Welcome new readers. Welp. There are a lot of you. I don’t know what happened this week, but I swear it’s because I opened a LinkedIn post with a sentence ending in “is fucking hard.”

That tells me something about the amount of vapid, LLM-amped garbage filling our feeds on that platform. Apparently, sounding like a person now counts as differentiation.

At least now the fucking growth strategy is clear.

This week we offer three CMO moves, three companies trying to grow without damaging what already makes the business work.

As usual, each hire is a confession: Aura knows fear can acquire customers and exhaust them. GM knows its product strategy is moving faster than its positioning. Masco believes value is trapped inside individual businesses, but extracting it could create another corporate layer. The CMO gets the contradiction.

Before we get into these appointments, here's a quick snapshot of the wider CMO hiring.

July saw 41 CMO appointments worldwide, split almost evenly between 20 women and 21 men. Of those, 11 were internal promotions, while 30 firms looked outside their own ranks to fill the role. More than half of the new CMOs - 22 in total - are taking on the top marketing job for the first time. Cross-industry moves are relatively uncommon, with just 5 appointments going to what we like to call "industry travellers".

In the U.S., 24 CMOs were appointed across 14 states. New York and California led the way with 4 hires each, followed by Michigan and Massachusetts with 3 apiece. Elsewhere, India had a particularly active month, announcing 5 new CMO appointments. England and France each recorded 2, while Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Australia and Iraq each welcomed one new CMO.

Aura hired Steven Tristan Young to make digital safety feel urgent enough to buy and quiet enough to keep.

Aura is a family digital-safety subscription. You give it the information you want protected, including identity, finances, devices and children, and it monitors for threats while helping reduce exposure. Parents are dealing with scams, predators, cyberbullying and the mental health effects of always-on screens. Older relatives are even more exposed. AI makes all of it worse, of course.

Most people know they are vulnerable, but very few want to become part-time security analysts.

Young starts with the message. At Grubhub, the company had the product, design and growth mechanics in place, but adoption stalled while marketing listed features. The breakthrough came when the message connected online food ordering to behavior people already understood: you buy flights and cinema tickets online, so why phone a restaurant?

Aura has the reverse problem. People understand the danger. They would rather stop thinking about it.

Young’s proposed message is stronger than another warning about hackers and stolen identities: here is how you get to stop worrying.

That matters in a category crowded with blue logos, solemn promises and dashboards that look suspiciously similar to the threats they claim to prevent. Borrowing the visual language of banks may communicate seriousness. It also drops Aura into a sea of companies making the same trust claim in the same colors.

His background will help. At Poshmark, Young helped lead marketing through IPO, international expansion and sale. It was a marketplace built on trust between strangers, community and repeat behavior. At Grubhub, he helped normalize a new purchasing habit. At American Express, he worked in a category where customers hand over private financial information before the relationship can begin.

Aura asks for something much heavier. Customers must share deeply personal data before the product has earned years of familiarity. Trust cannot arrive after adoption. It has to get them through the door.

That also changes the growth playbook.

The subscription products I’ve used chase engagement through (annoying) notifications, streaks and reasons to return. Aura could easily make customers feel that danger is always one click away. That may increase app opens while materially hurting the promise.

A security company that keeps reminding customers to be afraid is on the wrong path. (Actually…that applies to US AI companies too, right? I wish they would stop doing that end-of-days stuff, it’s so tiring)

Young is alert to that. His first 90 days will focus on the team and the marketing mechanics rather than the traditional new-CMO theatre of changing the agency, launching a rebrand and stamping his initials on everything. He wants to separate capability gaps from opportunity gaps, because one requires new skills and the other requires better choices.

Young put the contradiction better himself: “The promise isn’t ‘worry about this every day.’ It’s ‘trust us enough that you don’t have to.’”

That is why Aura made the right pick. Young understands that the company must make people care enough to subscribe, then protect them well enough that they stop checking.

[Our exclusive interview with Young lives in our paid members section below]

Buick and GMC are selling motors. Allyson Witherspoon’s job is to keep them premium while GM re-engineers the product plan. 

GMC is on quite a run, which is easier when you’re selling into a protected profit pool while Chinese cars reset the spec and price conversation elsewhere. Recent results are telling. Buick was one of America’s fastest-growing mainstream brands. This momentum continued into 2026: Sierra delivered its best-ever second quarter, Canyon its best first half, while Buick’s Envista recorded its strongest quarter. Witherspoon inherits two healthy brands whose margins depend on customers believing the higher trim is worth the money.

The two brands sell “premium” in different ways. Buick offers comfort, design and a more polished feel without the luxury-car price tag. GMC takes familiar trucks and SUVs, makes them tougher, better equipped and more expensive. Witherspoon has to keep those stories separate as both brands move further upmarket. The product strategy is less settled.

GM spent years preparing Buick for an all-electric future, including paying dealers who declined to make the required investment to leave the network. It’s not a surprise but the company now says near-term EV adoption will be lower than planned and is realigning production to demand. GMC still sells electric ambition through Hummer and Sierra EV, while its combustion trucks and SUVs keep the economics healthy.

It’s a delicate marketing job. GM needs to preserve belief in electrification and support profitable trucks.

Witherspoon has spent the past 12 and a half years inside Nissan and Infiniti, working across global brand, U.S. marketing, launches, dealers and transformation. She leaves after Nissan Division’s U.S. retail sales rose 8.8% in the second quarter. She will be missed. Nissan are a company operating under heavy cost pressure.

The move also tells us something about GM’s new marketing structure. Lin-Hua Wu was elevated to Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer in July. Her career was built across corporate affairs, technology and reputation at Google, Dropbox and Square. One of her first visible hires is an automotive operator who understands how brand plans survive contact with showrooms, incentives and dealer economics. Smart move.

Witherspoon is good. The question is whether GM will let an automotive operator bring order to a product strategy still changing underneath her.

MASCO Corporation is a global leader in branded home improvement and building products, known for popular brands like Behr paint, Delta and hansgrohe faucets, and HotSpring spas. Revenue in 2025 was almost $8 billion dollars. It’s a fairly resilient business model delivering strong operating margins and shareholder returns.

Masco owns brands that dominate their categories. Delta is the #1 faucet brand in the U.S., and it’s paint is exclusive to The Home Depot. This brand equity translates into customer loyalty and pricing power. The company's brands are widely considered its most defensible assets.

Masco hired Brad Hiranaga to make its brands share more than a balance sheet.

Six days earlier, Behr promoted Andy Lopez to CMO and handed him product strategy, marketing and innovation. Masco has created a chief marketer above another chief marketer, then given both men overlapping responsibility for growth, digital capability, customer insight and innovation.

Hiranaga sits at the parent company. His remit covers Behr paint, Delta and hansgrohe bathroom products, Liberty hardware and HotSpring spas. Masco wants him to connect marketing, commercial excellence, digital acceleration and customer capabilities across businesses that have largely built those things for themselves.

Masco believes valuable capability is trapped inside individual brands.

Behr shows why extraction will be hard. It is already rolling out AI tools and a redesigned website to help customers overcome the oh-so-relatable “color paralysis,” that stops people buying paint. Lopez now owns the product strategy behind that work as well as the marketing. His professional-paint business passed $900 million in annual sales in 2024, up more than 70% since 2020. He has results, resources and his own mandate.

Centralize too much, and Hiranaga slows the brand that built the capability. Leave each business alone, and the new enterprise role is ceremonial.

The same argument will play out across the portfolio. Should customer data sit with Masco or the brands? Who owns shared digital tools? Which innovation systems get copied? Who controls the investment when Delta, Behr and hansgrohe all claim their customer is different?

Masco has put numbers behind the urgency. It wants annual organic sales growth of roughly 3% to 4%, operating margins of at least 18% and EPS growth of around 10% a year by 2028. Those targets assume the portfolio produces more than a collection of individually strong businesses.

Hiranaga’s career gives him experience on both sides of the argument. General Mills is built around separate brands using common research, commercial systems and retailer relationships – and I think that’s the thread here. Marriott famously operates many distinct brands on shared customer, loyalty and digital infra.

His job is to build common muscle without turning Masco into another corporate layer that asks brands for data, schedules meetings and claims credit afterward.

Behr and Hiranaga’s relationship will establish whether Masco’s new growth platform moves decisions faster or simply moves them upward. Masco has placed a CMO above a CMO. The first budget fight will show who really runs marketing.