Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the change makers, innovators, disruptors, and bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!
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Everyone said the robots would take restaurant jobs. Then Dr. Chad Moutray, the chief economist at the National Restaurant Association, put a number in front of me that I keep repeating to people. 94% of operators told the NRA their technology investments over the past two to three years did not permanently eliminate a single job.
Should your refrigerator have a personality?
Casey asked that about ninety seconds into our latest Retail Transformers episode. She was listing everything marketing has had to absorb in the past ten years. Billboards to banner ads to AI agents to creator economies to retail media networks to, and I’m quoting her, whether your refrigerator should have a personality.
I laughed and said that’s what everybody needs. Then I remembered who was waiting to be introduced. Cole Moir spent the last three years leading brand marketing at TCL, which makes, among other things, refrigerators. So the joke may not age well.
That’s the problem with marketing right now. The absurd thing you say to get a laugh is somebody’s roadmap.
Cole is at a transition point in his career, which is the only reason a conversation like this happens. Twenty years at Ogilvy, 360i, and Edelman, then Samsung, Sony Entertainment, Motorola, and TCL, where the brand became the fastest-growing consumer electronics company two years running. He’s owned the NFL relationship. He’s partnered with Olympic athletes. And nobody’s PR team was on the call.
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31% of the Fortune 500 has no CMO.
That’s the number he opened with, and he named Starbucks, Walgreens, and General Motors.
I’d watched the trend for years. The number was new to me. Once you have it, the story tells itself:
the job got more accountable, less protected, and stretched across channels that didn’t exist three budget cycles ago.
So companies rename it. Chief growth officer. Chief revenue officer. Or they don’t backfill at all.
Cole’s read is that the job became a business job, and the word he reached for was transformation. Casey pushed on the obvious next question. Does the next CEO come out of marketing rather than sales? Cole said he’d put money on it. So would I.
Taste is now a hireable skill.
This is the part I didn’t expect.
Cole listed the three things he’d tell a 25-year-old marketer to build. Data was first, which anyone could have guessed. Talking to real customers was third, which is the kind of thing leaders say and rarely fund.
Second was taste.
His reasoning is that AI can produce infinite creative, so the constraint moves to the person who can look at a hundred versions and know which one is right for this brand, this audience, this week.
He wants that judgment on the payroll. I’ve never heard a marketing leader put taste in a skills stack next to data literacy, and it took about four seconds to make sense. Because of course it does.
What retail leaders get wrong about transformation.
The partnership math nobody publishes.
Here’s how a challenger TV brand like TCL builds the case for an NFL deal.
Only 5% of NFL fans have ever been to a game. 95% watch at home, on their own TV or a friend’s. And of the 100 most-watched TV shows over the past decade, 96 are football.
That’s a category argument.
Cole ran three tests on every partnership:
does this partner give us credibility we haven’t earned
audiences we can’t otherwise reach
content we can’t produce at scale
At TCL he needed all three, which he says is rare.
The Olympics story is better. TCL partnered with Jack and Quinn Hughes four or five months ahead of the Games, to build the relationship before anything ran. Then Jack scored the gold medal goal. Cole quoted his old coach: success is when preparation meets opportunity.
Where I landed.
There are two things I’m still chewing on.
The first is the budget. Casey handed him $200 million on air and he split it in about forty seconds, with real percentages and a floor underneath. I’m leaving the split out of this newsletter issue, partly because he earned the right to say it himself and partly because his reasoning matters more than the numbers. It starts at 32:39. What I will give you is the floor: 25% in the upper and mid funnel, and if you’re under it, he thinks you’ll feel it inside two years. Tech buying cycles in his world ran six months to seven years. You can’t convert people who never entered consideration.
The second is his test. I’ve already asked three people this week.
If AI disappeared from your company tomorrow, would the system break, or would everyone go back to doing what they were already doing?
If they’d go back, it’s attached to a plan that runs fine without it. If it breaks, something real happened.
Everyone I’ve asked so far would go back. Including two people who talk about AI constantly. It’s the perfect test for every leader to seriously think about.
He also named the four roles he says every marketing team needs, and the two he’d stop hiring for. That one starts at 13:32, and it’s worth checking out.
Store traffic is a gift your not converting.
Go deeper.
Season 2, Episode 8 of Retail Transformers, with Cole Moir: “31% of the Fortune 500 Has No CMO Role.”
Watch or listen to the full episode and learn what Cole sees the CMO role evolving to in the near future. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!
Your Turn.
If you’re new here, subscribe. Casey Golden and I do this every week, and the guests keep saying things they probably shouldn’t. And that makes it extra special fun.
Next time on the show: Shannon Flanagan returns to talk about her new book, what RWIT has achieved a year later, and what her career path has taught her.
Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn! Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.
Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!
Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers
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The Retail Razor Podcast Network
Retail Transformers is part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, alongside The Retail Razor Show, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades. Find us at RetailRazor on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram. For a full transcript of this episode, visit our retailrazor.com website!
Love the point about how taste is now a skill we need to focus on hiring. It's one thing AI just can't replace!