat, she says, top-tier CMOs lean into the process to identify blind spots...

All marketers have to find the balance between subjective feelings and objective metrics, and Cooley's Matt Lieberman is no exception. As the elite law firm's Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer, and the former CMO of PwC, Matt says the professional services industry comes with unique challenges and high stakes. That means he sometimes has to challenge coworkers on the value of certai...

Armin Molavi spent 20 years working in agencies before transitioning to client-side marketing at Hilton, then building a successful fractional CMO practice serving private equity-backed companies. Currently, he's the CMO at Instructure, which makes the ubiquitous learning management system Canvas."25 years of B2C, and this is my very first B2B gig, so I've been learning a lot," Armin says. "What's...

Grace Kao has served as a marketing leader at some of the most influential consumer tech companies of our time, including Yahoo, Pandora, Instagram, Spotify, and now Snap, where she is the CMO. But one of the most important things for her career growth has been following people, rather than job titles. "You want to go to a company that you believe in the company values, but believing in the people...

Amy Weisenbach, CMO of The New York Times, recalls some crucial advice she received early in her career: "Don't come to me and say, how do I do this? Come to me and say, here's the problem. Here's what I think I should do. What do you think?" After cutting her teeth at companies like Jim Beam and Unilever — where she helped build one of the most provocative brands of the early 2000s, Axe Body Spra...

Starbucks Global Chief Brand Officer Tressie Lieberman learned early in her career that building a brand requires balancing two timelines: "brand over time and sales overnight." It's a philosophy she's carried through leadership roles at Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Chipotle, and now applies to one of the most watched brand transformations in business. Tressie joined Starbucks a year ago as part of C...

"Being a public company CMO is very different than being a CMO in a private entity ... you need to deliver earnings. And I'd say this, any CMO that is not focused on driving revenue will not be there a long time," says Drew Panayiotou, the CMO of Keurig Dr Pepper. "You have to drive revenue, no if, ands, or buts." Consistently driving revenue gets even harder when, like Drew, you are stewarding 12...

"If you don't drive, you will be driven," says Natasha Madan, the head of marketing at Intuit Credit Karma. "You have to play offense, you cannot be playing defense." That leadership philosophy has helped Natasha navigate from marketing candy brands at Nestlé to building Prime's brand strategy at Amazon, and now helping millions of people make financial progress. She believes marketers struggle to...

Full transcript⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch this interview on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ — Wayfair CMO Paul Toms got some advice from the company’s first marketing boss, which he still uses all the time: “Nobody cares about anything that happened before today. All we care about is that we make the smartest decision today… It lets you just engage in the present and in solving for the future without over-rotating on a pri...

Full transcript⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch this interview on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ — "I would argue, in the C-Suite, there's not a job that has expanded, shifted, evolved more so than the CMO's role, more so than a marketer's role," says Melody Lee, CMO of Mercedes-Benz USA. "We are now responsible not for marketing as tactics, but marketing as a growth strategy for a company, for a brand."Melody carries what she cal...

Full transcript⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch this interview on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠ — One simple piece of advice has had a “profound impact” on Moët Hennessy USA SVP Regan O'Kon’s career: “Don't let tasks take over.” “We are all guilty of letting tasks take over, every single day,” Regan says. “You might have to create a PowerPoint, you might have to put a checklist on your annual planning milestone. You might have to ha...

Full transcript⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Watch this interview on YouTube⁠⁠⁠ — “Sometimes when you get to a fork in the road and you have to decide, am I going to stay in this job or take this new job? … It can feel like the weight of the world on your shoulders to make that decision,” says Noha Abdalla, CMO of Choice Hotels. “[But] each path is going to lead you somewhere else and you're going to learn something new...

Full transcript⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Watch this interview on YouTube⁠⁠ — “Knowing who you are then leads you to a place where you can start asking questions about how who you are shows up in the workplace,” says Stacy Hammond, Chief Marketing Officer at Charles Schwab.  “Everybody at Schwab is a leader,” she says, and the best leaders do market research on themselves: How they are perceived, and how those percepti...

Full transcript⁠ ⁠Watch this interview on YouTube⁠ — "You have to blend innovation with empathy, and effectively combine data-driven insights and creative storytelling," says Lisa Caputo, the Chief Marketing, Communication and Customer Experience Officer at Travelers. "To me, that's a magic combination." And there's one more ingredient missing from the recipe, which Lisa has learned over a career...

Full transcript Watch this interview on YouTube — "There are still folks who feel like marketing is just fluff, it's just, 'make things pretty,'" says Lauren Beckstedt. Her mission, as CMO of the recreational boating company Brunswick, is to redefine what marketing is and to educate her organization about its power. Brunswick's portfolio includes iconic names in aquatic recreation, like Mercury Ma...

Watch this interview on YouTube⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Full transcript⁠⁠⁠ — It's easy to see every glass as half-empty in today's world, says Virat Khullar, head of marketing for Hyundai India. But focusing on the negative will imperil your leadership, while choosing optimism will help you structure things better. "Perpetual optimism for me is a force multiplier," he says. "You will motivate people around you. You...

Watch this interview on YouTube⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Full transcript⁠⁠ — "Who is this person that I am trying to get to change in behavior? Do I really understand them?" asks Doug Martin, CMO of General Mills. Understanding consumers deeply, he believes, is an essential skill in the ever-evolving world of marketing, and it's one that General Mills uses constantly to drive brand management and create emotional conn...

Watch this interview on YouTube⁠ ⁠Full transcript⁠ — "I've always sort of been in marketing, but by way of psychology," says Charlotte Blank, the U.S. CMO of Jaguar Land Rover North America. Only by applying concepts from neuroscience and behavioral science, she says, can we truly understand what consumers want & how they think. "The whole creative process is inherently scientific," Charlotte says...

Watch this interview on YouTube Full transcript — Media consumption habits are changing rapidly, which means marketers have to thread the needle between "chasing the shiny new object" and embracing emerging platforms strategically. For Bob Sherwin, the chief marketing & commercial officer of Zoe, the solution is to frame new media initiatives as a test. "The test is that you're going to either win...

Marketing is not really a profession. There is no one body of knowledge that CMOs and other marketing leaders all share. We can’t even agree on what the role of a CMO is. On Building Better CMOs, MMA Global CEO Greg Stuart speaks with the very best marketing leaders about what CMOs get wrong and how they overcome the challenges they face. Plus: How are they responding to the evolution of AI? Where...

Watch this interview on YouTube Full transcript — "If you want to get to the next level, you need to understand what motivates you," says Alex Craddock, Chief Marketing and Content Officer at Citi. "As you get more senior ... your role does change. And if you want to continue to grow, you need to be able to find a reward in it beyond just the joy that you have in marketing as a discipline." Today...