For the better part of a decade, CPG companies hired marketers who could optimize a media plan. Now, they’re hiring ones who can save a brand.
When Smuckers went looking for a new CMO earlier this year, it didn’t reach for a performance marketer. It hired Katie Williams, the former U.S. CMO of Haleon, a consumer health veteran who spent her career building brands like Advil, Sensodyne and Centrum. Hormel, which had never had an enterprise-wide CMO before, created the role in December and filled it with Jason Levine — a Mondelēz lifer who ran marketing for Oreo and Ritz. Burger King’s new CMO Joel Yashinsky, poached from Applebee’s in early 2025, promptly fired the brand’s mascot, launched a brand reset built on customer feedback and described the whole thing as “not a marketing campaign” but a fundamental rethink of what the brand stands for.
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