When Alexander Green announced that he was joining Butterfield & Robinson, he began with luggage. Freshly packed bags by the front door. Tickets in hand. The small electrical charge before a trip becomes real. “Buy the ticket, take the trip,” he wrote, treating a new C-suite job less like a promotion than a departure.
The metaphor fit because Green’s career has always moved. He has crossed categories that many executives choose to inhabit for life: advertising, pizza, casual dining, grocery retail, coaching and now luxury active travel. Yet the route has a clear line through it. At each stop, Green has worked on the stubborn space between what a brand says and what a customer actually experiences.
At Butterfield & Robinson, that space may be a Tuscan lane, a table set by a local host or the quiet after a day on a bicycle. Green arrived as chief marketing officer in 2025, just before the Canadian company’s 60th anniversary. His public mandate is to strengthen its global presence. The more interesting challenge is to do that without flattening the qualities that made the company worth noticing in the first place: its pace, local relationships, curiosity and slightly irreverent character.
The pizza education
Green began in account planning at McCann Canada and then moved to Work Party Media + Creative. In 2002, he joined Panago Pizza. The job expanded far beyond communications. His remit ran through product development, menus, pricing, design and advertising, the kind of role that makes a marketer responsible for the meal before being responsible for the message.
By 2006, Green was 30 and had become, by his own admission, obsessed with food. Panago had restructured its menu and pricing, pushing against the category’s habit of bundles and discounts with gourmet recipes and consistent prices. Thirteen months of double-digit comparable-store sales growth followed. Green moved from Vancouver to Toronto to oversee the chain’s Ontario expansion, where some of its strongest new locations opened.
The work offered an early expression of a principle he would later state more directly: the exponential value of being different can beat the incremental value of being better. At Panago, difference lived in modern food styling, contemporary design and a personality that could be playful without becoming careless. A take-home line called Panago Cucina turned olive oil, balsamic vinegar and seasonings into an approachable extension of the restaurant kitchen. The packaging was not decoration around the strategy. It was part of the strategy.
The operating route · 2000 to today
McCann
Panago
Boston Pizza
Longo’s / B&R
Serious business, slightly absurd
At Boston Pizza, where Green became vice president of marketing in 2011, the lesson gained a comic edge. The chain needed customers to think beyond the word “pizza” in its name. One answer was Rib Stain Camo, clothing patterned to disguise the splashes produced by eating saucy ribs. Another campaign turned a model into a sports trophy during the Toronto Blue Jays’ playoff run. A young fan’s viral bat-flip imitation became a live activation and mock press conference.
The jokes were strategically useful. Green described the strongest work as smart creative tied to culture and the humour that defined the brand. During the playoff campaign, monthly social mentions rose from roughly 3.2 million to 16.4 million. Rib Stain Camo earned industry recognition, and Green’s record includes CASSIES honours for both that promotion and Boston Pizza’s sustained brand platform.
“Our most successful campaigns combine some good smart creative that is culturally relevant, but also with that sense of humour that has defined the brand.”Alexander Green, on the Boston Pizza playbook
There is an operator’s instinct beneath the levity. Green spoke about loyalty programs as a way to understand who was visiting, how different customers engaged and what value the company could add through what it learned. Data was not the opposite of personality. It was a way to make the personality land with more precision.
The grocery aisle changes his mind
Longo’s widened the work again. Green joined the Toronto-area family grocer as vice president of marketing in 2017, became chief marketing officer in 2019 and, in 2022, added customer experience to his title. The seven-year chapter covered a full business transformation: team members, merchandising, marketing, guest experience, store design, loyalty, personalization and community.
It also changed one of his beliefs. Green had heard the line about culture eating strategy for breakfast and did not buy it. Then he watched Longo’s values - treat people like family, do the right thing, act entrepreneurially - guide thousands of employees through disruption. He came to see strategy less as a freestanding plan and more as a way to channel the capabilities a culture already enables.
The practical version of that insight sat beside his office. Longo’s chief human resources officer, Liz Volk, was next door. Marketing and HR co-sponsored the transformation, using common research to connect the customer brand with the employer brand. Their proximity became a useful picture of Green’s method: customer experience and employee experience belong in the same conversation because customers never meet an org chart.
One experience, many departments.
Green’s repeatable move is to join the pieces customers encounter - product, service, people, data and story - even when the company keeps those pieces in separate boxes.
The family connection was unusually literal. Green’s father-in-law came to Canada on the same boat as the Longo brothers, then became a farmer who sold produce to them. Green’s wife had her first job at Longo’s. One of their teenagers later pushed carts there. By the time Green left, he joked that he felt more Italian at heart and was flattered when someone asked if he was related to company president Anthony Longo.
The farewell comments from colleagues add texture to the executive biography. They returned to energy, humour, care, coaching and an appetite for action. Green, who pursued executive and team coaching certifications, described the transformation as personal as well as commercial. The line matters. He is drawn to ideas, but also to the conditions that let other people carry them.
A slower kind of product
Travel gives Green a new version of an old problem. A trip cannot be reduced to its itinerary any more than a restaurant can be reduced to its menu. Butterfield & Robinson sells cycling, walking and multi-active journeys, but the durable product is the story collected along the way. The local encounter. The unplanned meal. The view that becomes vivid because a traveller reached it under their own power.
Green has always been drawn to exploration and the learning and connections it unlocks. He described joining B&R as a chance to help a proudly Canadian, delightfully irreverent company bring its travel design to a larger global market. In his early months, he returned often to stories: the ones families tell after a journey, “dripping with joy and washed down with a little champagne.”
Now he is assembling the machinery behind that language. Public hiring in 2026 points to the next build: brand marketing, CRM and content leadership. The roles reveal the same integrated stack that has followed him since Panago. Creative vision makes the company recognizable. CRM helps relationships endure. Content turns an experience into a reason to pack.
“I’ve always been drawn to exploring and the experiences, connections and learning it unlocks.”Alexander Green, announcing his next adventure
There is a tension inside every heritage brand. Growth rewards repetition; character depends on details that resist easy replication. Green’s career suggests he will approach the problem from inside the experience out. At Panago, he worked on the food and the package. At Boston Pizza, he connected a joke to an occasion. At Longo’s, he joined culture to customer experience. At B&R, the most important marketing asset may be a guide who knows when to take a detour.
His side project, RMRKBL, sharpens the point. Green created the presentation-training field guide to help people express ideas clearly enough to move them into the world. The toolkit is free and deliberately accessible, built around a belief in remarkable people rather than polished speakers alone. It is easy to read that as a separate coaching venture. It also looks like the distilled version of his executive work. An idea has to cross from one person to another, survive the handoff and become useful. A menu redesign, a loyalty program, an employer promise and a journey all depend on that passage.
This is also why Green’s optimism does not read as passive cheerfulness. He pairs it with a resilient, coaching-minded approach and a stated bias for action. Colleagues remember the energy, but their stories keep circling back to what the energy made possible for other people. The brand builder becomes a capacity builder. The idea gets better because more hands can carry it.
The packed bags by the door were therefore more than a flourish. Green has spent 26 years arriving at the point where marketing meets memory. Luxury travel simply makes the meeting visible. A traveller goes somewhere, notices something and returns with a story. The CMO’s job is to help more people buy the ticket while protecting the parts of the trip no campaign can manufacture.