For The Entrepreneurial Chief Marketing Officer, Challenging Norms Is the New Norm.
According to the International Monetary Fund’s World Uncertainty Index, 6 weeks ago, measures of global uncertainty reached their third highest level since monthly tracking began in 2008, behind only that year’s global economic turmoil and the pandemic.
And as any behavioral scientist knows—or anyone with common sense for that matter—uncertainty clouds and complicates decision making processes and thus the path to purchase, and is something other than the optimal macro-context for marketing or marketers.
But so it is, and so it makes the need for chief marketers to challenge norms, and to think and do entrepreneurially and differently, ever more important.
What then makes for an entrepreneurial CMO?
At Forbes, as we have for the four years since we created this recognition, we consider the entrepreneurial CMO one who approaches driving growth neither beholden to the status quo nor to disrupting it for the sake of same. We believe the entrepreneurial CMO understands both what has enduring value and what needs to change, whether within their organizations and/or in how they go to market.
They are strategic risk-takers, learning and optimizing based on both what works and, inevitably, what doesn’t, believing that failures aren’t failures if you learn from and get better because of them. They see opportunity in constraints and are relentlessly focused on making and doing more with less, no matter how much they might have.
Their entrepreneurial approach to marketing challenges assumptions and what’s come and been done before. It’s a mindset that informs their strategies, and evidence of it is often seen through tactical application and activation, the in-market expression of mindset and approach.
So too do we recognize the difference between being a great CMO and a great and entrepreneurial one. Not everyone is both and not everyone who is, is both at the same time.
A great CMO focuses on what matters most, on what creates and captures demand, and on how to best allocate limited resources to unlimited opportunities. They eschew the rest as distraction and think about the business and their role in driving it strategically and then execute creatively.
However, we consider this to be as fundamental as it is essential, and not in and of itself evidence of an entrepreneurial approach.
We also recognize that the “entrepreneurial” must be considered within the specific context of different industries, categories, companies, and markets. Because that which may be business as usual for company X might be an entirely new way of thinking and doing for company Y, and our judging and selection of the fifty CMOs recognized on this year’s list makes efforts to account for this.
It’s our conviction that a status-quo approach to marketing is an increasingly challenged one. It’s our belief that an entrepreneurial take on driving growth and on the art, science, and practice of marketing is and will be increasingly important to great—even good—CMOs, as there is no current reason to think these times of radical uncertainty will become anything but more so in the near-future.
As reminder, this particular Forbes list is a one-and-done list, which is to say that once someone has appeared on it, they are no longer eligible for it. This year’s cohort represents the most geographically diverse one yet, and as you read through it (presented alphabetically), you’ll find evidence of an entrepreneurial marketing approach from leaders stewarding brands and companies across categories and the globe.
Each is a chief marketer—regardless of their titles—who has been selected from among hundreds of nominees, based on open-nominations, and judged by qualitative consideration from amongst their peers, marketing industry and agency leaders, executive recruiters, CMO list alumni, and Forbes, by whom all final decisions were made.
Regardless of what and where they market, it’s how they market and compete that finds them recognized on this 4th annual Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 list.
As in year’s past, we think you’ll find something to learn from each and all of those recognized and invite you to get to know them below.
2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50
Additional writing and reporting by Laura Ratliffe. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and/or brevity.
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CBRE
Benji Baer
CMO, CBRE
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Because despite a fundamental, global reset for commercial real estate driven by economic uncertainty, office-norm disruptions, and the continued evolution towards a post-pandemic new normal, Baer’s marketing embraces the disruption that comes from “breaking models.”
Knowing that the times and category require reinvention, Baer and her team have reimagined CBRE’s brand and client experience, marketing’s mission, structure, capabilities, and audiences, and, as she told Forbes, “built a level of accountability the business had not previously experienced.”
During her tenure as CMO of the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm, Baer and her team have challenged outdated paradigms and models. At a time when businesses and policymakers are reevaluating how cities function, Baer and her team created the firm’s Shaping Tomorrow’s Cities initiative, positioning CBRE as more than a services provider by urging industry leaders to rethink economic, demographic, and infrastructure challenges.
“[Marketing] stepped up to be the ultimate convener, giving a voice—and a platform—to these consequential themes,” Baer tells Forbes. Since its launch, this program alone has doubled the firm’s client engagement.
In Q4 2024, CBRE’s reported revenues increased 16% year-over-year (YoY).
Danone North America
Linda Bethea
CMO, Danone North America
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Because Bethea’s focus on “championing unorthodox ways of doing things” ensures the company’s marketing remains agile and continually “tweaked” based on performance.
With the company since 2020, Bethea has found new ways to solve problems and meet unmet consumer needs with what she describes as a “test and learn” approach. To these ends, Bethea and her team work to create a culture of learning and risk-taking, embracing what inevitable failures can teach, “curating a wall of ‘fame & shame’ highlighting both our successes and failures to help our team become more comfortable with risk-taking.”
Examples of Bethea’s unorthodox and entrepreneurial approach include launching STōK, a “bold” cold-brew brand—not just in partnership with Wrexham AFC but by “sponsoring a stadium in a country where the product isn’t sold?” As she asked Forbes, “what is bolder than that?” Facing budget declines of 70% for International Delight, a $1B+ portfolio brand, Bethea and her team took an insight—75% of 18-24-year-olds watch at least one hour of reality TV weekly—and created a TikTok reality show, Créme House, to drive engagement and growth.
In the last quarter reported, Danone saw an increase in like-for-like sales of 5.8% across its North American market.
Benjamin Braun
Benjamin Braun
CMO, Samsung Europe
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Because Braun markets with the conviction that scale isn’t incompatible with agility and that “even if you work for a massive global conglomerate like Samsung you operate as a start-up team.”
With a remit including oversight of the company’s marketing across 44 countries, Braun tells Forbes that you can’t “allow yourself to become complacent and slow. You think big and figure out how to deliver without a budget or people. Change,” he says, “is driven by people with ideas. Not budgets.”
For Braun, marketing isn’t just about storytelling—it’s about proving real business results because, and as he says, “only then will we gain credibility.” Illustrations of this and his entrepreneurial approach are seen in the brand’s activation at the Paris Olympics. Rather than spending millions on advertising, Braun and his team went guerrilla—gifting 17,000 Samsung foldable phones to Olympians and Paralympians, requesting only that they unpack them on social media. This led to “Victory Selfies” on Olympic podiums, massive global exposure at a fraction of the cost, and a 23% sales increase.
International online research data and analytics firm YouGov recently named Samsung the #1 Best Global Brand for 2025.
National Hockey League
Heidi Browning
Senior EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, National Hockey League
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Because as sports’ traditional broadcast model evolves to a multi-platform and direct-to-consumer one, Browning markets knowing engaging the next generation of fans requires a transformation in skills and approach.
Equating the entrepreneurial mindset driving the league’s marketing to the “cowboy ethos” she learned growing up in Montana, Browning tells Forbes, this cowboy spirit creates the “fearless pursuit of new frontiers, question(ing) everything; both why and why not; and being comfortable with the unknown.”
To ensure the NHL’s continued growth, Browning and her team apply the lessons of start-up culture to invite new fans and revenues into the sport and league. Examples include creating the Power Players Youth Advisory Board, embedding Gen Z perspectives directly into marketing decisions to ensure future generation relevance, launching an original content docuseries, “Face-Off: Inside the NHL,” with Amazon Studios among others, and which succeeded in driving both upper and lower funnel growth metrics.
The NHL saw record-breaking business performance in 2023-24, with revenue reaching $6.2 billion, a 5.7% year-over-year increase, and total attendance hitting an all-time high of 22.9 million.
Hasbro
Jason Bunge
CMO, Hasbro
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Because when Bunge joined the 102-year-old toy category icon as its first CMO in 2023, “there was,” as he told Forbes, “the opportunity and need to build an entirely new marketing organization; construct a new set of marketing capabilities to snap to the company’s evolving business portfolio, and perhaps most importantly, redefine the role of marketing for the different needs of each business.”
The former Riot Games CMO and his team approach driving growth recognizing the challenges and opportunities for the company’s principal business lines (toys, physical games and digital/video games) “are bespoke, and the marketing organization must be able to demonstrate agility, efficiency and scale in how it addresses each.”
To these ends, Bunge carved out 5% of their budget “for a first-of-its-kind company test-and-learn agenda,” in order “to inject a new mindset of ‘roles of brands’, (because) not everything was going to grow and not everything needed the same type or amount of marketing.” This approach drove insights allowing Bunge and his team to understand where resources would have the greatest impact and return.
As Bunge shared, “having an entrepreneurial mindset sometimes means breaking old habits and fighting hard to create space and oxygen for new approaches.”
Workday
Emma Chalwin
CMO, Workday
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Because as she leads all marketing globally for this enterprise software company, Chalwin is intent on driving growth by “breaking the B2B mold.”
As Chalwin and her team disrupt Workday’s traditional marketing and ensure it is anything but category-typical, she never loses sight of the fact that, as she told Forbes, “we’re not just selling to a business; we’re selling to the people who work there.” This human-centric approach to enterprise marketing is driven by a mindset rooted in what she describes as rule-breaking, risk-taking and acting like “an entrepreneur inside a Fortune 500 company.”
Believing that challenging the status quo of B2B marketing requires a sense of humor and resolve, she and her team launched the Rock Star 2.0 campaign, bringing an “unexpected irreverence” that challenged conceptions about who the rock stars of business are. Chalwin tells Forbes the campaign increased web traffic by over 50% and lead-to-sales conversions by 17%. She’s also working to train 20,000 employees as brand ambassadors to ensure everyone can share a consistent and compelling brand story.
Workday’s FY25 revenues increased 16.4% YoY.
Bobbie
Kim Chappell
Chief Brand Officer, Bobbie
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Because in order to compete against industry Goliaths, Chappell is helping build this infant formula company into more than just a business and is reshaping conversations and expectations about modern parenting.
For Chappell, being an entrepreneurial marketer isn’t just a mindset—it’s a muscle. As she told Forbes, “you have to train yourself to move in the moment without hesitation—with limited resources and often without a blueprint for success. If you don’t go do the work, it’s just another idea, what-if, or magic moment lost.”
One example of Chappell’s approach to advancing the conversations driving Bobbie’s growth, is when a Times Square billboard featuring culinary influencer Molly Baz, pregnant, in underwear, and holding lactation cookies over her breasts was removed for violating the billboard owner’s guidelines, Chappell and her team saw opportunity and moved to both seize and make the moment.
In only two weeks, Bobbie had Baz back on a Times Square billboard, this time breastfeeding her newborn—a cultural first—and apt illustration of Chappell’s entrepreneurial conviction that “not everything needs a quarter of planning to be on brand, bold and successful.”
Chappell tells Forbes that over the past year, Bobbie has become the fastest-growing brand in its category.
adidas
Daniel Cherry III
SVP & General Manager, adidas
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Because for Cherry, entrepreneurial marketing is about “always being in beta, and instead of fearing failure embracing it as critical feedback pushing ideas one step closer to thrilling the consumer.”
As Cherry helped lead the brand through the very public early-end of its controversial partnership with Kanye West his perspective on failure as feedback would make the difference. “We suffered a crisis of confidence and almost believed the hype,” he told Forbes. But rather than replacing the void left by the end of that partnership with another, Cherry thought and did differently, turning to adidas’ greatest asset—its archive—and creating “Originals LA.”
Intended as a new business unit not just a marketing approach, Cherry’s idea for moving the business forward looked backwards. By tapping the brand’s archives, Cherry and his team helped put adidas back at the center of sneaker culture, as evidenced by the near ubiquity of Sambas and Gazelles over the past year.
Cherry also built forward, championing new collaborations blending nostalgia with modernity, launching initiatives like the adidas Foundation, and restructuring creative workflows to give designers greater autonomy.
For the quarter ending December 2024, company revenues had increased nearly 24% YoY.
State Farm
Kristyn Cook
EVP and Chief Agency, Sales & Marketing Officer, State Farm
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Because in the crowded and complex insurance market, Cook leads marketing for this category leader with a conviction that it’s only by “taking the right calculated risks where you have opportunity to win big.”
Importantly though, the work Cook leads proves entrepreneurial marketing doesn’t always mean chasing reinvention for reinvention’s sake, Cook and her team are amplifying State Farm’s most powerful assets—its signature red, iconic jingle, and, of course, Jake from State Farm—by positioning them in high-profile, real-world moments that matter.
“Our goal is to stay nimble so we can jump in on trending cultural moments,” Cook told Forbes. As examples, the brand has been a first-mover in the category in Gaming, and when Donna Kelce became a cultural focal point, State Farm took advantage of the moment by placing Jake next to her at a game, amplifying brand I.P. and creating a clutter-breaking moment for the brand.
A 25-year company veteran, Cook oversees both marketing and sales. And in support of the 18,000 agents in its network, she and her team “always strive to be ‘market movers’ in any space in which we play.”
WNBA
Phil Cook
CMO, WNBA
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Because during an explosion in interest from fans and partners alike, Cook, the league’s first CMO, is ensuring the WNBA isn’t just riding a wave of growth but actively driving it.
Cook and his team are creating a new marketing playbook for the WNBA and its rising stars, during a time of unprecedented attention on women’s basketball.
While most leagues pay little attention to their players’ pasts once drafted,Cook and his team took a different strategic approach with their “Welcome to the W” campaign, as college stars including Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Cameron Brink segued from the NCAA to the WNBA. In leading efforts to bridge the players’ college and pro journeys, the campaign leaned heavily into the players’ college pasts, creating a narrative continuity helping grow the league’s fan-base on the players’ existing ones.
This, as well as a differentiated commitment to social impact, a heightened focus on dimensionalizing player narratives, and creating a 24/7 content hub for the league amongst other efforts, are driving unprecedented numbers for the WNBA.
Last year witnessed the largest rights deal in the league’s history, an aggregated $2.2B across ESPN, Amazon and NBCUniversal; sponsorship revenue and demand exploded, as attendance increased 48% and sellout games 242% YoY.
Coty
Stefano Curti
Chief Brands Officer, Coty
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Because with a determination to “make a large company small again,” Curti is ensuring leaner teams and faster decision-making help transform Coty into a nimbler player across the global beauty category.
As the leader of a transformation that’s revitalized brand icons like CoverGirl and Rimmel, Curti’s entrepreneurial approach is rooted in speed and connection. In order to mirror the approach of smaller and niche-beauty players, and nurture the brands’ internal “cool factor,” he and his team created an internal incubator, Agile Beauty, which operates like a startup within Coty. Since its inception, the incubator has developed trend-driven products in just eight months, an industry-best for a global beauty powerhouse. To these same ends, Curti and his team have built new advocacy and community programs, engaging influencers and beauty creators not only to amplify storytelling but to co-develop products.
With a remit spanning Europe, North America, and high-growth markets like India, Latin America, and the Middle East, Curti and his team are expanding Coty’s global footprint while leveraging its dominance in prestige fragrance—a category he calls “the skincare of the mind”—to drive future innovation and consumer engagement.
Coty reported 10% net revenue growth in 2024, outpacing the 9% global beauty market increase.
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Rakbank
Carmen DeRosas
EVP, Head of Marketing, Rakbank
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Because by challenging status quo and conventional industry norms, DeRosas is redefining what marketing is in the UAE’s financial services category, and helping lead the transformation of one of the oldest banking institutions in the country.
Since arriving at Rakbank, DeRosas tells Forbes she has “implemented a culture of continuous experimentation…that continues to challenge and improve our models,” evidence of which can be seen in a near 60% reduction in agency costs and 50% increase in asset turnaround times during her tenure.
Ensuring that marketing is a driver of the company’s innovation and transformation, has DeRosas and her team embracing a challenger brand ethos and shifting mindsets “from fear to exploration,” which she credits with helping drive “the step change we have created across all marketing disciplines, from transforming the way we show up, reshaping agency partnerships, launching campaigns that have elevated brand perception and performance, to delivering a 4x uplift in digital acquisition.”
With industry expertise honed during time at PayPal and American Express, DeRosas’s remit includes overseeing the Rakbank brand, its insurance technology platform Protego, and family finance app Skiply. Since getting to Rakbank, DeRosas and her team have driven a major shift in marketing’s role at the bank—and their enhanced brand focus has contributed to a 13-point increase in employee engagement, reinforcing her belief that a strong, people-first culture is key to sustained innovation and growth.
Rakbank had record-breaking financial performance last year, and a 16.4% increase in net profits YoY.
UGG
Carole Diarra
Global Vice President of Marketing, UGG
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Because the “vision to see beyond traditional strategies and the agility to act on them in ways that drive real impact” is helping Diarra fuel the iconic brand’s transformation from its comfort-first origins to a broader fashion and lifestyle business.
With a global remit, Diara and her team are redefining what UGG is, where it shows up, and how it connects with its audience. Under her marketing leadership, they’re doing this by focusing on a combination of “agile media thinking” that is inverting status-quo channel approaches, a media-mix strategy shift to social-first, real-time creative decision making, and liberating their marketing from the category’s traditional seasonal emphasis.
An illustration of the latter and Diarra’s enhanced emphasis on consumer-led innovation is the brand’s “UGG Season” platform which, as Diarra shared with Forbes, “didn’t start from us but from our community (including Cardi B)…we didn’t create the movement; we recognized and amplified it, letting culture lead our strategy.” This entrepreneurial approach, one untethered to the past, is also evident in UGG’s unexpected collaborations with Paris Fashion Week, and fashion-forward brands including Sacai and Telfar.
According to Piper Sandler’s just released Taking Stock with Teens Survey, UGG “tops teen fashion” gaining “the most mindshare among favorite footwear brands for all teens.”
A core part of the Deckers’ portfolio, for Q3FY25, the UGG brand reported +16.1% increase in net sales YoY.
Diageo
Cristina Diezhandino
CMO, Diageo
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Because Diezhandino’s marketing for Diageo’s 200 brands is rooted in a “mindset of possibility” and an approach that she told Forbes, values ”progress over perfection. It’s okay to fail as long as we learn.”
Despite category headwinds created by a changing world and consumer attitudes and behaviors, Diezhandino realizes that what doesn’t change is the need to stay “centered around celebrations, culture and memorable moments” and that this in turn requires her marketing organization to “understand—and shape the future of—socializing better than anyone else.”
To these ends, Diezhandino and her team have built a marketing organization thriving on “connected decisioning,” curiosity, agility, experimentation, reorganizing marketing into “agile brand communities” which allows them to better turn insight into action.
To accelerate the growth of $100+ (USD) brands, Diezhandino created the Diageo Luxury Group, uniting its luxury portfolio. To ensure her organization has the tools to act fast in evolving markets, Diezhandino spearheaded initiatives including a Virtual Studio “revolutionizing how we create content”, a global partnerships lab, and Diageo’s largest consumer data initiative.
With responsibility for marketing, innovation and digital transformation for the global portfolio, Diezhandino is thinking and doing differently to ensure Diageo’s place in socializing’s future.
Ancestry
Brian Donnelly
EVP, GM and Chief Commercial Officer, Ancestry
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Because Donnelly understands that “speed is a competitive advantage” and, as he tells Forbes, while “there’s a comfort in the ‘tried and true,’ challenging norms, experimenting fearlessly, and pivoting quickly, allows us to adapt and refine strategies in real-time.”
With P&L accountability for the 40-year-old genealogy brand’s global business operations, Donnelly’s remit includes oversight of marketing, growth, and business development across the 130 countries where they do business. Intent on “inspiring a culture of innovation across the business” Donnelly and his team identified a growth opportunity, creating a new market by leveraging their genetic testing expertise and applying it to the pet category for the first time.
Focused on driving growth by marketing and raising awareness “of the emotional, cultural and personal benefits that come from discovering your roots,” Donnelly and his team are pushing boundaries and experimenting with the new as they reshape Ancestry’s brand, commerce, and customer engagement.
Donnelly reports that brand health metrics are rising and that, in 2024, the company saw double-digit growth in DNA kit sales.
As of May 1, Donnelly will become the Chief Commercial Officer at Myriad Genetics.
Figs
Bené Eaton
CMO, Figs
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Because in leading marketing globally for this DTC healthcare brand, Eaton’s entrepreneurial approach balances boldness and precision, and as she told Forbes, “isn’t just about disrupting—but about building something meaningful and enduring.”
With a remit spanning 34 countries, Eaton and her team lean into the company’s entrepreneurial DNA to fuel their own. For Eaton, entrepreneurial marketing “isn’t just about growth (but) about redefining how a brand can impact people, culture and the world.” To these ends, and as one example, Eaton and her team led Figs to become Team USA’s official Medical Team Outfitter, creating a global stage and moment celebrating the community in a never-been-done-before way. She says the effort drove “significant incremental revenue…but more than the numbers, this campaign redefined how healthcare professionals are perceived.”
The LA fires, which devastated the company’s hometown, provide further illustration as Eaton and her team mobilized to quickly support over 1,500 displaced healthcare professionals. “This wasn’t just a crisis response—but testament to our entrepreneurial mindset: acting with urgency, empathy, and impact to show up for our community in moments that matter most.”
ServiceNow
Colin Fleming
CMO, ServiceNow
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Because with a “stubborn intolerance of mediocrity,” Fleming focuses, as he tells Forbes on “what could be, and refusing to be discouraged by the status quo.”
Insistent that “none of the Bs in ‘B2B’ should stand for boring,” Fleming and his team are proving that bold storytelling, culture-shaping campaigns, and a strong point of view will drive growth regardless of sector.
With a remit leading ServiceNow’s end-to-end global marketing, planning and operations, Fleming has evolved company strategy from product-led to brand-led. As he and his team seek “exponential thinking and big, bold ideas that break the mold,” they’ve rolled out the company’s most comprehensive global campaign ever, high-profile and perception shifting partnerships, and “Project Marie Kondo,” which led to cutting 50% of their content creation to ensure focus on what “sparks joy” for customers. “This simplification” he told us, “frees our teams to concentrate on impact and alignment rather than volume.”
For the 12 months ending as of the date of this writing, Service Now’s market capitalization was up 22%.
(Disclosure: One of the editors working on this list owns stock in ServiceNow.)
eBay
Adrian Fung
Global CMO, eBay
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Because Fung brings a “founder’s mentality” to the iconic ecommerce brand, focusing, as he told Forbes, on “treating every dollar like it’s your own, and finding scrappy ways to leverage existing assets, customers, partners.”
For Fung, a global remit for marketing a brand and multi-category business like eBay’s, with some 130 million customers and over 2.1 billion listings, requires an approach he defines as “learning fast rather than failing fast.” And in order to leverage learnings to drive innovation at scale, Fung recognizes the need “to balance speed and agility with the complexity and scale of eBay’s (business). To do this, we identify small but high leverage opportunities that can be quickly tested and iterated upon to optimize impact.”
One example: An initially small-scale test with Facebook Marketplace in Germany which enabled buyers to browse eBay listings directly on Marketplace, rolled out internationally.
Recognizing “this type of innovation can’t be achieved from marketing alone – and requires an end-to-end approach” finds Fung breaking down silos and challenging how problems are solved across the business.
As of this writing, eBay’s stock was up over 58% YoY.
General Catalyst
Arielle Gross Samuels
Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, General Catalyst
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Because with a global mandate across all marketing and communications, the former Blackstone CMO and 10-year Meta veteran, is looking to help redefine the company’s place in its category and is “building from zero to one.”
In a category-atypical approach, Gross Samuels is using what she tells Forbes is “surround-sound, cross-channel storytelling as a strategic commercial lever.” To help lead the brand beyond its venture capital origins to that of a global investment and transformation company, Samuels and her team launched “Venture Beyond”, not just a campaign but an invitation to their ecosystem of founders, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. She credits the launch with “invigorating our ecosystem and expanding what’s possible. “
For the year ahead, among other things, Gross Samuels and her team are focused on “unveiling new strategic brand partnerships with major platforms, revitalizing our social strategy with franchised branded series, and convening first-of-their-kind forums to catalyze our community—all in service to ecosystem transformation.”
By ensuring “we play our own game and operate as a category of one,” Gross Samuels and her team are continuing to help redefine what people know of and expect from General Catalyst.
Novartis
Gail Horwood
Chief Marketing & Customer Experience Officer, Novartis
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Because Horwood doesn’t see constraint in the pharmaceutical category’s deeply regulated environment but a catalyst for integrating “now and next practices” redefining how the company markets to drive impact.
To better connect with their multiple constituencies, Horwood and her team have championed and facilitated the “creative and innovative;” building Novartis’ Innovation and Content Labs, and establishing its Media Center of Excellence, leading them to explore non-traditional category channels and audiences. They’ve turned to gaming as a way to educate healthcare professionals and “set new standards for audience engagement in the pharma industry.”
And while in many categories a Super Bowl ad is no proof of the entrepreneurial, in January, Horwood and her team broke company and category conventions with a campaign to raise awareness and drive screenings for breast cancer. The ad’s creative was bold by any measure, especially within the context of pharma, and is a case study proving that any category’s work can be emotionally resonant.
As Horwood told Forbes, “we didn’t want to just show up; we wanted people to receive the message and take action.” A subsequent announcement of a broader partnership with the NFL “merges the power of sports, culture, and health advocacy in a way that has never been done before.”
As of their Q4 reporting, Novartis’s stock was up over 15% YoY.
Kellanova
Charisse Hughes
Chief Growth Officer, Kellanova
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Because Hughes is proving that legacy CPG brands can lead cultural conversations—and drive growth while doing it.
Since joining Kellanova (formerly Kellogg Company), Hughes has transformed the company’s marketing approach, leaning into bold, unconventional collaborations and innovations that extend beyond the company’s broad portfolio of household names, including Kellogg’s Pringles, and Cheez-Its, themselves.
As Hughes told Forbes, “in an era where traditional marketing strategies aren’t enough, we have embraced unconventional, culturally resonant collaborations that push boundaries…(and) elevate our brands beyond transactional products to cultural icons.”
To these ends, one example of the work Hughes and her team have done is the collaboration between Crocs and Pringles, which went beyond a mere licensing deal in order to create mutually inspired products for both brands. This included the insta-worthy Pringles-inspired slides and the Crush Boot which sold out in under two hours, driving earned media in publications like GQ, not typically known for paying attention to pantry brands.
In August, Mars, Inc. offered to acquire Kellanova for $36 billion. If it closes, this will be the largest CPG deal in over a decade. As of this writing, the company’s stock is up over 51% YoY.
Lucky Saint
Kerttu Inkeroinen
Marketing and E-commerce Director, Lucky Saint
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Because Inkeroinen leads marketing for this six-year-old UK-based alcohol-free beer brand with a “Break Rules, Honor Traditions” mantra, which she says, “allows us to challenge category norms while respecting beer culture.”
Despite having only a fraction of the marketing budget of her multinational competitors, Inkeroinen “approaches every decision with big budget energy,” telling Forbes she “sees opportunities where others see limitations and with the resilience—what we call sisu in Finnish—to push through.”
And while some may consider process and entrepreneurial agility to be opposed, Inkeroinen doesn’t considering “a well-structured framework what enables fast, efficient scaling.” To these ends, she and her team introduced a cross-functional “gate process” to ensure rapid execution without quality compromises, and built a proprietary digital platform to, among other things, drive pint giveaways in pubs, an in-house innovation that she credits with “removing cost barriers and unlocking new distribution opportunities.”
Inkeroinen leads marketing, communications, innovation, and e-commerce for the brand across the U.K., and as it expands into Ireland and the Netherlands.
Her entrepreneurial approach has helped Lucky Saint become what she says is the most loved and most Googled alcohol-free beer in the U.K.
7-Eleven
Marissa Jarratt
EVP, Chief Marketing & Sustainability Officer, 7-Eleven
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Because for Jarratt “acting like an entrepreneur is a cornerstone of how I lead and inspire my team,” an approach driving how she has built the marketing organization for this global retail giant.
Focused on ensuring 7-Eleven doesn’t just keep pace with cultural and consumer shifts but actively drives them while navigating market volatility and new resource constraints, Jarratt emphasizes agility, creativity, and resilience.
With broad responsibilities in the U.S. and Canada across marketing, corporate communications, and sustainability, Jarratt and her teams navigated “over 220 reputation-critical issues, implementing a three-tier crisis management strategy,” introduced “Big Bite Hot Dog-Flavored Sparkling Water” on April Fool’s Day to recruit Gen Z customers and publicize the launch of their private label sparkling water brand. The creatively dissonant effort drove a nearly 10% month-over-month increase in store brand sales and a 12% increase across the category; expanded 7-Eleven’s in-house creative agency, producing campaigns faster and cheaper, all while also reducing plastic bag usage by 37%.
Jarratt is intent on “steering the brand out of a challenging 2024” and will continue enhancing the retailer’s “ability to adapt and innovate, even in a resource-constrained environment.
Polaroid
Nicolas Kettelhake
CMO, Polaroid
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Because in a digital world saturated with “perfect” images, Kettelhake is reinvigorating an 80-year-old analog brand, making what’s old new again by proving that imperfection sells.
Kettelhake and his team market by counterprogramming and leaning away from—rather than into—digital cultural trends. Because Polaroid images can’t be retouched, Kettelhake and his team have delivered what he described to Forbes as “a counter to digitized, altered, ‘perfect’ photography, because Polaroid is one of one, and inherently imperfect due to the chemical development process.”
Kettelhake ensures the brand’s claim to a positioning rooted in the tactile and imperfect not only drives communication but product innovation. To make a statement against the endlessly replicable nature of digital images, he and his team have elevated the craft of instant photography by appealing to high-end professional photographers, invited digitally-native consumers into the brand by becoming part of sub-cultures, and created a new membership program.
By zigging while culture zags, Kettelhake’s integrated, multi-channel and cohort approach has sold-out both new products and film, and driven YoY double digit sell-through increase across the full business.
Kettelhake left Polaroid as of April 1st.
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Vans
Drieke Leenknegt
CMO, Vans
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Because Leenknegt understands that in the ever-changing consumer landscape, today’s “marketing isn’t about incremental change—it’s about transformation.”
Despite its globally iconic brand status, Leenknegt inherited a business facing years of declining revenue and a turnaround imperative. Her entrepreneurial approach to marketing has helped reverse Vans’ decline and position it for long-term growth.
Since joining two years ago, Leenknegt has restructured the company’s global marketing team, going beyond necessary surface-level adjustments to deep, strategic reinvention that is connecting dots across marketing, product, and commerce. All of this is driving what she tells Forbes is “agility, alignment, and profitability, ensuring innovation is more than just an idea.”
Leenknegt and her team are embracing and deploying an “always on marketing model…that balances reinvention with authenticity.” Illustration is found in their creation and launch of a new pinnacle segment, OTW by Vans, at Paris Fashion Week. Describing this as both a product and cultural innovation, Leenknegt credits the innovation with fueling extraordinary sell-through and, as being but one effort that is helping restore brand momentum.
While numbers for the VF Corp-owned brand are off the record, Leenknegt reports a return to growth and that brand and business have turned around.
Writer
Diego Lomanto
CMO, Writer
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Because without the tens of billions of dollars raised by competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic, Lomanto leads marketing for this startup generative AI enterprise solution certain that “winning in AI isn’t just about who builds the best model, but about who owns the conversation.”
Given relative resource constraints, Lomanto and his team approach owning the AI conversation by ensuring Writer is, as he told Forbes, “impossible to ignore to the folks we wanted to have a conversation with…that wherever AI decision-makers looked, they saw Writer, setting us apart in a highly competitive, scrutinizing and often hesitant market.”
The brand’s outsized presence on stage, in headlines, and on billboards along Silicon Valley’s busiest highways was just one part of its scrappy reach and frequency strategy. Certain that “the entrepreneurial marketer knows the best marketing comes from customers who can’t stop talking about their ROI,” Lomanto created a program targeting analysts, a.k.a. the influencers of the AI category, marketing the brand as an ROI catalyst and movement, turning “our biggest successes—for companies like Salesforce and Uber—into our biggest marketing assets.”
At the end of 2024, the company raised an additional $200 million, increasing its valuation to $1.9 billion.
Crayola
Victoria Lozano
EVP and CMO, Crayola
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Because despite Crayola’s dominant market share, Lozano pushes the business to think and market like a challenger, redefining not just what Crayola sells, but repositioning the brand and business by repositioning creativity itself.
Lozano and her team are redefining how the company creates commercial value. As she told Forbes, “Crayola is a bigger brand than business,” and in order to capitalize on the former and overcome the latter, she and her team are shifting long-held but limiting parental perceptions about Crayola as just an arts-and-crafts brand by marketing “beyond the crayon,” embedding the brand deeper into family routines and educational systems.
To these ends, Lozano launched Campaign for Creativity, an advocacy movement reframing creativity—and Crayola’s role in it—as a critical life skill; and built Crayola Studios, a content development and production division that creates programming across genres for kids and their parents. The studio already has some dozen partnerships, including those with parent company Hallmark, a BBC Kids partnership, and a brand partnership with audiobook platform Audible.
Lozano’s entrepreneurial approach is reframing the brand, its scope, and creating new sources of revenue.
Ennismore
Martina Luger
Chief Brand & Culture Officer, Ennismore
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Because as Luger leads marketing for this, U.K.-based hospitality enterprise, she’s rejecting the category’s traditional price-based segmentation, instead deploying a narrative-driven model to position and differentiate the company’s brands.
With a portfolio including The Mondrian, Hoxton, and SLS brands, Luger and her team focus on disruptive lifestyle strategies rooted in her conviction that safe ground never leads to innovation. As she told Forbes, the entrepreneurial marketer has to have “the courage to stand on the edge of a cliff, because only at the edge do you get the most amazing views.”
Luger and her team are “making the statement that our hotels are more than just transactional decisions,” an approach exemplified by Ennismore’s “game-changing” loyalty program, “Dis-loyalty.” With no points, tiers, or blackout dates, members get 20% off first-time stays, and 10% off return visits.
“Traditional loyalty models reward people for sticking to the familiar,” Luger shared. “We wanted to flip that idea on its head.” Moves like these are part of what’s driving growth across her global remit for marketing 17 brands, and over 170 hotels in more than 35 countries with another 120+ in the pipeline.
Braze
Astha Malik
Chief Business and Marketing Officer, Braze
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Because, certain “there has never been a better time to be a better marketer,” Malik is unconstrained by the tried-and-true and untethered to industry standards and expectations.
With a broad remit across this SaaS platform’s corporate strategy, global expansion, and growth initiatives redefining how brands connect with their audiences—and how Braze connects with its clients, Malik encourages innovation, as she told Forbes, by ensuring her teams are “comfortable with failure—because it’s not final.”
Malik and her team created the company’s Innovation Lab, 427°, a consulting initiative providing clients agency-like services during and post-sales, helping them rethink customer connections at scale,, because Malik believes “the best marketing doesn’t just drive pipeline, it builds enduring and valuable relationships.” The Lab, but one illustration of her entrepreneurial approach in action, has “accelerated sales cycles, improved satisfaction, and set us apart.”
Malik remains intent on challenging assumptions about the CMO role, ensuring marketing always has a seat at the board table, “challenging everyday actions and standing out when others may prefer to just fit in.”
For Q4 25, the company reported YoY revenue growth of 22%.
NewYork-Presbyterian
Devika Mathrani
Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, NewYork-Presbyterian
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Because in an increasingly competitive landscape, Mathrani is “shaping the future of healthcare and changing the conversation in the category” for one of the nation’s top 10 healthcare systems, by bringing unconventional strategies to a category not known for innovation.
Mathrani and her team are challenged not just by their competitors but also a glut of healthcare disinformation: “Alongside the rise of (public health) misinformation, we recognized the need to inform and empower consumers,” Mathrani told Forbes. So they launched a newsroom operation to “publish trusted information—helping people navigate their health proactively and reactively.”
When New York City faced a critical blood-supply shortage, Mathrani and her team drove essential donations by turning donations into a limited-edition product drop, applying a scarcity marketing model common in footwear but not in healthcare.
Partnering with renowned pastry chef Dominique Ansel, creator of the Cronut, donating blood became the only way to get Ansel’s “3 Lives Bar.” Thinking and acting outside category norms led to a 25,000% (not a typo) increase in traffic to the donation site, and a 40% increase in donations.
Taylor Morrison
Stephanie McCarty
Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Taylor Morrison
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Because McCarty is challenging home-building category norms, transforming a traditionally rigid and slow-moving process to fundamentally reshape how buyers navigate one of the most significant purchases of their lives.
With oversight of marketing for one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, McCarty told Forbes she is intent “not just on adapting to change but driving it, ensuring our marketing plays a critical role in our growth and shaping the future of the industry.”
McCarty and her team have led the company to create a fully digital shopping experience, an “unheard of” first for the homebuilding category. As she told Forbes, this consumer-centric innovation drove meaningfully higher conversion rates, exponentially reduced cancellations, and increased revenue.
McCarty, whose remit includes overseeing marketing and consumer engagement across 21 markets, has also redefined how homebuilders connect with consumers, turning social media from a branding tool into a direct revenue driver, another category first.
Despite an environment marked by significantly higher interest rates, as of this writing, the company’s stock was up over 7% YoY.
Cracker Barrel Old Country Store
Sarah Moore
CMO, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store
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Because as Moore leads marketing for the culturally iconic restaurant chain, she does so with the conviction that entrepreneurial marketing “is not just the high-stakes journey of a disruptive startup—but about leading transformation when the odds are against you—when competition is fierce, behaviors are shifting, and a brand must evolve or fade.”
With oversight of all marketing for the chain’s 660+ locations, including brand, culinary menu architecture, and pricing strategy, Moore and her team are driven by “bucking category norms…and the relentless pursuit of discomfort.”
As rising egg prices became their own source of discomfort for customers nationally, Moore told Forbes that she and her team flipped the competitive script and, “instead of raising prices (like competitors), we launched a rewards promotion where members earned extra for egg-based dishes.” She credits the simple and counterintuitive move with driving higher guest frequency and spend — and adding 6 million new loyalty program members in just year one.
Modernizing a brand that is literally rooted in the “old” is no small challenge. But Moore’s take on being an entrepreneurial CMO “isn’t just about building something new. It’s also about reinventing, reimaging, and revitalizing something that already exists.”
Universal Pictures
Michael Moses
CMO, Universal Pictures
Because in a landscape where “all the content in the world is the push of a button away,” Moses markets with the acute awareness that “launching every film is akin to launching a new business…every few weeks.”
Over the past year, Moses, who has been with Universal for 25 years (seven as global CMO), oversaw marketing for a portfolio including Wicked, The Substance, The Fall Guy, and as he told Forbes, always with a “healthily skeptical eye on data because its proliferation is an alluring siren call that risks narrowcasting the audience and making all our approaches homogenized.”
For “Twisters,” overcoming this temptation meant tapping into an overlooked heartland audience through country music partnerships and broadening the film’s appeal without alienating traditional moviegoers. For “The Wild Robot,” Moses and his team took a slow-burn strategy—festival screenings, a dialogue-free trailer—helping make it 2024’s top original animated title, all while also making “Wicked” a ubiquitous cultural presence.
In 2024, Universal led the domestic box-office, suprassing $1.9 billion in ticket sales and securing four of the year’s top 10 highest-gorssing films.
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Tubi
Nicole Parlapiano
CMO, Tubi
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Because in leading marketing globally for this FOX-owned ad-supported streamer, Parlapiano is “stripping fear from the equation and leaning into risk (to) drive business growth.”
Parlapiano favors audacity, telling Forbes that she looks for “marketers who have dangerous ideas” and prefers to risk failure than miss an opportunity. “It’s better to throw your hat in the ring than to wait for perfection.”
Along with a broad remit to grow Tubi’s brand and audience, Parlapiano works closely with the streamer’s B2B team to demonstrate how valuable Tubi’s viewers are to advertisers.
Her creatively dissonant “Tubi Is More Popular Than” campaign did just this, reframing both brand and business. Parlapiano and her team also launched Stubios, a “first-to-market product” for aspiring filmmakers and their fans, that gives the camera to “anyone who has a story and puts the power to greenlight in the hands of the viewer.” The first class of Stubio projects goes live later this year.
Over the past year, Tubi has seen monthly-average-user growth of 23% YoY.
GeoBlue
Lynn Pina
CMO, GeoBlue
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Because Pina drives marketing for this travel medical insurance brand with what she describes as an “owner’s mindset.” As she told Forbes, “When you see yourself as an employee only, you can be passive, complacent, and easily defeated. With an owner’s mindset, I’m relentless about finding solutions and creative approaches to achieve the desired outcome.”
For Pina, whose remit includes Marketing, Product and Customer Experience, driving growth with an entrepreneurial marketing approach is about “striking the right balance between building and breaking,” a perspective that has served Pina and the company well in its highly regulated category over the past year in particular.
In just six months—rather than the usual 18-24—Pina and her team led the creation and launch of a new product and partnership, Globaline, which significantly expanded the GeoBlue’s portfolio and market reach. Doing so required Pina and her team to challenge assumptions, break down barriers, and build from scratch, all while working across two companies with two different cultures and competing priorities.
Pina reports that the product launch reached 80% of its first-year goal within just six months.
Church & Dwight
Surhabi Pokhriyal
EVP, Chief Digital Growth Officer, Church & Dwight
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Because as digital has become 70% of the 186-year-old CPG company’s media mix, Pokhriyal works to “scale fast and scrap fast” in a landscape where “many new shiny things come and fizzle often.”
For brands including household names like Arm & Hammer, Trojan, and Waterpic, Pokhriyal tells Forbes that, over the past year, she and her teams have “started using social as the ‘third shelf,’” partnering with some 4000 influencers to create “a virtuous cycle for social engagement that drives online and in-store sales.” This, along with ensuring there is “no-dead-end media and that over 90% of our media is shoppable, is how our teams truly scale fast and scrap fast when needed.”
Knowing that today’s status quo can be disrupted in an instant, she and her team “keep raising the bar with readiness, not just for the here and now, but for tomorrow.” Pokhriyal credits this approach—and a “healthy sense of paranoia”—with helping drive ecommerce growth that she claims outpaces other CPG brands.
In the last year, Church & Dwight’s revenue growth surpassed its outlook and, according to sources, outperformed its competitors.
Citadel
Amanda Rubin
CMO, Citadel
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Because, since joining the world’s most profitable hedge fund, Rubin is redefining what marketing means and does in a firm and industry that has long operated behind closed doors.
As Rubin told Forbes, entrepreneurial marketing “requires not only showing others what needs to be done, but more importantly, what else is possible, even when it deviates from the status quo.” Until Rubin, Citadel’s marketing status quo relied largely on earned media–driven awareness of the firm’s financial acumen, with little time given to its brand or that of its founder, Ken Griffin.
Facing “a fierce war for talent and very public scrutiny,” Rubin built Citadel’s marketing function from the ground up to better position the company—and Griffin’s philanthropic efforts—among what she describes as a “complex ecosystem of audiences, from talent to commercial clients, regulators and policy-makers…none of their journeys are linear, and their perceptions have enduring impact on our commercial success.”
By actively building a marketing narrative, making visible what had historically been opaque, and deploying a multifaceted content strategy across dozens of new touchpoints and channels, Rubin and her team have helped drive a 50% YoY increase in talent applications, while concurrently tripling awareness of Griffin’s philanthropic initiatives.
Oatly
John Schoolcraft
Chief Creative Officer, Oatly
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Because Schoolcraft conceived and built a new-model approach to creating a category and driving growth for this oat-milk brand and company.
Schoolcraft takes pains to make clear he is not a CMO and that Oatly doesn’t have a marketing department “at all,” but a creative one, something he made a stipulation for joining the company in 2012. As he told Forbes, “Marketing departments are filters, and it is always better to work with makers and problem solvers and not approvers.”
This perspective led Schoolcraft to build the “Oatly Department of Mind Control” (ODMC), which he describes as a team of creative problem solvers,” instead of a traditional marketing organization. “The ODMC doesn’t solve isolated marketing or brand problems,” he told Forbes. “We understand everything is tied together, so [we] look to solve business problems…[sitting] in on meetings from innovation to finance gives the creative department ownership and understanding of the business, which turns all of us into entrepreneurs.”
While one might argue with his definitions, Schoolcraft’s approach is working. Despite slowing growth in the plant-based food category globally, 12+ years in, Oatly continues to see double-digit sales increases YoY.
Meta
Alex Schultz
VP Analytics and CMO, Meta
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Because with an unusually broad remit for a CMO, including global oversight of all analytics and business, public affairs, brand and direct response consumer marketing across Meta and its brand portfolio, the analytics driven Schultz marries the quantitative and qualitative, helping disrupt and reinvent how the company drives business outcomes.
While WhatsApp is dominant outside the U.S., in the U.S., it remains a challenger brand. Recognizing that the biggest brand-unlock for the messaging app would be initially product-driven, not marketing-driven, Schultz and his team “deployed product changes to make sharing to WhatsApp easier” before launching the brand’s largest U.S. campaign to date. This effort, “direct response ads using our platforms and others…bent the curve on topline growth.”
Identifying an internal lag time stifling growth of the company’s burgeoning live-shopping ad business (customers wanted to boost ad spends but the internal ad-review period “meant the live video would be over by the time we approved the ads”), Schultz and his team brought the idea and insight needed to help the product team reimagine the ad-review process, leading to what he tells Forbes is “explosive growth of live shopping with business messaging.”
At the end of 2024, Meta reported a YoY revenue increase of 21.94%.
(Disclosure: One of the editors working on this list owns stock in Meta.)
PayPal
Geoff Seeley
CMO, PayPal
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Because as PayPal’s business evolves, Seeley is helping drive “a new approach to product-led marketing that spins our consumer and merchant flywheel even faster.”
Seeley’s role as marketing leader is to help conceive and realize new product innovation and take these products to market across their 450 million customers, 35 million merchants, 200 markets, B2B and B2C, and family of brands, including its eponymous one, Venmo and Honey.
In his first year since joining as Global CMO, Seeley drove what he describes as “one of the most significant strategic and executional transformations in our history…revolutionizing global commerce again,” Seeley and his team are “working back from (our) customers to create the next innovations.”
Evidence of this —and Seeley’s intent to catalyze growth by changing how people think about and use the company’s products—is seen in the launch of PayPal’s largest-ever program, “Everywhere;” its partnerships with Apple Wallet and others; and in how he and his team are capitalizing on Venmo’s becoming a verb, “subvert(ing) that soundbite to introduce people to a much wider world of Venmo.”
As of this writing, the company’s stock is up more than 18% YoY.
Depop
Peter Semple
CMO, Depop
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Because Semple “thinks of our brand, our experience, and our proposition as ‘Always WIP’…obsessing about the context in which we operate and reflecting on how we might react. Our conviction to act is the entrepreneurial mindset in action.”
With a remit for the Etsy-owned marketplace that includes oversight for brand marketing and communications, merchandising, media, seller growth, and an in-house creative studio, Semple tells Forbes he is “consistently iterating on the brand we present to the world, and the combination of channels and messages we leverage to bring that brand into peoples’ lives.”
Focused on audience expansion, brand differentiation, and market share growth in the U.S. and Australia, Semple and his team are unafraid to broaden the brand’s platform and appeal beyond their traditional core demographic.
Illustrations of their entrepreneurial approach in action includes expanding Depop’s advocacy programs across 100 U.S. college campuses, cultivating a new generation of engaged brand ambassadors, and, also in the US, removing seller fees in order to further differentiate the brand and business, lowering barriers to entry, and leading to material YoY market share growth.
In March, Semple was named the company’s interim CEO.
Zip
Jinal Shah
Chief Customer and Marketing Officer, Zip
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Because Shah is driving growth for the buy-now-pay-later platform by “challenging assumptions, moving with urgency, and transforming constraints into advantages.”
Having led the company through multiple strategic evolutions since joining in 2021, Shah and her team are now stewarding Zip through what she describes as its hyper-growth phase with a certainty that “opportunity is created, not waited for.”
Focused on “rewriting how people experience financial empowerment,” in the crowded and regulated industry, Shah and her organization are “embedding payment flexibility into everyday passions,” including NASCAR, MLB, and concerts. To decrease the brand’s reliance on search networks, Shah and her team built Commerce Media, a proprietary and brand-direct model, turning a profitability experiment into a fully independent business unit. Shah has also reframed customer experience, typically an “afterthought in fintech,” into a competitive differentiator and, as she told us, “from an operations cost center to a brand accelerator.”
Recognizing that “entrepreneurship is about building teams that can scale the mission,” in the past year, she and her teams helped Zip realize a 45% revenue increase YoY.
Loewe
Charlie Smith
Chief Marketing and Communication Officer, Loewe
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Because Smith is “pushing the boundaries of luxury fashion communication and perhaps even brand communication in general” for the LVMH-owned brand.
In a category long reliant on exclusivity, polish, and reverence, Smith and his team are rewriting the rules—and the brand’s renown—by taking LOEWE in an unexpected direction: one where irreverence, lo-fi aesthetics, and surprising collaborations challenge convention and category constructs.
For Smith and his team, challenging the status quo is rooted in what he told Forbes is their “collective willingness to embrace failure, enabling us to push boundaries.” Over the past year, Smith’s How to Pronounce LOEWE campaign “tackled head-on that many don’t know how to pronounce our name, something other brands might have shied away from.” He and his team turned a might-have-been-traditional celebrity campaign with Daniel Craig into subversive storytelling, creating “a fresh context and a lot of conversation.” Similarly, LOEWE’s Suna Fujita collaboration reimagined the Japanese ceramic studio’s whimsical figures as an animated universe, pop-ups, and a children’s book, blending artistry with commerce in an entirely new way.
Despite a challenging period for many luxury labels, in October, reports indicated LOEWE’s sales had increased 27.5% YoY.
In March, long-time Creative Director Jonathan Anderson left the label, and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez were appointed.
Therabody
John Solomon
CMO, Therabody
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Because as Solomon leads global marketing for this wellness pioneer, “the biggest breakthroughs haven’t come from rigid planning; they’ve emerged from a willingness to seize unplanned, unbudgeted opportunities driving real consumer connection.”
The private-equity backed company is expanding into new verticals, markets, and audiences without a commensurate expansion in marketing resources, but Solomon and his team have, as he told Forbes,“proved that speed and ingenuity can outpace size and budget constraints.”
By leaning into other brands’ reach to supplement their own, Solomon and his team forged relationships with Sephora, developing a co-branded product that led to a 50% increase in the vertical YoY; partnered with United Airlines to drive trial in their lounges; and, when faced with the challenge of excess inventory, partnered with Hollywood and sports powerhouse CAA to “turn a potential problem into an opportunity” by executing name, image and likeness deals with tier 1 college football programs “to ensure Therabody was in the hands of the next generation of elite athletes—who eagerly shared their experience on social media.”
Despite a flat marketing budget, Solomon reports their core wellness category grew 40% YoY.
Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
Marc Speichert
Chief Commercial Officer, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
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Because Speichert, who is the first to have this title and combination of B2B and B2C responsibilities in the iconic brand’s corporate history, is reimagining where the brand plays and how commercial returns are driven.
Recognizing that organizational structure either facilitates or limits growth, over the past year, Speichert has integrated teams once operating separately, telling Forbes he has optimized “end-to-end strategy and execution,” reimagining corporate structure with “mirror organizations…embedding subject matter experts within regions, allowing them to drive local agendas with autonomy, agility, and greater self-sufficiency.”
To drive growth and innovate at scale, Speichert and his team are taking the brand, long synonymous with hotel luxury, into new businesses and categories. This includes launching the first branded yacht voyage in January, which he describes as “creating something entirely new that challenges industry norms.” At the same time, the brand’s ongoing relationship with HBO’s The White Lotus was credited by Wallpaper as “achieving something few luxury brands manage: catapulting into mainstream awareness while maintaining exclusivity.”
Speichert tells Forbes that these efforts and others are not only identifying and commercializing untapped “white space,” but also leading the privately owned company to record-breaking performance.
Domino’s
Kate Trumbull
EVP, Global CMO, Domino’s
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Because, over the past year, in a category challenged by macroeconomics and constrained consumer spending, Trumbull markets the iconic QSR brand so as to “get speeding tickets, not parking tickets.”
Trumbull leads marketing for the brand and its 20,000 franchisees with an action-first approach, believing “people will like you for what you say, but they’ll love you for what you do.” For Trumbull and her team, brand actions are redefining “value-driven initiatives beyond price [to] break through the sea of the same offers” that have historically driven the category by “turning consumer value into talk value.”
Efforts have included countering shrinkflation with MOREflation, reimagining a traditional buy-one-get-one offer as a brand equity moment with their Emergency Pizza 2.0 campaign, and turning a basic $3 coupon on its head with their You Tip, We Tip driver-appreciation effort.
With oversight of Domino’s marketing, product innovation, strategic partnerships, and national sales in over 90 global markets, Trumbull’s approach is bucking headwinds: Domino’s has posted three consecutive quarters of U.S. same-store sales and order growth.
As of this writing, the company’s stock is up over 6% YoY.
Infosys
Sumit Virmani
CMO, Infosys
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Because, as he leads global marketing for the India-based IT services company, Virmani “values the entrepreneurial attitude over mere skills, celebrating risk-taking, experimentation and recognizing excellence through failures that teach, not just successes.”
Despite competing against global companies that are better resourced and funded, it’s this approach to marketing that is driving how Virmani and his team create differentiated and deeper connections to the brand as a short-term and long-term growth lever.
Evidence of the approach in action includes Infosys’s move into sonic branding, a strategy more typical for B2C marketers than B2B, where brand identity is typically limited to the visual. Certain that “B2B clients (also) value an emotive connection and there’s no reason for B2B to appeal only to the visual sense,” Virmani and his team launched of The Sound of Opportunity—a sonic signature, which was played more than 5 million times in its first six months.
As AI continues shaping and reshaping the marketing landscape, Virmani is determined to ensure Infosys helps lead the way for its clients and prospective ones by investing “deeply” in its brand. Over the past five years, and according to Brand Finance, Infosys’s brand value has increased by 15% YoY, and is the fastest-growing IT Services brand over the last 5 years.
Paramount Pictures
Marc Weinstock
President of Worldwide Marketing and Distribution, Paramount Pictures
Because Weinstock markets the studio’s slate of films with the understanding that in today’s rapidly changing content landscape, a “think-different mindset is crucial. If you can’t think outside the box and blaze a new trail, you’ll simply fall flat.”
Over the past year, for films and sequels including Sonic the Hedgehog 3, A Quiet Place: Day One, and Gladiator 2, Weinstock and his team were responsible not just for “creating or re-creating a brand from the ground up nearly every four weeks” as he told Forbes, but, more relevantly, for leading the studio to five #1 domestic openings and three franchise-best sequel performances, despite sequels typically underperforming the originals.
For Weinstock, success requires overcoming not just the competition but audience inertia and the urge to stay home. This makes marketing innovation mission critical, leading Weinstock and his team to work “with key platforms in ways no one’s ever done”—such as partnering with Snapchat to “reach every one of their users at once,” and a Mission Impossible interstitial starring Tom Cruise in this year’s Super Bowl.
In the midst of its parent company’s reorganizations and sale process, in 2024, Paramount’s filmed entertainment division revenues increased 67% YoY.
Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority
Kate Wik
CMO, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority
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Because when a brand is as defined in the public consciousness as Las Vegas, expanding perceptions required Wik to reinvent the traditional destination marketing playbook.
To market and sell Vegas globally in, as Wik told Forbes, “an increasingly noisy world, with an abundance of competition in every category,” Wik and her tea, broke through by thinking entrepreneurially, expanding on the city’s entertainment roots by focusing on two marquee events, Super Bowl LXII and Formula 1.
Going beyond traditional sponsorship model, Wik “challenged my teams and my partnerships with the NFL and Formula 1 to leverage their spotlights as a year-round marketing platform.” By thinking beyond the traditional window, she and her team helped reset the rules of destination marketing.
“My product is Las Vegas,” Wik told Forbes, and the results of her repositioning it as “The Sports and Entertainment Capital of the World” are measured in broadened perceptions—and in billions of dollars in direct revenues.
Zegna
Edoardo Zegna
Chief Marketing , Digital, and Sustainability Officer, Zegna
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Because in a marketing landscape evolving at warp speed, this fourth-generation leader of the Italian brand’s founding family sticks to his goal:, “to make Zegna the slowest company in the world.”
“To build a product that lasts forever, you have to be slow, told Forbes. “Patience and time are indispensable ingredients to create a timeless brand.” This perspective finds the brand’s marketing not disrupting category convention so much as ignoring it.
Describing his role at the 115-year-old company not by his multi-hyphenate remit but as “the custodian of Zegna feelings,” he is all but singularly focused on giving space—often literal—to stories and the emotions they engender. He and his team launched, among other platforms, Villa Zegna, a private-club pop-up bringing the brand’s heritage to life in key markets globally; they also turned a children’s book about the company’s origins into a week-long immersive experience in Milan, the first Zenga event with no clothes in it.
Next, they are creating Oasi Zegna (a Zegna Oasis) destinations around the world, as places to be slow and as metaphor for ZEGNA’s commitment to sustainability, craftsmanship, and lasting impact.
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For a qualitative look inside the 2025 Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 list, take a look at our “By The Numbers” companion piece.
