Marketing gets complicated long before most companies hire someone to lead it.
I've spent my career working inside that complexity, alongside senior marketing leaders, sales teams, agencies, creatives, specialists, and the people responsible for actually growing the business.
The situations below are a few of the experiences that shaped how I think about marketing leadership today. They aren't stories about one person swooping in with all the answers. They're examples of what can happen when the right people are in the room, someone is connecting the pieces, and the team knows what it's working toward.
COVERGIRL
✳︎
RIMMEL LONDON
✳︎
BERKLEY FISHING
✳︎
ABU GARCIA
✳︎
NAUTICA
✳︎
ADIDAS
✳︎
NOBILIA NORTH AMERICA
✳︎
PRETTY KITTY CHARLESTON
✳︎
VERA WANG
✳︎
COVERGIRL ✳︎ RIMMEL LONDON ✳︎ BERKLEY FISHING ✳︎ ABU GARCIA ✳︎ NAUTICA ✳︎ ADIDAS ✳︎ NOBILIA NORTH AMERICA ✳︎ PRETTY KITTY CHARLESTON ✳︎ VERA WANG ✳︎
CHALLENGE
When I interviewed to lead social at Pure Fishing, the function sat under Creative. That made sense if social was primarily viewed as a place to distribute content from photoshoots. I saw a bigger opportunity for it to support the business across a portfolio of 11 brands.
Social needed to be closer to brand leadership and the broader marketing organization. The team needed better access to business priorities, stronger connections with the people making brand decisions, and a clearer way to show what the work was accomplishing.
Building a marketing function that could do more than
make content.
APPROACH
I raised that concern during the interview process. Leadership agreed, changed the reporting structure, and I joined the company reporting directly to the VP.
From there, I worked to build the function around the role social could actually play in the business. I created regular touchpoints with brand leaders so our team understood their priorities and they had visibility into our work. Influencer marketing became part of the function. I built reporting structures that connected what we were doing to broader objectives and used those results to make the case for additional investment in content and influencer marketing.
As the work expanded, I built the team with it. I interviewed and hired people across the function, led the team, managed budgets, and worked across brand, sales and marketing leadership to make sure our priorities reflected what the business needed, not just what was newest or easiest to promote.
RESULT
Over three years, the function grew from one full-time employee and freelance community support to a team of six plus me. We secured more budget and autonomy as we demonstrated what stronger social and influencer programs could contribute, and the brands saw audience growth and increased share of voice online.
More importantly, social had become a marketing function with a clearer role in the business, rather than a channel sitting downstream waiting for content.
What this experience taught me
Where marketing sits, what information it has access to, and who it talks to changes the quality of the work it can do. Sometimes improving marketing starts with the strategy. Sometimes it starts with fixing the structure that makes good strategy possible.
FIGURING OUT WHAT MARKETING NEEDED BEFORE ASKING IT TO DO MORE
CHALLENGE
When I joined nobilia's U.S. business, the company had been operating in the market for years without an established internal marketing team. A PR agency reported directly to the CEO, but like many outside partners, they didn't always have access to the time, context or information they needed to do their best work.
The newly formed marketing team was also trying to support both the parent brand and a retail concept. Lead quality was a concern. Messaging wasn't consistently speaking to the right buyer. The digital customer journey needed work. Sales and marketing had very different ideas about what was important and very little visibility into what the other was doing.
There was plenty of marketing activity. The harder question was what all of it needed to accomplish for the business.
APPROACH
I joined as the second marketing hire, reporting to the CMO and leading social and digital strategy. Before recommending more activity, I spent time understanding what was already happening.
That meant looking at the work and the results, but it also meant talking to the people around it. I worked closely with the CMO, met with external partners, participated in PR conversations even though PR wasn't my function, and tried to understand the different priorities across the organization.
From there, I helped diagnose gaps across messaging, social, digital, the customer journey and partner relationships. I led the agency supporting social and content and helped lead the work to redesign the website around a more useful customer experience and a more cohesive brand presence.
RESULT
We created a more polished and consistent digital presence, shifted messaging toward the intended buyer, improved the website experience, and gave external partners clearer direction.
But this experience also exposed a larger problem that better creative or another marketing tactic couldn't solve. We never got enough clarity around the business objectives marketing was ultimately responsible for moving, and the disconnect between sales and marketing remained difficult to close.
That limited how confidently the team could prioritize the work or prove whether it was moving the business in the right direction.
What this experience taught me
Marketing can't work toward a business goal it doesn't understand.
It's one of the reasons I ask so many questions now before I recommend a strategy. I want to understand what the business is trying to change, what sales is seeing, what customers are doing, what's already been tried, and what success actually needs to look like. Otherwise, it's very easy to make good marketing that doesn't solve the right problem.
KNOWING WHEN AN OPPORTUNITY IS WORTH CHANGING THE PLAN FOR
CHALLENGE
COVERGIRL was working to build more relevance with millennial consumers without abandoning the customers and products that had built the brand. That was especially challenging for a legacy beauty brand with longer product lifecycles at a time when younger consumers were gravitating toward newer brands and faster-moving trends.
One of the stories we were beginning to build around existing products was skincare in makeup. Then a young creator organically posted a TikTok about Simply Ageless foundation.
She wasn't part of our campaign. We hadn't sent her the product. But she was already saying the things we hoped younger consumers would understand about it, showing the product in use, and generating real conversation in the comments.
APPROACH
Someone on the paid media team spotted the post as it was gaining traction, and I was part of the leadership conversation about whether we should put money behind it. We knew there was no guarantee it would turn into anything bigger. We also knew the opportunity was unusually aligned with what the brand had been trying to accomplish.
Once we decided to move, I led the creator outreach, negotiation and contracting while coordinating with PR, paid media, legal and global teams. Boosting creator content was still relatively new for the organization, the brand didn't yet have its own TikTok presence, and the normal contracting process wasn't exactly built for a 48-hour turnaround.
We figured it out and moved while the moment still mattered.
RESULT
The boosted post generated more than 10 million views and more than $1 million in incremental sales for a single SKU. It gave an established product originally associated with an older customer new relevance with the younger audience the brand had been trying to reach.
We tried boosting more content afterward, including another post from the same creator. Nothing recreated that result.
And I actually think that's important.
What this experience taught me
The lesson wasn't that boosting UGC was the secret. It wasn't.
The strategy gave us enough context to recognize why this particular opportunity mattered when it appeared. Then we had people in the room who could make a decision, pull the right teams together, and move quickly enough to do something with it.
A good strategy gives you direction. It shouldn't make you so committed to the plan that you miss something better happening right in front of you.
A FEW OTHER THINGS I’VE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR
BUILDING TEAMS
I've hired and led marketing talent, growing a function from one full-time employee and freelance support to a team of six plus me.
MANAGING MARKETING INVESTMENT
I've owned social and influencer marketing budgets, approved content production budgets, and made the business case to senior leadership for increasing investment when the results supported it.
CONNECTING SALES + MARKETING
I've worked directly with sales teams to understand regional performance, retail priorities and product needs, then used that context to shape marketing priorities, content and influencer partnerships.
LEADING AGENCY PARTNERS
I've worked on both sides of agency relationships and led external partners across social, digital, content, PR-adjacent work and website projects. I know how much better that relationship works when an agency has access to the context behind the assignment.
BUILDING INFLUENCER MARKETING INFRASTRUCTURE
At Coty, I helped bring parts of the influencer marketing function in-house so creator relationships could live closer to the brand. I helped develop outreach processes and strategy and brought in consultants to support the work from inside the organization.
CREATING MEASUREMENT + REPORTING
I've built reporting structures to connect channel performance to broader marketing and business priorities, giving leadership better visibility into what the work was accomplishing and helping inform future investment.
The companies change.
The job of good marketing leadership doesn't.
Understand what the business is trying to accomplish. Get close enough to the people doing the work to understand what they're seeing. Make sure the right information is making its way into the right conversations. Decide what marketing should focus on. Give people enough direction and context to do good work. Pay attention when something changes.
That's the work I've spent my career doing alongside senior marketing leaders and teams inside larger organizations. Now I bring that experience directly to growing companies that need marketing leadership before they're ready to build the full role in-house.
YOU DON’T NEED SOMEONE WHO’S WORKED IN YOUR EXACT
BUSINESS BEFORE.
YOU NEED SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO UNDERSTAND ONE.
If your company has grown to the point where marketing needs more direction, leadership or structure than you can keep providing yourself, tell me what's going on.