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Global Vice President of Marketing and Communications

After being acquired by Whole Foods Market, in 2010, we moved the Integrated Alchemy Media team to the ‘sleepy’ town of Austin, Texas, which over the 5 years I stayed there, exploded it’s population, city infrastructure, and presence in multiple industries. What allowed the Board and Co-CEOs to support me in my proposed ambitions for the brand, at a time when they had nothing but a basic landing page and a store locator on the website, was a vision of deep customer connection.

The vision was one of integrated national/international, regional, and store level communications, anchored by intimate lifestyle storytelling and food culture, flowing through an increasingly localized ecosystem of websites, apps, and content (branded, affiliate, and even community-relevant unbranded content) oriented around common interests and intent. This connected real-world sub-cultures and groups of friends to the stores and products, through any social media or the practical interactions they enjoyed as an individual. Not as product marketing, but as lifestyle guidance, support, and entertainment. In a nutshell, we weren’t selling to users in a segment, we were inviting people to hang out and immerse themselves in the welcoming space of our brand and its ethos. That opened new communities to the stores and led to growth in revenue, partnerships, and shoppers. In 3.5 years, traffic grew from hundreds of thousands of visitors to hundreds of millions reached through our digital ecosystem, sales grew by 40%, same-store sales grew, even as the number of stores grew from 250 to 375 and when Amazon acquired Whole Foods it was aiming at 1000 stores supported by every digital platform and community.

We also developed and implemented major partnerships with Square, Instacart, and technology that would become a component of Stripe, as well as point-of-sale providers, payments processors, conventional media outlets, lifestyle affiliates in food, home, mental health, and fitness, and partnerships with every major social media platform. See examples below of Product Development, Multimedia Content, Marketing Collateral and Strategic Campaigns, undertaken by my team, or read on for more of the story...

On arrival, I proposed to form a global marketing and communications team that would extend the experience of the store - and the core values that had grounded the enterprise for 30 years in an authentic growth and distinct culture - into the homes and hands of the population at large, by using the tools of digital communities. So not segments but groups aligned around friendship and common interests, not sales but partnerships to gather their attention, not advertising but interaction, and not brand voice, but regional voice, store voice, and even the voice of individual team members and customers.

This strategy wasn’t foreign to Whole Foods, they had employed a stakeholder model for many years and empowered regions and team members to act on the behalf of the customer and each other, since the beginning. But bringing the visceral, sensory, intellectually ‘organic’ connections (sorry) that were so present in the brick and mortar community within and around the stores, to the seemingly infinite remoteness of digital space, was a new concept.

I assumed the role of Global Vice President of Marketing and Communications, reporting to the CEO, and built an outstanding team of about a hundred people at the central office, with Directors of Digital, Marketing, Communications, and Content reporting directly. Additionally, I shared responsibility for Directors in each of the 12 regions that helped bring highly integrated collaborations to fruition with the central team, while delivering our efforts, cross-functionally, online and to each store floor, with localization, personalization, and support.

It was a generative environment and the work thrived. In just under 4 years, we managed to create a ton of digital products, build out a full studio, an unrivaled content machine, and extend the activity of the stores (and diversity of the store communities) to millions of new ‘users’. These represented entirely new shoppers from many segments, new and established.