Emily Call - Fractional CMO, Nuuvia
In 2013 Emily Call wrote a deliberately conversational brand voice into a marketing plan for a banking technology company, specifically to break from an industry norm of corporate jargon. She spent eleven years at CFM and its sister company DBSI marketing branch technology to financial institutions, driving roughly $80 million in annual revenue with a team producing more than 225 content pieces a year and an account-based program that closed 67% of named target accounts. Three acquisitions later those companies became Kinective, where as CMO she united three brands into one narrative, tripled revenue growth, grew clients 72%, and supported an investment from TA Associates. OneAZ Credit Union then hired her as chief brand and marketing officer, where she launched a full brand refresh across 20 branches and 500 employees in six months, lifted unaided awareness 8% in the largest increase in the credit union's history, and wrote the communications plan for a bank acquisition from regulatory approval through Legal Day One. Call has been fractional CMO of the youth banking platform Nuuvia since February 2026, building the function from zero. She sits on ASU's W. P. Carey Marketing Advisory Council.
Zachary Shurtleff - CMO, Strive Compounding Pharmacy
Zachary Shurtleff sold iPhones in Gilbert before he marketed anything. Two years at Apple as a sales specialist and then a business sales expert led to Tesla, where he spent two and a half years moving from senior sales representative to associate sales manager to regional performance coach for the southwest, and finally to developing the onboarding program for all Tesla sales in North America. Vantage Mobility, the second largest manufacturer of wheelchair accessible vehicles in North America, hired him in 2019 for marketing and sales enablement and promoted him to head of marketing when the CMO left, mid-turnaround, at a private equity-owned company. His transformation there produced 35% more website traffic and 27% more product purchases on half the marketing spend, along with a 2.5x increase in product inquiries and a doubling of organic search visibility. Strive brought him in as VP of marketing in late 2023 and made him chief marketing officer in April 2025. He calls his approach objectively creative, which he means as a discipline rather than a slogan.
Hilary Kerner - SVP & CMO, Insight
Hilary Kerner served as chief of staff to Jon Iwata, IBM's senior vice president of marketing and communications, which is an unusual line on a CMO's record. She spent twelve and a half years at the company. Her Watson chapter started in 2014 with building a marketing and communications organization for a newly formed business unit, and over two years she scaled the Watson partner ecosystem from five to 5,000 and its university program from 10 institutions to 200. She became vice president and CMO of Watson, then of Watson Health, where she also served as site leader for more than 250 Boston-based IBM marketers, and finally added responsibility for product marketing across all of IBM. Merative, a Francisco Partners-backed health data company, made her CMO next. Insight recruited her in December 2023 to lead global marketing and communications for a business that combines hardware, software, and services across more than 6,000 partners. Kerner credits strong mentorship for her own career and is committed to paying it forward, particularly to women in technology.
Parvathy Hariharan - Fractional CMO, Harbor Health
Parvathy Hariharan started as a software engineer at ADP India. Consulting followed, first at DaimlerChrysler and then nearly ten years at Deloitte, where she rose to engagement principal advising manufacturing and industrial clients on growth, customer strategy, and pricing. Comcast then gave her seven and a half years and two very different jobs. She led a customer experience transformation that drove double-digit NPS improvements, then took over sales and digital marketing for the Heartland region, a $4 billion business with 2.2 million customers, more than 600 sales professionals across five channels including 44 retail stores, and a $100 million sales budget. WillScot made her chief marketing and digital officer, where she consolidated eight websites into one, improved lead volume more than 20%, built a headless customer self-service portal from scratch with native iOS and Android apps, and presented strategy to the board and investors. She has been fractional CMO of the Austin-based Harbor Health since January 2026, working from Phoenix, and has served on City Year's board for nearly eight years.
Nicole Rodriguez - VP Marketing, Super Star Car Wash
Vuse went from zero to 29% market share in ten weeks, and Nicole Rodriguez ran the launch. At Matter Innovation in London she helped RJ Reynolds transform from an agriculture business into a technology company, handling product innovation, brand, and campaigns with budgets above $55 million. Her career began in public relations at Sony Corporation of America in 1999, then moved through film promotion agencies handling Twentieth Century Fox and Disney, then seven and a half years at iris worldwide on Sony Mobile and Sony Pictures, where she secured T-Mobile distribution that opened 12% of the US market. As managing partner at Cherry London she built loyalty programs including Three UK's Wuntu, which grew from zero to more than a million weekly active users in 16 months, and HSBC's Jade program for high net worth clients, which reached 93% registration. Car washes came next. At Clean Streak Ventures she doubled the membership base in under a year, lifted NPS 30 points, and delivered a 9:1 marketing ROI before the company sold for $390 million. She was president of a European Wax Center platform, then CMO of a regenerative organic bedding brand. Super Star Car Wash hired her in September 2024.
Zach Jory - VP, Growth, Product & Customer Marketing, Axon
Zach Jory has been promoted five times in six years. He joined Axon in 2020 as director of enterprise marketing, scaling the business outside public safety into field services, supply chain, retail, and healthcare, then moved into growth marketing as a director, senior director, and vice president, then to VP of US marketing, and since January 2026 to vice president of growth, product, and customer marketing across state, local, federal, and adjacent markets. IBM trained him first, across seven and a half years that began in communications and ran through digital and social strategy for DevOps and mobile, digital marketing for the big data portfolio, and a growth marketing team for the Internet of Things, before a year as chief of staff for IoT sales working alongside the division's general manager. F5 then hired him to build marketing from zero to one for Aspen Mesh, its new cloud-native business in a market that barely existed yet. His work at IBM won a Summit International Emerging Media Leader award.
Kirstin Currie - VP Marketing, Leslie's
Eighteen consecutive quarters of comparable sales growth in major appliances is a hard number to argue with. Kirstin Currie delivered it at Best Buy, where she ran marketing for more than $4 billion in revenue on a $120 million budget and lifted market share 100 to 400 basis points in categories most retailers treat as commodities. She then built the company's social, influencer, and experiential capability from scratch, leading a team of more than 20 and 50 agency partners, managing over $350 million in media investment, and delivering $150 million in incremental profit across 400 campaigns a year. Her earlier Best Buy chapter was in new retail formats, launching concepts including Best Buy Mobile. Appliances Connection later made her chief marketing officer, where revenue scaled from $275 million to $500 million and owned and distributed brands grew from $5 million to $60 million in two years. She ran her own growth and transformation advisory for six years, working with founder-led, public, and private equity-backed businesses. Leslie's hired her as vice president of marketing in June 2026.
Joelle Park - SVP & CMO, BWH Hotels
Hilton kept Joelle Park for eleven and a half years and gave her progressively more of it. She arrived in 2009 running digital for DoubleTree, moved to Embassy Suites online marketing, then brand marketing for Embassy Suites across more than 200 properties, then DoubleTree and Embassy Suites together at over 600 hotels, then the newly formed All Suites category at more than 1,000. Enterprise marketing strategy followed, and finally vice president of global enterprise and cross brand marketing, covering brand positioning, product marketing, and integrated campaigns across all 18 Hilton brands. Advertising agencies trained her before that, at Grey on Hasbro children's games, at RPA on Pioneer Electronics, and at AKQA on Discovery and Borders. BWH Hotels named her senior vice president and chief marketing officer in July 2023, running global marketing, brand strategy, communications, and the company's loyalty programs. Park describes a go-to-market plan grounded in positioning that is both authentic and ambitious as the part of the job she most enjoys.
Felicity Carson - CMO, onsemi
Felicity Carson built a global demand center from nothing at onsemi and drove more than $360 million in marketing-sourced pipeline in under three years. She also led the company's rebrand around intelligent power and sensing, champions its climate commitments toward net zero by 2040, and runs a customer experience program that has produced an OSAT score above 70%. Her first marketing job was field marketing for Ericsson in South Africa in the mid-1990s. IBM then took sixteen and a half years, from program director roles across communications, digital, branding, and events, to director of marketing for WebSphere and then enterprise content management, to vice president of demand generation for IBM Analytics worldwide. SAP recruited her to lead its customer experience program and define the global event strategy, including the flagship SAPPHIRE NOW conference. She returned to IBM as CMO of Watson Customer Engagement, then spent two and a half years at AVEVA leading global demand generation, where a new channel go-to-market strategy lifted closed-won business 33%. Carson is fluent in German and Afrikaans.
Jeffrey Lack - VP Marketing, Discount Tire
Rite Aid printed a weekly circular for more than sixty years until Jeffrey Lack ended it. He replaced it with targeted digital acquisition, keeping sales flat while saving the company more than $30 million in printing costs. As senior vice president and chief marketing officer he also turned around a failed loyalty relaunch, segmenting customers into six groups and moving sales from loyal shoppers from minus 15% year over year to plus 3% in sixty days, while brand awareness, consideration, and purchase intent all reached record highs. Procter & Gamble started him on Cover Girl, then Shell kept him fourteen years across Quaker State, Pennzoil, and finally as CMO of Jiffy Lube, the nation's largest automotive preventive maintenance chain. Bridgestone followed for six and a half years, where he was CMO of a $4 billion retail operation, then VP of marketing for the $3 billion consumer tire business, launching four tires that delivered $500 million in revenue, and finally built the company's digital center of excellence, running 70 websites across 20 countries. Discount Tire hired him in September 2023. He also spent thirteen years on Google's Retail Advisory Council.
Where the Exit Clock Is Always Running
Read these records and the private equity fingerprints are everywhere. A car wash chain sold for $390 million. A fintech built from three acquisitions and sold twice. A wheelchair van manufacturer in turnaround. A waxing franchise platform. An appliance retailer scaled from $275 million to half a billion. That kind of ownership imposes a particular discipline: every campaign has to trace to a number, and the number has to move before the next board meeting. Phoenix has a lot of these businesses, and the marketers here have learned to do brand work and pipeline work at the same time because they have never had the luxury of choosing one. The semiconductor and enterprise technology companies in the Valley get a different kind of attention. The people selling tires and pool chemicals have quietly become just as good at the job.