The chief marketing officer of Principal Financial Group built a career on a stubborn idea - that an industry running on spreadsheets and fine print can still make people feel understood.
Most people would rather do almost anything than open the statement for their retirement account. Beth Wood has spent more than thirty years standing in that exact spot - the small, quiet flinch people feel when the subject turns to money. Her whole job is to make the flinch go away. As executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Principal Financial Group, she leads the brand for a company that helps millions of people save, retire, and protect what they have built. And she keeps arguing, to anyone who will listen, that the work is not really about products. It is about a feeling.
The feeling has a name she uses often: security. The sense that someone competent is on your side, that the future is not a cliff, that you are in control of something that usually feels uncontrollable. Sell that, she believes, and the annuities and the 401(k)s and the insurance policies take care of themselves. It is a simple thesis. It is also, in an industry famous for jargon and fine print, a little bit radical.
Wood did not set out to spend her life in financial services. She grew up in marketing the way most marketers do - through products you can hold. Early in her career she worked at Frito-Lay, where you learn scale and the unglamorous discipline of moving a lot of something off a shelf. Then Johnson & Johnson, where you learn that trust is the whole ballgame, that a brand people bring into their homes carries a weight most brands never touch.
Somewhere in there came the detour that she still talks about first. She inherited her mother's coffee business, and more or less overnight became a small business owner. She calls herself an "accidental entrepreneur," and she does not use it as a cute line. Running that business taught her the parts of entrepreneurship the case studies skip - the payroll math at odd hours, the loneliness of the decision that only you can make, the gap between a good product and a stable company. It is one thing to market to small business owners. It is another to have been one, sweating the same numbers.
That experience became the through line. When she talks now about financial literacy - about business owners who do not know what their company is worth, who have not thought through succession or benefits or what happens if they step away - she is not reciting a talking point. She lived close enough to it to know how easy it is to get wrong, and how few people are actually helping.
From consumer products she moved into insurance, the industry she would eventually help reinvent from the inside. There were years at MassMutual. Then Guardian Life in New York, where she climbed from a marketing leadership role in 2010 to chief marketing officer of the individual businesses by 2016. She was, by any measure, established - a senior marketing executive in the center of the American insurance world.
Then, in the summer of 2019, she did something a little against the grain. She left New York for Des Moines, Iowa, to become chief marketing officer of Principal Financial Group. Trading the coasts for the Midwest is not the obvious ambition move. But it fit the way she thinks about the work. Principal is a company with deep roots and a genuine claim to the thing she cares about most - actually understanding people, without the performance. She has described the approach as Midwestern in its DNA, and she means it as a compliment.
Ask Wood to describe the Principal brand and you get two words that she treats as inseparable: empathy and expertise. On their own, each one fails. Expertise without empathy is the industry's default setting - technically correct, emotionally cold, the reason so many people feel talked down to when they ask a simple question about their money. Empathy without expertise is warm and useless; nobody wants a financial company that is nice but does not know anything. Put them together and you get the thing she is actually chasing: a brand that knows what it is doing and still treats you like a person.
That framing changes the marketing itself. Instead of leading with features - rates, riders, product names that mean nothing to a normal human - the work leads with the emotional stakes. What does this let you stop worrying about? What does it protect? The products become the proof of the promise rather than the pitch. It is a subtle shift, and it is surprisingly hard to pull off inside a large financial institution, where the safe move is always to talk about the product.
Empathy paired with expertise. One without the other doesn't work — cold competence pushes people away, and warmth alone can't be trusted with a retirement. The whole strategy lives in the "paired."
When the conversation turns to artificial intelligence, most executives reach for the language of efficiency, which everyone correctly hears as a polite word for cutting jobs. Wood goes the other way. Her line is direct: AI is not here to eliminate jobs, it is here to make humans superhuman. She sees the tools less as a way to spend less on people and more as a way to give people - both her teams and the customers - better answers, faster, in plainer language.
In practice that means using AI to make guidance more accessible, not more automated-feeling. A chatbot that demystifies a confusing benefits question at the moment someone is stuck is doing empathy work, just at a scale a human team could never staff. The point, in her telling, is the same as everything else she does: take something intimidating and make it feel manageable.
Her leadership style tracks her marketing philosophy more than most executives' do. She leans toward autonomy over control - hiring people she trusts, giving them room to think, and resisting the urge to turn everything into a process. She talks about diverse perspectives not as a compliance box but as the raw material of better ideas, and about independent thinking as something to protect rather than manage. The through line is trust: build a culture where people feel empowered, and they will do braver work than any top-down system can squeeze out of them.
Beyond the marketing organization, she chairs the Principal Foundation and has led the company's sustainability efforts, extensions of the same instinct that the work should mean something past the quarter. It is easy to be cynical about a large company's stated purpose. It is harder to be cynical about someone who keeps organizing her actual time around it.
Strip away the titles and the tenure and Wood is making one argument, over and over, in a field that mostly disagrees with her by default. The argument is that feeling is not the soft part of financial services - it is the whole part. People do not save because a spreadsheet told them to. They save because they are scared, or hopeful, or responsible for someone, and a good brand meets them there instead of burying them in rates and disclosures.
It is a Babson marketing graduate's answer to a very old problem, sharpened by a coffee shop she never planned to run and a few decades spent learning what people actually respond to. Whether the whole industry follows her is an open question. But if you have ever felt, for a moment, that a financial company was on your side rather than across the table, you have felt the thing Beth Wood has spent her career trying to build.