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
December 17, 2025 • 60 mins
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 CEO Brian Niccol's turnaround team,...
Mark as Played
December 3, 2025 • 64 mins
"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 125 brands, including Yoohoo, Hawaii...
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November 19, 2025 • 52 mins
"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 connect brand marketing with gr...
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November 5, 2025 • 56 mins
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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 prior decision."
Paul has spent ne...
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October 23, 2025 • 55 mins
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"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 calls "a burden of responsibility,"...
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October 8, 2025 • 48 mins
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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 have a huge cross-functional meet...
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September 24, 2025 • 50 mins
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“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. And so take the burden off a l...
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August 20, 2025 • 51 mins
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“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 perceptions align with the value they...
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July 9, 2025 • 67 mins
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"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 spanning broadcast journalis...
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June 25, 2025 • 60 mins
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"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 Marine, Sea Ray, and Boston Whale...
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June 11, 2025 • 33 mins
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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 will gather the right teams, ...
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May 28, 2025 • 54 mins
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"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 connections. Doug recommends devel...
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May 14, 2025 • 45 mins
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"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. "And any creative will tell...
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April 30, 2025 • 50 mins
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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 and find something new...
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April 8, 2025 • 3 mins
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 do they stand on the brand vs. p...
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April 2, 2025 • 58 mins
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"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 on Building Better CMOs, Alex t...
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March 5, 2025 • 61 mins
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"As marketers, we can't just respond to the bottom line," says TIAA CMO Micky Onvural. "We can't just say, 'Well give me a million dollars and I will give you this many customers or this many clicks, and if I do the right kind of mathematics, I'll give you this kind of lifetime value that's going to deliver you this to the bottom line.' I think you actually have to connect further u...
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February 19, 2025 • 49 mins
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"Business and humanity can actually not only live together, but I think that they can thrive together," says Brian Irving, CMO of Lyft. That sort of philosophy has informed his work at companies like Apple, Airbnb, and the agency Rapp, and today at Lyft he's applying it to everything from autonomous vehicles to city bikes.
Today on Building Better CMOs, Brian discusses how marketing...
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February 5, 2025 • 52 mins
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"Our grand purpose is to make home a reality for more and more people," says Ravi Kandikonda, SVP of Marketing at Zillow.
Today on Building Better CMOs, he and Greg Stuart discuss the significance of empathy in brand messaging, and the importance of integrating product knowledge, customer experience, and business outcomes to effectively connect with audiences. Ravi emphasizes that m...
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December 4, 2024 • 63 mins
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Getting the right health insurance is serious business; it's the number one reason for bankruptcy in America, says eHealth Insurance CRO Michelle Barbeau. But when she joined eHealth — which helps consumers compare and select providers — she realized that scaring people into action was not a winning strategy.
"What we found was, it's all about transparency," says Michelle, who initially served as eHealth's CMO, and ...
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