Long before Michigan-born Amy Marentic got into marketing – today she’s the CMO of Genesis Motor America – she wanted to be an astronaut.
After graduating from high school, she went to the University of Michigan to study aerospace engineering. During her senior year, she met Colonel Charles Bolden, who piloted the Space Shuttle mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990.
The colonel asked Marentic what she wanted to do with her life, and she promptly responded, “I want to be an astronaut.”
“He looked at me and he said, ‘Well, being an astronaut is something you do once in your life, if you’re lucky,” Marentic recounts on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “You need a career to fall back on.”
She had a moment of panic, because she realized he was right.
That’s when she found her way to the aerodynamics department of Ford Motor Company, where she spent just over 28 years, starting as a product engineer for thermal aerodynamics systems engineering and eventually segueing into executive business and marketing roles.
“I got to use my aerodynamics degree,” Marentic says, “and I also got to work on cars, which still to this day inspire me.”
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Today, she gets inspiration from analyzing data and translating it into insights to support marketing.
In March, she took the chief marketing role at Genesis North America, a luxury vehicle brand launched in the US in 2016 by South Korean automaker Hyundai. One of her top remits – and challenges – is to raise brand awareness for Genesis in the US market.
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To do that, Marentic and her team are working on a growth strategy to broaden the brand’s appeal with women and families. Women drive (pun intended, of course) the majority of consumer buying decisions.
“It started with the data,” Marentic says, “with the percentage of families that buy our vehicle versus the percentage of the segment that buys [SUVs in general], and we went from there.”
Also in this episode: Why programmatic is a key component of Marentic’s media strategy, how to approach measurement in a category where the manufacturer doesn’t own the direct customer relationship (the dealer does) and balancing the opportunity and risk of generative AI. (“We’re putting our toe in the water in a way that starts with efficiency,” Marentic says.)
