Brand Loyalty and Broad Experiences Give These First-Time CMOs a Fresh Perspective on Marketing

Kristyn Cook has never served a day as a company’s chief marketing officer. When she assumes that role for State Farm on Jan. 1, 2023, however, she’ll do so having lived with parents who were State Farm agents since she was 11, opening her own State Farm agency in Chicago 15 years ago and helping outgoing CMO Rand Harbert revive the insurance company’s “Like a good neighbor” slogan and develop the Jake From State Farm character. From the marketing side, she’s seen State Farm’s jingle and pitchman expand seamlessly into social media and digital video. From the sales side, she’s helped the brand amplify its voice at tentpole events like the Super Bowl. (The 2023 host stadium even bears State Farm’s name.) Celebrities Are the Ticket to a Memorable Super Bowl Ad “It's this privilege to carry a legacy, and it stokes that fire in my belly to do my very best to give to this organization,” Cook said. “You can say State Farm is in my DNA and embodies who I am, so I've been fortunate to build a career of my own.” With the median tenure of a CMO sitting at just 28 months, brands seeking a marketing edge are looking to first-timers for both brand familiarity and fresh perspective. In some cases, they're finding the perfect first-time candidate decades in advance.Mike Katz, for example, was recruited by a VoiceStream representative to sell wireless service at a Circuit City while attending Colorado State University in the mid-’90s. In the middle of his first job covering the greater Chicago area, VoiceStream was purchased by Deutsche Telekom and eventually relaunched as T-Mobile. Katz has been with the brand for almost 25 years and has dabbled in sales, corporate strategy, operations, management, phones and marketing. Katz has served as its CMO since March, but said his job would be infinitely more difficult if he didn’t understand each of his previous positions within the company. There's a lot of benefit in really letting somebody get their feet wet in the organization prior to giving them that ultimate role.Andrew Rebhun, CMO, El Pollo Loco “The CMO job at T-Mobile is one of the few roles where you are looking left to right at the way the entire company works,” he said. “Starting my career here, working on the frontlines in front of customers, is an invaluable experience that I find myself frequently drawing back to in this job.” New CMOs for new CMO gigs For nearly 26 years before Eddie Revis arrived in April 2021, Magnolia Bakery did not have a CMO position. But during the pandemic, Magnolia Bakery expanded its business significantly by embracing delivery and direct-to-consumer sales. Revis’ experience at strategy, media, design and tech agencies gave him the focus and in-house problem-solving skills to market a growing company. However, his time at Chobani turning a yogurt company into a global food brand under mentor Peter McGuinness—who taught him “a CMO is at their best when aligned to the business and its outcomes”—made him the CMO Magnolia Bakery came to need. “What I love about this job and where Magnolia Bakery is at in its trajectory is there is no way to fully prepare,” Revis said. “I’m motivated by the unknown and seeking out clarity—so while there will always be an aspect of the job that I won’t be prepared for, I use that as an indicator of success because it means there is still more for me to learn.” Bose didn't establish a CMO position until 2021, nearly 50 years into its history. By the time Jim Mollica took the job, he'd already amassed much of the position's experience elsewhere. At Nissan, Mollica focused on brand strategy and the automaker’s full portfolio. Later, at Disney, he took note of the company’s “emphasis and obsession around the consumer” from the moment they entered a theme park to the PhotoPass keepsakes they took home. Once at Viacom and MTV, he realized the importance of content creation and storytelling that earned people’s time and attention. At Under Armour, he witnessed the marriage of the online and offline world in commerce. “All of those things in that deep emphasis were almost like picking up majors along the way,” he said. “They all helped me as I was thinking through not just this strategy of transforming the company, but also the skillsets needed to build out this marketing leadership team of world class experts.” McAfee’s New CMO Wants to Drive Emotional Connection With Consumers Following your passions Even through seemingly disparate career experiences, new CMOs often follow a single motivational tread. Before he became CMO of Vista in 2019, Ricky Engelberg spent more than a decade at Nike developing products like Nike Plus and Fuel Band. He also briefly ran a record label in Athens, Ga. Innovation, transformation and customer obsession were at the core of each of those ventures, and they were central to his discussions with Vista about its CMO position. Now many of his friends and former colleagues are also first-time CMOs. Though each company is different, Engelberg noted that they face similar challenges: the first budgeting process, the first strategic review, the first crisis, the first presentation to the board. “Some of our approaches have worked great, others haven’t,” he said. “But consistently, we have come to the table with a very big learning mindset informed by past leaders we’ve worked for and experiences we’ve had, rather than an already-established roster and playbook of how to succeed.” Andres Cardenas was with publisher Minute Media for five years before becoming its CMO in 2021. But his desire to meet fans’ passions surfaced long before he’d pitched The Players’ Tribune, Fansided or 90Min. Fifteen years ago, he worked on the Rio 2007 Pan American Games and joined the marketing team for Rio’s 2016 Olympic bid. He spent more than half a decade as a director at sports marketing agency Octagon and conducted this interview between World Cup matches in Qatar. The Modern Agency CMO Must Balance Brand Building, Business and Culture “There’s so much passion surrounding sports, and with that comes the immense responsibility of delivering branded experiences that match the magnitude of this passion (or risk getting lost in the shuffle), while still feeling complementary and additive to the sports environments that you’re in (or risk getting written off by consumers),” he said. “I don’t want to innovate simply to make a big splash. I want to create long-lasting business impact and truly meaningful connections with our audiences.” Finding room to grow Going with a first-time CMO instead of a more known commodity requires some bravery, patience and investment from all involved. Andrew Rebhun realized roughly three years into his early marketing career at Ford that he wanted to be a CMO one day. He didn't attain that position with the automaker. “I realized that I didn't necessarily want to be a functional expert at anything, but rather the breadth of the marketing function was what really interested me,” he said. It wasn’t until after a lengthy stint with McDonald’s and a new opportunity at El Pollo Loco that Rebhun began planning his life around that possibility. After a little more than a year with El Pollo Loco, Rebhun was asked if he wanted to take a CMO course at Stanford. By the end of the year, he was already in discussions about the job. “There's a lot of benefit in really letting somebody get their feet wet in the organization prior to giving them that ultimate role,” he said. “I don't think I would be doing as good of a job with my team or within the organization had I not had the opportunity to learn a little bit at first.” The Modern Agency CMO Must Balance Brand Building, Business and Culture Sarah Franklin spent 15 years at Salesforce before becoming its CMO and was similarly motivated early on, but actually quit for a bit in 2013 because she felt her career wasn’t progressing quickly enough. The company took her back a year later, after she missed the culture, the people, and having a purpose and passion for her work. She helped Salesforce construct its Trailhead online learning platform and celebrated both her coworkers’ and customers’ successes. While Trailhead helped her cause when Salesforce was seeking a CMO, Franklin credits her success to a strategy that dates back to the early days of her career when a tech company she was interviewing for asked for a product presentation and she launched into a dissertation on the feasibility of colonizing Mars. She got the job based on the explanation of her pitch—she wanted it to stand out—and learned to “have a beginner’s mind in everything you do.” “It's showing up, being relevant, being interesting, being differentiated and building trust,” she said. “That is what I think is the most important thing to bring to the [CMO] role: that you have the courage to show up with new ideas and to be your authentic self, and to value what your customers value and to see things through their lens.”