With the coronavirus crisis showing no end in sight after upending the world in March, marketers have spent the past month putting in additional work to address their response and actions to solving the nation’s latest crisis of racial injustice. 

Gail Horwood, CMO at Kellogg North America, doesn’t have a typical CMO resume. She doesn’t have an MBA and she didn’t begin working her way up the ranks on the brand side after graduation. And yet she built critical skills in digital strategy and content creation, ecommerce and how to integrate silos

As Vice President, Marketing - Mountain Dew, Energy & Flavors, Nicole Portwood oversees one of PepsiCo’s most influential portfolios when it comes to entertainment marketing. A longtime integrated sponsor of the NBA, action sports and music, among many other platforms, Mountain Dew and its sister brands spend upwards of $100 million a year on media campaigns that have shaped pop culture for decades.

The COVID-19 crisis has thrown a lot of curveballs at marketers over the past three months, but Deborah Wahl, Global CMO at General Motors, was up for the challenge.Just one week into taking on her new role in Detroit last September after 18 months as Global CMO of Cadillac in New York

It’s in times of need that powerful brands are defined.As COVID-19 swept across the world, Zappos instructed all its employees: Spend “whatever time is required” to listen, care, and empathize with the thousands of people phoning their call centers. Calls that began talking about shoes have veered off into heartfelt discussions of everything under the sun.

As Head of Digital Innovation & Transformation at Nestlé USA, Orchid Bertelsen’s work has been even more in-demand within her company to help her portfolio of 20 brands adapt to a post-COVID climate. “A lot of people are saying ‘my innovation projects are getting cut,’ because they’re usually science projects or really far out.