Before Christine Latour was asked to market the machinery of live entertainment, she learned to sell an experience with a pulse. At Zoo Atlanta, working for Sodexo in the mid-2000s, the product was not a neat object on a shelf. It was a day out, a group visit, a memory still waiting to happen. She joined as a representative, advanced to director of sales and marketing in about a year, and says she generated $500,000 in sales in a start-up setting. The work travelled: Sodexo later brought her into comparable accounts at Zoo Houston and the Cincinnati Museum Center to share what had worked.
The detail matters because it previews the rest of her career. Latour has repeatedly worked where the offer is complex, the buyer needs a clear story and the organization needs more than promotion. A zoo visit. Regional employment services. Insurance. Audiovisual systems. A hydraulic mobile stage built to carry a festival through weather, logistics and a tight production clock. Different products, same demand: translate many moving parts into a reason to act.
The operator arrived before the CMO
Latour grew up in Sorel-Tracy, Quebec, then studied business administration at HEC Montréal. Her master's work at Purdue University joined management, tourism and e-marketing, a combination that looks unusually prescient in retrospect. It trained attention on both the experience people have and the systems used to find, sell and measure it.
Returning to Quebec, she took charge of L'Orienthèque, an employment and social-integration nonprofit in Sorel-Tracy. This was not a narrow communications assignment. As executive director from 2008 to 2013, she was accountable for finance, operations, people, partnerships and the board relationship. Her public résumé records funding growth of more than 200 percent, a team that expanded from eight people to more than 25, and a service footprint that went from one location to three.
One of the programs created in that period was Accès-Région, built with public and regional partners to help welcome, integrate and retain workers and newcomers around Sorel-Tracy. In 2012, a jury assembled by Les Affaires and the Fonds de solidarité FTQ selected Latour among 25 Créateurs d'avenir, a group of Quebec managers, entrepreneurs and students under 40 judged on vision, leadership, creativity, achievement and community engagement.
It is tempting to file this chapter under community work and move on to the corporate ascent. That misses the useful thing. L'Orienthèque was where marketing, in Latour's career, became inseparable from capacity. More interest only helps if the organization can fund the service, staff the program, maintain partnerships and show results. Visibility had to land somewhere.
Building the machinery behind the message
At Lussier Dale Parizeau, now Lussier, Latour moved through marketing, public relations, sales and strategy roles from 2013 into early 2018. She worked on the brand across 19 Quebec locations, then managed teams spanning inside and outside sales, marketing and customer experience. Her remit included acquisition, cross-selling and digital infrastructure for both consumer and business markets. Again, the pattern was connective: the brand promise on one side, the sales and service operation on the other.
Solotech raised the scale. Latour joined the Montreal-rooted audiovisual and entertainment-technology company in January 2018 as its first marketing leader. Six months later, according to her résumé, she was promoted to vice-president and reported to the CEO. Her team oversaw a new identity designed to help a Quebec-centered company speak consistently across a widening international footprint. The new logo and website were the public artifacts. Behind them sat a new marketing vision, services, team, board-level KPIs and the work of integrating brands and people through 10 acquisitions.
When live events were disrupted in 2020, Latour's job widened again. As vice-president of marketing and e-commerce, she led the strategy and launch of a platform carrying more than 3,000 products. Her résumé says the team delivered it in four months and generated more than $2 million in revenue. She managed its profit-and-loss statement and brought inside sales, marketing, customer service and merchandising into the same operating frame.
The numbers are useful because they distinguish the project from a decorative digital exercise. The platform had inventory, customers, service questions and financial consequences. Marketing owned a result that could be read in a ledger.
By late 2022, she was Solotech's chief marketing and communications officer, directing global work across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. Her responsibilities reached public affairs, partnerships, corporate responsibility and ESG. During these years she also returned to Purdue, no longer as a graduate student but as an invited industry speaker. The student of experience marketing had become the case study.
From the show to the structure beneath it
In March 2025, Stageline announced Latour as chief marketing officer and head of new market development, a new executive position. The move kept her in live entertainment while changing the physical center of gravity. Solotech's world included audio, video, lighting and systems integration. Stageline designs and manufactures the structures beneath outdoor performance: covered hydraulic mobile stages, rigging systems and related event infrastructure.
A stage is a revealing marketing problem. The crowd sees spectacle; the buyer sees wind resistance, setup time, transport, engineering certificates, rigging capacity and operational risk. A credible story must hold both views at once. Stageline gave Latour responsibility for development planning, new-market identification and digital strategy as the company sought to use its acquisition of Scène Éthique to broaden its offer.
Her public writing later in 2025 showed where that market-development brief could go. Two LinkedIn articles considered the 2026 FIFA World Cup as both a sports event and a distributed brand stage. One asked how organizations were preparing to activate around the tournament; another explored how mobile solutions could support fan experiences. The product case was practical, but the marketing lens was expansive: major events create temporary cities, and those cities need places where audiences, sponsors and programming can meet.
A playbook small teams can borrow
Latour now presents her independent work through Christine Latour Strategy & Coaching Services. The menu includes fractional CMO work, growth strategy, coaching, training and programs for start-ups, nonprofits, sales teams and individual professionals. Her stated method begins with diagnosis: understand the situation, competition and customer behavior; define positioning; align sales and marketing; choose measures; then stay close enough to help the plan survive contact with the week.
There are three practical ideas in that model. First, positioning is a choice about operations as much as language. A promise that sales cannot explain or service cannot deliver is not a position for long. Second, alignment needs shared goals and shared evidence, not occasional meetings between departments. Third, measurement works best when it helps people decide, not merely report.
A fourth idea sits quietly in her career: keep the institution connected to the world around it. At L'Orienthèque, that meant public agencies, employers and community partners working around a regional labor need. At Solotech, it meant technology partners, public affairs and relationships across several countries. At Stageline, it meant sports commissions, venues and event organizations thinking together about how a tournament extends beyond its matches. The marketer in this model is partly a translator and partly a convener. The job is to notice where separate groups have compatible interests, then give them a project and a language they can share.
That instinct also shows up outside a formal CMO brief. Latour has described mentoring emerging entrepreneurs and professionals through Zú Montréal, and her independent programs distinguish among the actual constraints of start-ups, nonprofits, sales teams and executives. A young company may need a position it can test without a large department. A nonprofit may need communications that strengthen funding and legitimacy. A sales team may need common measures with marketing. The tools overlap, but the operating context decides how they should be used.
Her coaching turn also makes sense beside the executive record. Former colleagues describe a manager who notices talent, communicates clearly and pushes teams beyond the limits they had assumed. Latour's own vocabulary is more colorful. Her site uses a peacock motif and the invitation to “deploy your colors.” She describes herself with four words: visionary, creative, disciplined and a popularizer, someone who can make complex material understandable.
She is pursuing professional-coach training with the goal of ICF certification in early 2027. The aspiration she gives clients is relational rather than transactional: build durable partnerships and accompany the evolution of their projects and teams over time. That is consistent with the career behind it. Latour's work has rarely stopped at attracting attention. It follows attention into the organization and asks what must be built next.
The through-line is not entertainment, insurance, nonprofits or even marketing. It is organized growth. At each stop, Latour has taken something difficult to hold in one view - customers, teams, technology, partners, markets - and built a shared frame around it. The stage changes. The work beneath it remains.