Building Better CMOs and Marketing Leaders
Marketing leaders are facing constant new challenges. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, listen to Building Better CMOs, from the nonprofit thinktank MMA Global. It's a podcast about the future of marketing and how marketers can get smarter & stronger, hosted by MMA CEO Greg Stuart. Greg interviews some of the wisest and most successful CMOs in the business, who share crucial insights about what their industry gets wrong, how to get to the C-Suite, and how to unlock the true power of marketing. You'll gain a deeper understanding of the evolving purpose of marketing leaders, and learn actionable strategies to overcome obstacles. Produced by LightningPod.fm. For transcripts and more, visit bettercmos.com
Episodes
April 26, 2024 • 34 mins
Full transcript
Some marketers think of themselves as operators and some see themselves as visionaries. But only the great ones, says Ulta Beauty CMO Michelle Crossan-Matos, understand that they have to be both. Just before the POSSIBLE conference in Miami, where she spoke to MMA CEO Greg Stuart, she was in Orlando, working to inspire 3000 leaders from Ulta's massive retail operations.
"But when I get in the office tomorrow, it is ...
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Marketing is both an art and a science, but unless the science is sound, the rest of the company won't believe that you're driving results. So says Morgan Stanley Wealth Management CMO Andrea Zaretsky, who has devoted her entire marketing career — starting at American Express in 2003, with stops at Sephora and Toys-R-Us in between — to improving measurement.
"From the beginning, it's been really important for me to ...
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February 21, 2024 • 60 mins
Full transcript
"At the end of the day," says Impossible Foods CMO and Chief Creative Officer Leslie Sims, "we're helping save the planet, we're helping the environment, but people don't necessarily want to hear that when they're eating a cheeseburger."
The arrival of the plant-based meat industry came in the form of a scientific breakthrough: Foods made from plants that behave like meat when cooked, which have been steadily added ...
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February 7, 2024 • 28 mins
If you like Building Better CMOs, we think you'll also like "Stories and Strategies For Public Relations and Marketing," hosted by Doug Downs.
In this episode, originally released in May 2021, Doug interviews Ogilvy UK vice chairman Rory Sutherland about nudge theory — the behavioral science concept popularized by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."
We'll be back...
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January 24, 2024 • 52 mins
Full transcript
By her own admission, First Command Financial Services exec Kellie Richter's official title is a mouthful. It's "EVP, Chief Marketing and Client Experience Officer" — but those aren't empty words to her.
The clients who First Command cares about are military service members, veterans, and their families; even more than a regular financial services customer, Kellie says, "they do their research ... they're protective...
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January 10, 2024 • 57 mins
Full transcript
To connect with their customers, companies have to understand them. But current approaches just don't work, says Anywhere Real Estate CMO Esther-Mireya Tejeda.
Breaking those customers into demographic groups obscures important differences, and psychographic profiles are not easily targetable. The missing link is an emerging neuroscience-backed framework called emographics, which explains why people do what they do....
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December 27, 2023 • 51 mins
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Laura Jones is Instacart's CMO and was previously the former global head of marketing, but she never explicitly set out to get jobs like those. "How did I end up here?" she asks. "It really centers on proactively seeking out learning opportunities."
After stints at Deloitte, Visa, and Google, Laura's last two job hops were both motivated by a realization that she had learned what she could from those roles and "that...
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December 13, 2023 • 61 mins
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When Aron North was hired to lead marketing and creative at Ultra Mobile — the fastest-growing private company in the world, in 2016 — he had no idea what would be waiting for him on day one: The outlines of a new prepaid cell phone plan aimed at consumers, then called Mint SIM, which would be sold online only.
Aron was blunt with the company's president: "Oh, this is incredibly interesting. Unfortunately, this is n...
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November 29, 2023 • 54 mins
Full transcript
The "brand versus performance" marketing debate happens in all industries, but no one appreciate the value of brand as performance better than Zena Arnold, the CMO of Sephora US. Her job requires her to balance the demands of both online and in-store operations ("I get emails every hour during our great sales," she notes), so performance means more than just clicks.
"One of our key roles of marketing and retail is d...
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November 15, 2023 • 62 mins
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"We have this East Coast, West Coast dynamic going on in our industry," says Vineet Mehra, the CMO of Chime. But rather than 2Pac and Biggie, the split is between brand marketing and performance marketing — which Vineet says shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
"Instead of integrating our worlds and realizing that all of this is now marketing, we have marketed marketing in an absolutely divisive way," he says, "and actu...
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November 1, 2023 • 68 mins
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One of the three core principles of successful marketing operations, says McKinsey & Co senior advisor Rebecca Messina, is articulating and keeping to a clear mission. Sometimes, companies already have one, but "engagement in the mission is low." Other times, business leaders may think they have a mission, but it's wildly inconsistent across the organization. Formulating a proper answer to the mission question means...
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October 18, 2023 • 55 mins
Full transcript
“You need content to deliver a good customer experience.” Sounds obvious, right? Except in today's marketing environment, says Adobe's chief brand officer Heather Freeland, one campaign can require 5,000 unique assets: Consider every possible channel, multiply that by the number of audiences you're trying to reach, and that by the number of customer segments within those audiences, and that by the number of markets ...
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October 4, 2023 • 75 mins
Full transcript
Once upon a time, Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder was selected by her then-employer for an assessment with a professional coach, to see if she was executive material. "I knew I could, but I didn't think I would" make it to the C-Suite, she recalls. "And I didn't think I would because I didn't think anyone would give me the shot."
The big takeaway of the session reduced Dara to tears: Her CEO really believed in her, so mu...
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September 20, 2023 • 61 mins
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How do you advertise a streaming movie or TV show? "Flashy campaign assets" like a trailer and key art are certainly part of it, says Paramount Streaming's head of marketing Domenic DiMeglio. But in the modern entertainment business, that's just the tip of the iceberg. In reality, he says, you need hundreds of assets that will appear on every platform, and a plan to "manage the customer life cycle as part of that pr...
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September 6, 2023 • 64 mins
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Uber's big Super Bowl campaign this year was a hit: In the ad, actual Uber executives try to convince Diddy to produce a jingle for the company's membership program, Uber One. The entertaining spot was "about as blatantly overt about selling as you can get," says VP of Marketing David Mogensen — and he's proud of that.
"As an industry, I think we tend to think that selling is a bit of a dirty word," David says. "And...
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August 23, 2023 • 62 mins
Full transcript
As recently as the late 2000s, if you wanted to launch a new banking brand you needed brick-and-mortar branches. But GMAC, a spinoff of GM that was bought by private equity firm Cerberus, didn’t have the liquidity to build or buy a network like that. Joining the company as a brand executive and later becoming its CMO, Andrea Brimmer recalls how risky it felt to debut GMAC’s new identity, Ally Financial, as an online...
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August 9, 2023 • 69 mins
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There are some necessary dividing lines in FanDuel CCO Mike Raffensperger's line of work. The most obvious one is that online sports gambling is legal in 19 states, but not others. The company also refuses to do name & likeness deals with college athletes because many of them aren't old enough to gamble, Mike explains. But he outright rejects the idea — widely accepted in some marketing circles — that there needs to...
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July 26, 2023 • 58 mins
Full transcript
When CMO Kellyn Smith Kenny joined AT&T in 2020, she led an ambitious overhaul of the company's purpose; as is the case in many companies, this required a huge amount of customer research, and countless workshops and conversations with employees from across the company. But after landing on a stronger brand — to connect people to greater possibility through expertise, simplicity, and inspiration — Kellyn realized th...
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July 12, 2023 • 50 mins
Full transcript
The online design software Canva has more than 130 million users around the world, but it wasn't obvious 10 years ago that the Australian startup would one day be a runaway hit, valued at $40 billion. Just ask CMO Zach Kitschke, who was employee number five. He was hired to do communications and marketing, but also wound up being tapped to lead customer service, product, HR, and even food prep for a time.
"When you'...
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June 28, 2023 • 60 mins
Full transcript
Colgate-Palmolive has been in business for more than 200 years, and it won't be around for another 200+ unless its operators continue to innovate, says Diana Haussling, the company's VP and GM North America Consumer Experience & Growth.
"It's really important that we don't have a sense of entitlement," she says. "We are parts of a broader history, of a huge brand and a huge brand story. Our responsibility as brand s...
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