The first thing Amanda Teder sells is a moment nobody can see. The refrigerator hums. A basement stays dry. A family keeps moving through dinner while a storm works outside. The product may be a generator, a battery or an energy-management system, but the desired result is quieter: continuity. As chief marketing officer of Generac, Teder works in the narrow emotional space between remembering the outage and imagining the relief.
That makes her assignment more complicated than putting an orange machine in an advertisement. A home standby generator is expensive, requires installation and may sit unnoticed for long stretches. Teder has compared the purchase to a small construction project. The customer is not simply choosing among brands. The customer is deciding whether the disruption, planning and investment are worth making now, when the lights might still be on.
Her answer is to teach before asking for the sale. It is a habit developed across three businesses that look unrelated from the shelf: electric toothbrushes at Procter & Gamble, consumer tires at Michelin and backup power at Generac. In each, an existing default is easy to tolerate. A manual toothbrush already feels familiar. Tires can be postponed. Grid electricity is taken for granted. Marketing has to reveal the cost of staying still, then make a better outcome understandable.
A category is a behavior waiting to change
Teder joined Procter & Gamble in 2001 and stayed through 2020, moving through brand-management roles and eventually leading Oral-B in North America and retailer marketing across the company's portfolio. The long apprenticeship gave her a classic consumer-marketing toolkit: start with behavior, build the category and watch the economics. It also gave her a practical education in how brands, retailers and shoppers meet in the same decision.
There was a formal education running alongside the working one. Teder earned a Bachelor of Science from Purdue University. For her MBA, she commuted from Cincinnati to Chicago every weekend for more than two years while working full time. Procter & Gamble funded the degree at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The schedule reads like a small operating system for persistence: workweek, travel, class, repeat.
At Michelin in 2020 and 2021, she led North American consumer marketing in another category full of delayed decisions and technical detail. She spoke publicly about the opportunity to improve how women experience tire shopping, especially as retailer partners helped buyers navigate more of the process online. Tires are consequential but infrequent; customers have to understand enough to feel in control without becoming engineers. The work rewarded clarity.
Generac offered the same underlying problem at a larger scale. The company created the automatic home standby generator category and built a familiar name in backup power. Yet household penetration remained limited, and the purchase could be easy to defer between storms. Teder arrived as executive vice president of marketing in November 2022 with a mandate to support growth and help a generator company explain its broader future in energy technology.
Fear is useful but blunt. When an outage is happening, relevance requires little explanation. In ordinary weather, memory fades. Teder's team varies the balance between problem and benefit by region and recent experience. It can remind customers what an outage felt like, then move the message toward control and peace of mind. Generac even employs a meteorologist, bringing weather information into decisions about where attention is likely to rise.
The lesson is portable: urgency has geography and timing. The same message lands differently in a neighborhood cleaning up from a storm and one enjoying a quiet week. A national brand still has to listen locally.
The midfielder in the C-suite
Asked which position she would play if her team were a soccer side, Teder chose midfield. The answer contains a joke because she has written that sports were not her strength in high school. It also describes her operating style. The midfielder sees several directions at once, connects groups and creates a path for other people to score.
Experience
Growth
At Generac, that connection is visible in the org chart. Her scope has included marketing, communications, digital, data and analytics, pricing and support for customer experience across residential and industrial divisions. She has also described a large customer-support operation inside her function and ownership of pricing and value realization. Those responsibilities turn the brand promise into an operating question: what should the company offer, what is it worth and what happens when a customer needs help?
An outage compresses the entire journey. New prospects arrive because the weather has made the product urgent. Existing owners call because their equipment and expectations are being tested. Acquisition and service happen in the same hour. A conventional handoff between departments would miss the shape of the moment. Teder's wider remit lets the team see it as one event.
That ordering is more than positioning. Teder speaks about marketing investment in terms of top-line growth, profit and return. Brand awareness matters, but it must eventually meet the income statement. Her P&G background came from a place where marketing already had institutional standing. At Generac, she found a similar belief in the customer, then broadened the ways her function could contribute.
CEO Aaron Jagdfeld credited her with building the marketing organization when Generac announced her promotion in December 2024. Teder answered by pointing to the team and the next phase: growth opportunities, consumer experience and the company's move toward total energy solutions. Her title changed after two years; the work remained a bridge between the generator people know and the energy system Generac wants them to understand.
Listening becomes infrastructure
The bridge now reaches into places brands cannot fully control. Generac's social team spent 2025 listening to customers and dealers already talking about storm preparation, price and peace of mind. Instead of treating those conversations as comments beneath a campaign, the team used recurring themes to shape briefs. It asked permission to reuse posts, credited creators and built a tagged library that could serve social and internal teams.
The practice produced a feedback loop. A dealer's playful clip could prompt a quick collaboration. Recognition encouraged more dealers to create. Daily listening fed weekly insights and monthly reporting. The program exceeded its KPIs by more than 150 percent and won PR Daily's 2026 award for Social Listening and Real-Time Response.
Teder has connected that system to AI-shaped discovery. Generac experts joined an existing Reddit community where people were already discussing generators and hosted an Ask Me Anything. She later reported that, after the AMA and continued participation, the subreddit rose from eighth to second among sites appearing in LLM searches about Generac and its products. The operating idea is plain: useful answers in a real community can travel farther than the original conversation.
Her view of AI follows the same pattern as her view of marketing. Technology is valuable when expertise points it toward a business and customer need. She expects artificial intelligence to make functions such as search, content, social and digital work more closely together. She has also urged leaders to let machines handle ordinary work so people can use judgment, creativity and empathy on the extraordinary work.
There is an echo of a family story she shared in 2026. Her daughter tried a pogo stick on rain-softened grass, sank in and promptly moved to pavement. Teder saw a lesson in the speed of the iteration. Engineering cultures can wait for more data and a complete plan. Her argument is that learning requires motion. The point is not careless speed. It is choosing the next surface quickly enough to discover what works.
From orange equipment to an energy relationship
Generac's familiar product solves a dramatic binary problem: the grid is working or it is not. Its wider portfolio asks for a more continuous relationship with energy. Batteries, smart thermostats, distributed energy software and power-management tools can help homes and businesses make decisions even when no storm is present. That shift changes the marketing task from waiting for an outage to teaching people how energy can be managed every day.
In June 2026, Generac expanded its relationship with Quigley-Simpson, naming the firm digital agency of record across home standby generators, ecobee and dealer support. Teder described a partnership built on performance, analytics and collaboration. The work is meant to connect media, creative, research and measurement while widening how consumers see the company.
The larger ambition is visible without turning it into a slogan. Generac wants to be understood as more than the machine that starts when everything else stops. Teder's career has prepared her for exactly that kind of reframing. She knows the slow work of category education, the retailer's role in a complicated purchase, the value of regional context and the financial discipline needed to keep marketing credible inside the enterprise.
Her method begins with the person considering the purchase. What happened the last time the power failed? What questions are they asking a dealer? What does a business need to keep running? What would make the investment feel manageable? The answers move through her midfield, where data, service, price and story meet. Then the ball moves on.
The calm after the storm is still the emotional center. But calm can be designed before the clouds arrive. For Teder, that means turning a moment of fear into an informed choice, and turning a product people hope not to need into a relationship with how they use power.