Last month, Hyundai restructured its marketing department.
The auto manufacturer eliminated the chief marketing officer role and split those responsibilities into two separate jobs: creative and performance.
The move has precedent, says Angela Zepeda, Hyundai’s former CMO – and now its chief creative officer – on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Numerous other brands, including Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson, General Mills, Bank of America and Etsy, have moved away from the CMO role, which has expanded over the years to include everything from media strategy and planning to analytics and even comms.
With so much focus on sales and market expansion, Zepeda barely had enough time to devote to creative work as CMO, she says.
“Now, I’ll have a lot more time to do that and set the strategic vision,” she says. “We haven’t done enough brand building in the last couple of years and we need to get back to it. … We need to really get into the hearts and minds of consumers.”
As chief creative officer, Zepeda will oversee creative work, of course, as well as experiential marketing, multicultural and social media. Her close colleague Sean Gilpin, Hyundai’s VP of global sales marketing, is taking on the performance-related functions, including media buying, customer comms, the Hyundai website and CRM.
The creative and performance groups will divide, conquer and collaborate very closely. “We have to work very much hand in glove,” Zepeda says.
But there are skeptics that believe splitting the CMO role is a bad idea.
Brand and performance work best when those functions are fully integrated, because performance is more efficient when it’s underpinned by strong brand marketing, and in order to have strong brand marketing, you need a consistent message. One brain is actually better than two in this case, or so the argument goes.
Zepeda acknowledges the critics, but she isn’t worried about silos developing.
“Most of our teams have been working with each other for a long time, so we’re all very familiar with each other and have a high level of trust,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll figure out the new way forward pretty rapidly.”
Also in this episode: When to use humor in advertising and when to pull at the heartstrings, inside Hyundai’s big Paris Olympics push and dealing with signal loss using the Korean sensibilities of “ppalli ppalli” (reacting quickly) and “miri miri” (planning ahead). Plus, reminiscing about Zepeda’s first driving test as a teenager in Southern California.
For more articles featuring Angela Zepeda, click here.
