Colin Bettam Has Spent Three Decades Making New Categories Feel Familiar

In 2005, satellite radio was still a product that needed explaining. Colin Bettam arrived at Canadian Satellite Radio with responsibility for marketing and sales as the company prepared to launch XM Canada. The job stretched from advertising to retail shelves and automotive distribution. It required a customer to understand a new service, a retailer to know where it belonged, and a car company to see why a radio subscription could help sell a vehicle.

Bettam had already spent close to a decade at Coors Canada, eventually becoming vice president of marketing. Beer and satellite radio hardly look like adjacent categories. One lived in coolers and bars; the other arrived through dashboards and electronics aisles. But both depended on the same practical question: how does a brand fit into the way a person already lives?

That question became the quiet through-line of his career. It followed him into televisions and phones at LG, into e-readers at Kobo, and into enterprise technology at League. The products kept getting more technical. Bettam's work kept bringing the story back to an everyday audience.

A career loyal to the problem

The conventional executive story rewards industry continuity. Stay in one lane, accumulate contacts, repeat the vocabulary. Bettam's path suggests a different kind of compounding. McCain Foods, Coors, XM Canada, LG Electronics, Kobo and League form an eclectic list. What compounds is not sector expertise so much as experience at moments when a category must be made legible.

At XM Canada, the novelty was distribution and habit. In 2005, the company named him senior vice president of marketing and sales and put the launch and its channels within one remit. A campaign could generate interest, but the promise had to survive contact with a car dealer, an electronics store and a monthly bill. Marketing was not a layer placed on top. It was part of how the market came together.

LG presented almost the inverse challenge. The brand was known, but its product lines could fragment the message. Bettam oversaw marketing across mobile, home electronics, home appliances and business solutions. His role included helping consolidate their positioning under the Life's Good banner. One phrase had to stretch from a phone in a pocket to a television on a wall and an appliance in a kitchen without becoming meaningless.

He also worked at the junction of technology and Canadian culture. LG's partnerships with professional hockey included a playoff player feature built with the NHL Players' Association. Bettam described the expansion as an example of innovative thinking creating value for the brand, the players' association and fans. The language is corporate, but the mechanism is clear: enter an existing ritual and add something that feels native to it.

“First-in technology is never for the faint-of-heart.”Colin Bettam, discussing early OLED televisions in 2012

That line came as television makers prepared early OLED sets for consumers. It works as a description of his own assignments, too. New technology creates a peculiar marketing tension. Move too early and the story floats above what the product can deliver. Wait until every detail is settled and somebody else defines the category. The marketer has to be precise about what is real while leaving room for what is becoming possible.

Put the reader before the device

In 2013, Bettam joined Kobo as chief marketing officer and again reported to Michael Serbinis. The two had first worked together at LG. Kobo was expanding internationally, with planned launches in markets including India, Russia and the Philippines. Bettam's remit covered the whole public surface of the company: brand, advertising, communications, public relations, events, sponsorship and corporate responsibility.

His stated positioning was disarmingly simple: “Kobo differentiates itself from the competition by putting Readers first.” The capital letter in the original announcement did a little strategic work. It turned a customer segment into an identity. Kobo was not asking people to admire an e-reader. It was asking readers to see the device as an extension of something they already loved.

That work took the brand to millions of people in 18 countries. The number matters, but so does what had to remain stable across borders. Retail partners changed. Languages changed. Catalogs and launch conditions changed. The reader-first idea gave the company a portable center.

There is a small, playful artifact from the period after Kobo. Bettam wrote a LinkedIn article with the title “Win The Cold War With The Footlocker Fridge.” The product was a refrigerator styled like a military footlocker. It is hardly a manifesto, but it shows an instinct good marketers recognize: a product becomes memorable when its form creates a story people want to retell.

The consumer instinct enters enterprise software

Bettam joined League in 2016. The company sells software to large organizations, but the experience eventually lands in an individual's hands. That makes his consumer background less of a detour than it appears. Enterprise buyers ask about integration, scale, compliance and cost. The person using the product asks a more immediate question: does this make sense?

His remit at League is broad. He supports the team responsible for brand, public relations, digital, events, social and business development. Those functions are often separated on an organization chart. In practice, they are different places where the same promise can either hold or fracture.

A redesign of League's website offers a compact example. The project began with internal interviews, user research, card sorting and a new site map. Bettam's verdict was blunt: the result was a “100x improvement.” The useful part is not the multiplier. It is the recognition that a website is an operating surface. If people cannot find the logic of the business there, the positioning has not finished its job.

Build the room, not only the campaign

One revealing Bettam anecdote comes from League's eighth year. He had long argued that the company should create its version of Salesforce's Dreamforce, a gathering that could showcase the mission, platform, customers, partners and value in one place. In late 2021, League turned that idea into the first virtual League Connect.

A few hundred senior leaders were invited. The company used the event to share its platform vision, introduce products and launch a developer program. Scott Galloway gave the keynote. Speakers came from organizations including Uber, Google, Providence and Ascension. What began as a marketer's recurring suggestion became an owned stage for the company's ecosystem.

This is a more durable move than it first appears. A campaign rents a slice of attention. A recurring gathering creates a calendar event, a set of relationships and a place where customers can teach one another. It can serve sales, product, partnerships and brand at the same time, provided the conversation is useful enough to deserve a return visit.

League Connect reached its fourth edition in 2025. The company used the Miami gathering to introduce new AI capabilities and outline its product roadmap. Bettam shared the announcement publicly. The vocabulary had changed dramatically from beer coolers and radio receivers, but the marketing architecture was familiar: a clear audience, a concentrated moment and a story built to travel beyond the room.

A career can compound around a question, even when every product on the résumé changes.

What operators can steal

Bettam's career offers an alternative to the tidy industry ladder. Pick a problem worth getting good at. In his case, the problem is category translation. Find the human identity inside a technical product. Connect novelty to an existing behavior. Give partners language they can carry. Then create a place where the market can see itself.

The approach also explains why consumer thinking belongs inside enterprise companies. A contract may be signed in a boardroom, but adoption happens one interaction at a time. The brand has to connect the institutional case with the individual experience. It has to be credible to a buyer and clear to a user.

By 2026, Bettam was still publicly telling the League story, promoting a conversation with leaders from League, Medavie and Deloitte about a more unified Canadian digital experience. More than a decade into the company, the work remained unfinished by design. Categories do not become familiar once. New products, partners and expectations keep reopening the explanation.

That may be the most useful observation in his path from packaged goods to software. The marketer is not merely the person who makes noise when a product ships. At the right company, the marketer helps the organization decide which parts of a complicated future a customer should be able to understand today.