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 spanning broadcast journalism, the White House, and corporate America: The willingness to stay curio...
Jul 09, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 2Ep. 19
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 Marine, Sea Ray, and Boston Whaler. And one of Lauren's initiatives has been implementing a new brand ...
Jun 25, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 18
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 will gather the right teams, you will list down things that will make you ultimately achieve the ob...
Jun 11, 2025•35 min•Season 2Ep. 13
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 connections. Doug recommends developing a clear "consumer muse" for each brand, ensuring that marketing ...
May 28, 2025•56 min•Season 2Ep. 12
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. "And any creative will tell you that a good tight brief with tight boundaries is helpful for t...
May 14, 2025•46 min•Season 2Ep. 11
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 and find something new, or you're going to learn," Bob says. "As long as you set it up as a tes...
Apr 30, 2025•52 min•Season 2Ep. 10
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. performance debate? How is the definition of CMO "changing?" Above a...
Apr 08, 2025•3 min
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 on Building Better CMOs, Alex talks with MMA Global CEO Greg Stuart about the need for a strategic a...
Apr 02, 2025•59 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Watch this interview on YouTube Full transcript — "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 upstream with the CFO." Today on Building Better CMOs, Micky expla...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Watch this interview on YouTube Full transcript — "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 strategies can align with broader business goals to demonstrate ...
Feb 19, 2025•51 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Watch this interview on YouTube Full transcript — "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 marketers should actively shape solutions, not just identify pain ...
Feb 05, 2025•54 min•Season 2Ep. 6
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 is now a CRO who also oversees marketing. "We had just never told...
Dec 04, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 5
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 up with a message over time, you think back to almost every brand...
Nov 13, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 4
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 lot of data to work with there." Ariel previously led worldwide m...
Oct 30, 2024•45 min•Season 2Ep. 3
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 what's going to be differentiated?" she asks. Today on Building B...
Oct 16, 2024•52 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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," he says. "The team fundamentally is the same. It might not be p...
Oct 02, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 1
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 anything different from one of our other customers. Because again...
Jun 12, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 26
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 capital-P Purpose company," she says. "A third of the world has po...
May 15, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 25
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 time, but Charisse says that across the marketing world, it's easy t...
May 01, 2024•49 min•Season 1Ep. 24
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 about how are my sales doing? How can I pivot? How can I get even...
Apr 26, 2024•34 min•Season 1Ep. 23
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 understand how to use analytics," Andrea says. "How to make sure ...
Mar 06, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 22
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 to restaurant menus around the world; in the case of Impossible's...
Feb 21, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 21
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 in two weeks with a new episode of Building Better CMOs!
Feb 07, 2024•28 min
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 of their services and they should be." Having Client Experience ...
Jan 24, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 20
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. "The majority of human behavior upwards of 95 percent is actuall...
Jan 10, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 19
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 I wanted to continue pushing myself ... every day has been hard....
Dec 27, 2023•51 min•Season 1Ep. 18
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 never going to work the way you've laid it out. There's no chance ...
Dec 13, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 17
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 driving traffic, whether that's into a store or whether it's to ou...
Nov 29, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 16
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 actually split the community as opposed to recognizing that there's j...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 15
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 asking some fundamental questions. "It's based on the bigger...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 14
