We were tasked by our partner with identifying, engaging and securing an EVP and CMO, reporting to the CEO. This role oversaw all marketing for the entire company as well as ecommerce, digital merchandising and customer loyalty and journey management. The role was critical to shaping and reviving the brand’s growth, spearheading a customer-first journey and taking full advantage of recent best-in class, cutting edge technology and analytics investments.
We agreed that this search needed to focus on consumer/customer facing companies specifically focusing on retail and CPG companies. Target companies had to be comparable scale and complexity and global in nature with a strong marketing functions.
After two months of researching, we identified over 400 candidates. We ended up presenting a strong shortlist of four candidates and placed a female leader into the role.
Our partner in this case was a specialty retailer, based out of Manhattan. They were a business comprised of a number of separate brands, were going through a period of record growth and wanted to sustain that by bringing in a C-level marketing leader. This individual would be required to work in close partnership with the CEO to assess the core propositions, create a marketing plan and brand strategy that would strengthen their customer loyalty, optimize customer transaction performance and, ultimately, expand their marketshare across their various categories.
This search was focused on retail and required someone ideally from a pure play company with a strong brand perception. The ideal candidate needed to be someone with experience across both B2C and B2B, given the diverse nature of the company’s sub-brands. They also needed to have strong experience with digital marketing, brand strategy and customer data platforms.
The result was a refined and narrow search. We identified 320 individuals in total, presenting a shortlist of five candidates. Two candidates were taken forward to final interview, with the successful candidate coming from Amazon, where they operated as CMO for a particular business unit. Gender diversity was a conscious focus throughout this search and the shortlist delivered was over 50% diverse.
Our partner in this case had just hired a new CMO for North America. We were tasked with bringing in a Chief Brand Officer to help build his vision of a cohesive marketing function. The role was to oversee all elements of the creative brand experience, customer journey planning, digital marketing and media planning and execution / performance marketing. This leader was critical in delivering marketing assets to the needs of the organization, working front line with their peers across marketing, partnering with demand generation to understand requirements, ensuring consistency and quality and, at the same time, implementing appropriate systems and metrics to migrate away from the historical silo approach.
We quickly realized that this search needed to focus on companies of a comparable scale and complexity, that were global in nature and had strong marketing functions. We prioritized candidates with strong delivery and operational backgrounds, coming from complex product organizations who, ideally, have driven transformation in terms of process and structure.
In the end, we achieved both speed and quality delivering the search from start to finish in three months. We mapped the electronics, CPG and retail sectors across the US, speaking to more than 450 candidates in the process and leading to a shortlist of three high caliber candidates.
