The revolving door in the CMO office appears to have eased off a touch. After an unusually busy April that saw 49 new CMOs announced, the first half of May has been a lot calmer, with 11 fresh appointments so far: 7 women and 4 men stepping into the top marketing seat. 3 were promoted internally, while 8 joined from outside the business. Notably, 7 are first-time CMOs, suggesting companies are still willing to back rising talent rather than simply recycling the usual suspects.

The US continues to dominate hiring activity, accounting for 8 of the appointments across 5 states. New York led the pack with 3 hires, followed by Massachusetts with 2, while Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina each added one new CMO. England saw 2 appointments, with Cyprus contributing one.

Sector-wise, Media, Entertainment & Sports, and CPG were the most active, each making 3 hires. Professional Services, Retail, Logistics, and Tech each recorded one new appointment.

This month’s CMO moves point to one thing: brands want marketers who can build loyalty, community, and repeat engagement. Whether it’s chocolate, running, sports fandom, or Southeast Asian eCommerce, the common thread is stronger relationships in a world where discovery is no longer reliable and attention is harder to keep.

Speaking of relationships, we are grateful for the one we have with you. Special thanks to our VIP members for supporting. You know who you are.

Kurt Frenier has been appointed Global Chief Marketing Officer at Godiva, arriving during one of the strangest periods the chocolate industry has seen in years.

At first glance, the category looks healthy. Global chocolate revenues reached a staggering US$147B in 2025, and major manufacturers collectively posted around 9% organic growth last year as consumers continued to spend despite sharp price increases.

Underneath those numbers, though, chocolate has become a tougher business to run. Cocoa prices surged from historically under US$3,000 per ton to above US$11,000 at peak pricing in late 2024, forcing manufacturers to rethink pricing, packaging, product mix, and premium positioning simultaneously.

Frenier spent two decades at PepsiCo, leading large-scale portfolio transformations, sugar-reduction initiatives, global beverage repositioning, and innovation agendas spanning more than 150 markets. He later moved into strategic innovation and business development work at Pladis before taking the Godiva role.

His public introduction to the role leaned heavily into identity, heritage, and emotion. Frenier described joining Godiva “especially as a Belgian” as deeply personal, while repeatedly emphasizing craftsmanship, memory-building, brand desire, and Pierre Draps’ “love, passion (even obsession) for chocolate.”

We can relate. We still buy chocolate when prices rise, just more selectively.

That makes a difference for Godiva, which sits in an unusual middle ground: luxury associations, strong gifting behavior, travel-retail visibility, and century-old heritage, while simultaneously competing against both artisanal premium brands and mass-market global chocolate giants.

Frenier’s challenge, as we see it, is to preserve and expand the emotional pull of a 100-year-old chocolate brand while operating in a category shaken by inflation, wellness trends, premiumization, and changing consumer expectations around indulgence.

Also worth noting, he is clearly not a quiet exec. Frenier’s LinkedIn profile includes military leadership experience, children’s books, young adult novels, and a 920-page marketing novel titled “Two Marketing Buddies Walk Into Buddha (Bar).”

In an era where many consumer brands are interchangeable, Godiva may have decided that personality still matters.

Wendy Kula has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer at Saucony, following senior brand leadership roles at Nike, where she previously led Women’s Brand Marketing across North America. This is a meaningful hire for a brand that suddenly matters much more inside Wolverine World Wide.

Saucony had a breakout 2025, with revenue up just over 30% and record annual sales. Wolverine now describes Merrell (with CMO Richard McLeod at the helm) and Saucony as its two largest growth engines. They expect Saucony to deliver low-to-mid-teens constant currency growth in 2026.

You’re wrong if you think this is a sleepy heritage running brand trying to stay credible with marathoners. Saucony is becoming one of Wolverine’s prime strategic assets.

Kula’s background fits. At Nike, she led women’s marketing across running, sport, and training, worked across the WNBA and NWSL, and helped drive major moments, including the “So Win” Super Bowl campaign and the A’Ja Wilson signature shoe launch, which sold out on Nike.com in three minutes flat.

She also brings deep experience in Nike’s owned digital ecosystem, including Nike.com, the Nike App, SNKRS, Nike Run Club, and Nike Training Club. She helped launch the Nike App in China and Japan, and previously built membership and lifecycle programs across digital platforms and owned retail. This experience is important because running brands are being built through community systems.

Saucony has already been leaning into invitation-only races, field marketing, city activations, and a larger brand push beyond the U.S. Its recent talent patterns point in the same direction, with marketing hires from North Face, New Balance, Keds, and Uniqlo, while strengthening and refreshing brand marketing and regional capability outside America.

Kula brings a rare mix: women’s sport, athlete partnerships, membership, retail activation, lifecycle, performance marketing, and cultural fluency. Earlier in her career, she worked across Aerie, MISSION, and Reebok, including entertainment partnerships with figures like Jay-Z, 50 Cent, and Pharrell Williams.

That combination makes sense for Saucony now. The brand needs to maintain its serious-runner credibility while becoming more culturally visible, global, and commercially productive through owned media channels.

The risk is obvious to us. Saucony cannot just borrow Nike scale language and expect it to fit. Its advantage is being specific: authentic running credibility, heritage, product trust, and a community.

Kula’s job is to help Saucony grow without sanding off the parts that made runners care in the first place.

Jamie Gersch has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer at Fanatics Commerce, joining at a time when the company is expanding far beyond sports merchandise.

Over the past few years, Fanatics has pushed deeper into collectibles, betting, live events, athlete partnerships, loyalty, and commerce infrastructure, placing itself closer to how fans spend, collect, attend, and engage with sports year-round.

Gersch arrives with creds from Rothy's, Old Navy and Gap; the through-line in her career is how people gather around brands.

At Rothy’s, she helped expand the company from a DTC footwear business into a broader multi-channel brand while focusing heavily on emotional connection, first-party data, repeat engagement, and customer participation.

One case study from her time there stands out. A Facebook group of roughly 30,000 self-described “Rothy’s Addicts” became such an active feedback engine that the company seeded products directly into the community before launch, using customer reactions to shape product decisions and commercialization.

That approach feels increasingly relevant now.

As search fragments, CAC rises, and AI reshapes discovery, brands are placing greater value on owned ecosystems: memberships, loyalty loops, events, creators, communities, and first-party customer relationships.

Sports fandom already behaves that way naturally. People do not casually support teams. They build routines, rituals, collections, identities, and communities around them.

Gersch’s public comments repeatedly return to the same themes: personalization, emotional relevance, customer journeys, access, and community-led growth. At Rothy’s, she described the company as “laser-focused” on driving repeat purchase behavior through increasingly personalized experiences across channels.

Her Old Navy experience matters too. Beneath the glossy campaigns sat one of the largest-scale retail marketing machines in America, built around frequency, promotions, lifecycle behavior, and mass-market commercial discipline.

Fanatics now sits at a strange intersection: retailer, data company, licensing machine, and entertainment platform. Her job: make Fanatics’ sprawl feel like a single fan-facing brand, and build direct loops that keep fans coming back.

Alibaba-backed eCommerce giant Lazada is now searching for a new regional marketing leader following the departure of Marcus Chew, who oversaw marketing across Southeast Asia and South Asia for more than 4 years.

For U.S. readers unfamiliar with Lazada, this is one of Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce ecosystems operating across 11 markets, including Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore, and Pakistan. The scale is enormous, but so is the fragmentation. Regional marketing here means navigating radically different consumer behaviors, creator ecosystems, logistics realities, languages, and political environments.

Chew is out at a time when Southeast Asian e-commerce itself is entering a very different phase. Regional platform GMV reached roughly US$157.6B in 2025, nearly triple 2020 levels, but the spoils are quite concentrated. Rival Shopee now controls an estimated US$83.2B in GMV, TikTok Shop surged to roughly US$45.6B, while Lazada sits closer to an estimated US$18B. Growth has legs, but pressure around profitability, retention, discovery, and margin discipline has intensified.

Chew’s role inside that transition appears to have been highly operational. During his tenure, Lazada centralized media strategy and execution, expanded in-house marketing capabilities, tightened performance tracking, and built systems that more directly tied creative effectiveness to business outcomes. In other words, he helped build the machine.

That was important. Lazada spent much of the last few years squeezed between Shopee’s scale and TikTok Shop’s entertainment-commerce momentum. While TikTok blends shopping directly into creator ecosystems and algorithmic discovery, Lazada has operated closer to a traditional marketplace infrastructure model optimized around campaigns, conversion, and operational coordination.

At the same time, Alibaba pressure around efficiency and profitability intensified. Lazada recorded its first monthly profit in 2024 while simultaneously navigating layoffs, restructuring, and a broader pivot toward what it called “Confidence Commerce” through LazMall and more premium retail experiences.

Chew’s background across Unilever, Adidas, NTUC Income, reflects regional brand-building and systems orchestration rather than hype-cycle marketing. Even his public persona leaned heavily into endurance and marathon metaphors.

Now the more interesting question becomes: what kind of operator does Lazada need next?

Another systems-builder? That would suggest Lazada still believes operational efficiency, in-housing, and regional coordination remain the winning formula. A more creator-commerce or entertainment-native successor may imply the company believes the next battle will be fought much closer to culture.

Sometimes the empty seats tell the most interesting stories. We will be writing to the Lazada board to find out if they need help with this pivotal search.