A swimming-pool campaign has to perform a small act of translation. In the factory, the product is an assembly of pumps, heaters, lights, filters and controls. For a service professional, it is uptime and a job done cleanly. For the person in the backyard, it is an afternoon that works without becoming a maintenance project. Jillian Swift’s job is to keep all three truths in view.
As chief marketing officer of Pentair Pool, Swift operates at the seam between industrial detail and ordinary pleasure. She leads customer centricity, brand strategy, digital transformation and employee engagement for a business that sells sophisticated equipment into a deeply human setting. The pool is machinery, workplace, gathering place and memory at once. Her marketing works because she does not force those meanings to compete.
Her route here was less a straight ladder than a tour through different kinds of attention. She studied journalism at Ohio University. She began at Penton Media, moving into management and overseeing accounts that included the American Red Cross, Emerson and The Hartford. Then came frozen-dessert ingredients at PreGel America, nearly seven years across appliance and floor-care brands at Electrolux, and finally water at Pentair.
Penton Media
Accounts, editorial instincts and the discipline of understanding an audience.
PreGel
Marketing leadership across North and South America in a fast-moving food category.
Electrolux
Brand, product, digital and customer experience across household names.
Pentair
One pool business connecting professionals, owners, products and purpose.
A journalism degree in the engine room
The journalism foundation matters. Reporting begins with the irritating possibility that the first version of the story is incomplete. You listen, look for the motive beneath the behavior, and revise the frame. Swift carries that habit into commercial work. Her clearest formulation is that useful content starts with insights gathered along the customer journey. Understand the customer’s why, she argues, and content can build a relationship rather than merely trigger a transaction.
“Great content starts with insights gained along the customer journey.”Jillian Swift
That sentence contains a quiet management choice. The content team cannot discover the whole journey alone. Sales hears objections in real time. Customer service sees what happens after the promise meets the product. Product teams know which tradeoffs hide inside a feature. A marketing leader has to make those observations portable across the organization.
Swift describes marketing and sales as partners united by customer success, with paths that can be adjacent and perpendicular. The geometry is useful. Alignment does not require identical methods. It requires a shared destination and enough trust to let each function contribute what it knows.
Range, accumulated
At PreGel, Swift led marketing across North and South America and helped the ingredient company strengthen its position during the frozen-yogurt boom. The work earned a run of regional business-marketing honors, but its more durable value was range: distributors, chefs, operators and consumers all encountered the category differently. A booth, recipe publication or sales tool had to do a specific job for a specific audience.
Electrolux added household scale. Swift worked across brand, product, digital and customer experience for Frigidaire, Eureka, Sanitaire and other names. When she left in 2022 after nearly seven years, her public farewell lingered on colleagues. She thanked teams by name, called out the relationships she had built and wrote about leading the Smalls and Ownership Solutions North America marketing groups. The emphasis was revealing: the body of work mattered, but so did the people who made it.
She arrived at Pentair in November 2022 as group marketing leader for Pool and became CMO in December 2023. The category brought her previous worlds together. It is B2B and B2C, technical and emotional, seasonal and enduring. Its channel partners need education and dependable equipment. Its end users want the equipment to recede into an easy experience.
The campaign everyone can enter
“Rule the Pool,” introduced in 2023, made that duality explicit. The campaign featured energy efficiency, automation and lighting, but its promise was less time troubleshooting and more time using the water. Employees built the products, professionals installed and serviced them, and owners made the memories. Swift framed all three groups as participants in the same outcome.
The portable idea
A campaign becomes sturdier when every important audience can identify its own useful role in the promise. The message stays consistent; the point of entry changes.
That architecture reappeared in Pentair Pool’s partnership with the 2026 Special Olympics USA Games. Pools already sat at the intersection of community, movement and inclusion. Pentair became the Games’ Official Swimming Sponsor, then treated the agreement as the opening move rather than the finished work.
A stakeholder steering committee brought teams across the company into the activation. Employees joined Polar Plunges, wrote postcards to athletes, hosted customer moments and prepared to volunteer. Former Special Olympics swimming medalist Brian Henry spoke at a Pentair national sales meeting. For Swift, hearing the athlete’s journey made the partnership concrete and helped employees see how company purpose could connect to a person in front of them.
“It takes resources, it takes planning, and it takes budgeting.”Jillian Swift on partnerships after the signature
The line is almost aggressively unromantic. That is why it is useful. Purpose without resource allocation remains copy. Pentair arranged transport, expanded volunteer time off and planned a substantial presence at the swimming venue. People were given ways to act, not simply reasons to agree.
Purpose gets a scoreboard
Swift’s version of purpose marketing makes room for feeling without becoming allergic to measurement. Pentair tracked employee engagement, donations, volunteer participation, customer involvement, earned attention, social amplification and brand affinity. The Polar Plunge program offered an especially clean signal: five employees raising $17,000 grew to more than 60 employees across three states raising $80,000. By the Games, public plans called for up to 400 volunteer slots and roughly 2,000 hours at the swimming venue.
The numbers do not replace the human story. They test whether the organization created enough access for the story to move. A sponsorship becomes culture when employees carry it without being prompted, customers recognize the connection and the community at the center receives something useful.
The same logic informs Pentair Pool’s 2026 charter sponsorship of Women of Water, an industry initiative focused on professional development, leadership pathways and community for women across the pool, spa and hot-tub profession. Swift’s language again centers conditions: people should feel seen, supported and equipped to lead. The ambition is not simply representation in a campaign. It is a stronger route through the industry.
Tools change. Judgment remains.
Swift is equally practical about AI. She compares the shift to email, search and mobile: marketers should use tools such as Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT often enough that they become ordinary equipment. The point is efficiency, faster research and more fluid analysis. Human judgment still carries the work that matters most in purpose-led brand building: empathy, creativity and connection.
That balance fits the rest of her career. New category, new channel, new technology - each creates pressure to learn without abandoning the durable craft beneath it. Swift completed Bain’s Strategic Revenue Leaders’ Academy in 2024, a responsible-AI course in 2025 and the Thayer Leadership Program later that year. She has also spent years speaking and moderating at Content Marketing World. The student and the teacher keep trading places.
Her advice to marketers approaching a bigger challenge is to release imposter syndrome and lean into agility. Everyone is learning and growing, she says; the journey matters. It is not decorative reassurance. Her own résumé keeps putting the claim under load, moving from publication accounts to dessert kitchens, appliance brands and pool pads.
The work beneath the waterline
A good pool system is most appreciated when no one has to think about it. Marketing leadership has a similar hidden layer. The visible campaign sits above budgeting, customer research, channel coordination, team development, product knowledge and dozens of decisions about who needs to be in the room. Swift’s work is interesting because she talks openly about that layer.
She has accumulated awards along the way, including business-marketing honors, internal Pentair campaign recognition and a 2026 CEO award for the company’s highest-performing marketing team. Yet her public reflections return to teamship, learning, partners and the energy behind the result. The pattern is consistent with the operator who sees a signature as the start and a story as something other people should be able to enter.
The transferable lesson is modest. Listen long enough to find the real why. Give each function a role it can own. Put resources behind the promise. Measure whether people participate. Then keep enough humility to revise the story when reality answers back. In Swift’s hands, marketing is not a gloss applied to machinery. It is the connective system that lets machinery become an experience, and an experience become a community.