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 4, 2024 • 64 mins
Full transcript
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 ...
Mark as Played
November 13, 2024 • 63 mins
Full transcript
Marketing measurement is a complex puzzle—especially when it comes to balancing long-term brand-building efforts with short-term performance metrics that will please stakeholders. Tailored Brands CMO Carolyn Pollock acknowledges that CFOs may be skeptical of matched market testing and other tools for measuring brand-building impact, but that long-term may have an edge.
"The consistency and the continuity of showing ...
Mark as Played
October 30, 2024 • 45 mins
Full transcript
It's easy to say you want your decisions to be data-driven. But as Salesforce CMO Ariel Kelman has learned, hard data doesn't tell the full story. Often, you also need to consider the qualitative.
"Let's say you go and do some executive event series, where you have 30 people come to each event," he says. "It's not like if we want to go draw conclusions from, let's say, Dreamforce, we had 45,000 people. You've got a ...
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October 16, 2024 • 51 mins
Full transcript
Automotive marketing is fiercely competitive, and even though she's excited about the potential of AI, Nissan's Global CMO Allyson Witherspoon says an over-reliance on technology could be dangerous. She believes the safer bet is to continue to embrace creativity and a strong brand identity, even in an era dominated by AI and data-driven tools.
"If everyone is using AI and the data set is the same for everyone, then ...
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October 2, 2024 • 62 mins
Full transcript
Manolo Arroyo, EVP and global CMO of the Coca-Cola Company, believes there are three types of leaders: One type lacks confidence in themselves and frequently changes the strategy; another buys time for themselves by changing the team around them; and the third decides to commit to the strategy and the team and get the work done.
"[They] roll up their sleeves, having the confidence that the strategy is the right one,...
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June 12, 2024 • 59 mins
Full transcript
Today on Building Better CMOs: Andy Rebhun, the chief experience officer at the fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant chain Cava, talks with MMA Global CEO Greg Stuart about the importance of consistent authenticity, how to thrive in the C-Suite, and "bringing the weather" for everyone — including Uber Eats drivers.
"We welcome everyone to our table," he says. "It should never be that DoorDash or Uber Eats driver is ...
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May 15, 2024 • 54 mins
Full transcript
GE has changed a whole lot since Global CMO Linda Boff started working there, more than 20 years ago. It was once a sprawling portfolio company that made everything from microwaves to television shows; recently, it spun off its healthcare, energy, and aerospace divisions into three distinct public companies, and executives like Linda take these core areas of focus very seriously.
"We are a company, I like to say a c...
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May 1, 2024 • 48 mins
Full transcript
It doesn't matter how good your marketing is if you can't communicate its impact to the larger organization, says Charisse Hughes, senior vice president and Chief Growth Officer of Kellanova. Her firm spun off of the Kellogg Company last year to manage iconic brands like Pringles, Cheez-It, Pop-Tarts, Rice Krispies Treats, as well as breakfast cereal outside of the U.S. Those have been household names for a long tim...
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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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Full transcript
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...
Mark as Played
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
Full transcript
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
Full transcript
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
Full transcript
"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
Full transcript
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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