Cindy Goodrich has the sort of résumé that makes an ordinary marketing problem look almost too easy. She has worked inside Google, helped turn HubSpot's annual gathering into a five-figure crowd, led BetterUp's marketing through a period of expansion, and built brands in hospitality and packaged food. Then she chose a brief in which the audience would often prefer not to think about the product at all.
In January 2025, Goodrich became the first chief marketing officer at Empathy, a technology company that helps people with the emotional and administrative work surrounding loss and legacy planning. The role placed her at a peculiar intersection: enterprise buyers on one side, individual families on the other, and a subject that resists the usual tricks of the trade. You can manufacture scarcity for sneakers. You cannot hurry dignity.
Goodrich's answer has been to treat sensitivity as a creative constraint. She talks about a “respect-first mindset,” a phrase with more teeth than its soft edges suggest. It rules out shock tactics. It makes privacy part of the brand, not a paragraph in the terms. It requires the product to behave as kindly as the copy. In her formulation, people can spot insincerity quickly, so the work begins by listening and by keeping promises small enough to keep.
“We are not asking people to move on, but helping them move forward.”Cindy Goodrich, on the line between a slogan and a service
The engineer in the brand room
Goodrich did not train for a career in mood boards. At Duke University, she studied biomedical and mechanical engineering, graduating in 1999. She later earned an MBA at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, focusing on marketing, management and strategy. The change in disciplines looks dramatic from a distance. Up close, it feels more like a change of materials.
Engineering teaches respect for systems: where pressure accumulates, how one part affects the next, why an elegant component still fails when the surrounding structure is wrong. Goodrich's later career has repeatedly asked the same questions of organizations and audiences. A brand is also a system. Its campaign, event, product and customer support either bear weight together or expose the weak joint.
Her early marketing work crossed Barilla and Starwood Hotels & Resorts, two worlds where preference lives in details. She moved into business brand communications at Google, then became vice president of marketing at Oblong Industries, the gestural-computing company whose technology made screens behave like objects in a room. By 2013, she had joined HubSpot as vice president of Brand & Buzz.
At HubSpot, the remit was broad: brand, creative, digital, social, events, public relations and influencer relations. The company went public in 2014, and Goodrich served on the team around that transition. She also helped build INBOUND, an event that grew from an idea to more than 10,000 attendees. Its speakers ranged across business, books, media and comedy. That eclecticism was a strategic choice. HubSpot sold software, but INBOUND sold the feeling that marketing itself was becoming a more generous and interesting profession.
This is one of Goodrich's durable instincts: an event is not a break from strategy. It is strategy made inhabitable. People walk into the argument. They sit next to its other characters. The program tells them what belongs together.
Building categories, keeping the human
After a 2019-2020 interval devoted to a sabbatical and side projects, Goodrich joined BetterUp. She became chief marketing officer and chief brand officer as the coaching platform expanded internationally, made acquisitions and partnerships, and raised its Series D and E rounds. Category creation became an everyday operating problem. Before a company can win a category, the customer has to understand why the category deserves to exist.
Goodrich learned to connect narrative with proof: stories broad enough to invite people in, data precise enough to withstand procurement, and a product experience capable of closing the loop. At Empathy, that triangle is unusually visible. The institutional customer may be an insurer, employer, bank or wealth manager. The end user is a person trying to complete unfamiliar tasks under pressure. Goodrich calls the necessary balance bringing a consumer heart into a B2B world.
The Goodrich translation loop
The phrase is useful because it refuses to let a distribution model erase the person at the end of it. Enterprise scale is how support reaches millions. Consumer sensibility is how that support feels usable once it arrives. Goodrich's job is to make both sides recognize the same proposition without flattening either one.
The numbers explain why the category exists, but numbers alone cannot make the conversation easier. Goodrich has spoken about asking friends, relatives and colleagues about their own experiences before joining Empathy. Again and again, she heard uncertainty about what to do. Her conclusion was blunt enough to fit on a sticky note: “People deserve better, no?” The question mark matters. It invites agreement, then demands a plan.
Restraint as a growth skill
Most marketing advice treats attention as an uncomplicated good. Goodrich works in a category where attention can be clumsy, intrusive or simply mistimed. Her team has to make hard subjects accessible without turning them into spectacle. That means avoiding euphemism while preserving dignity. It means using research to reveal a widespread problem without reducing an individual to a statistic.
It also means accepting that authenticity is an operational claim. If the advertising promises care but the interface creates confusion, the brand has failed. If a campaign speaks warmly while the company culture rewards indifference, the audience will eventually notice. Goodrich's standard is consistency across touchpoints, a familiar phrase in marketing decks that becomes much less comfortable when taken literally.
Her creative answer often involves participation. In 2025, she hosted Empathy's first In Good Company conversation, bringing financial educator Vivian Tu and workplace writer Hebba Youssef together to discuss legacy and estate planning. The subject moved out of the filing cabinet and into a room where personal stories, work and practical choices could coexist.
By April 2026, the format had become more intimate. Empathy Unbound convened senior leaders from insurance and wealth management in New York. Goodrich advertised what it would omit: no keynotes, no booths. There would be original research, focused discussion and dinner. The person who helped build a stadium-sized marketing event now also understood the value of a room small enough to change its mind.
That August, Empathy took the conversation to Grand Central Terminal with What Grows Here, a public art installation inviting passersby to leave handwritten notes about memory and legacy. Goodrich described legacy as something built every day through people and memories. The installation made the idea physical. A private subject became a field assembled one note at a time.
The collaborators around these projects reveal another piece of her method. She pairs subject experts with people who already know how to hold an audience: financial educator Vivian Tu, workplace writer Hebba Youssef, Atlantic chief executive Nicholas Thompson, and leaders from the institutions Empathy wants to move. The cast is never incidental. Each person gives the conversation a different door. One audience enters through money, another through work, another through technology or culture.
Goodrich also continues to advise startups and scaleups, including BetterUp. That work keeps her close to the messy period before a category has settled into familiar language. It is easy to tell a neat origin story after the market has agreed on the terms. The more useful skill is noticing the phrase that makes sense before consensus arrives, then building enough proof and participation around it that other people begin using it too.
The next useful sentence
Goodrich's public style is not solemn. Her LinkedIn posts are crowded with parentheses, exclamation marks, direct questions and small verbal nudges. She writes like a person trying to get the room to lean in, not a committee trying to keep the copy safe. That energy sits beside an insistence on evidence and care. The combination is more interesting than polish.
It also explains the connective tissue in a career that can otherwise look like a tour through unrelated industries. Food, hotels, gestural computing, marketing software, coaching and estate support all ask a version of the same question: how does a complex organization create a feeling a person can recognize? The answer is never merely the logo. It is the accumulation of choices before, during and after contact.
At Empathy, Goodrich has said she is excited by the chance to expand support ecosystems and shift norms around subjects usually left in silence. Those are large ambitions. Her method is pleasantly concrete: listen closely, state the problem plainly, build evidence, create an experience, and give the audience a useful next step.
The marketer's temptation is to write the final sentence, the one that settles the meaning and lands the applause. Goodrich's work points toward a better kind of line: the sentence that lets someone begin a conversation they have been postponing. It may not be the loudest sentence in the room. It may be the one that gets used.