Most of Jim Knaub's working life has been devoted to products designed to disappear. A barrier coating becomes part of a package. An acrylic goes into paint. A silicone sits between two components and does its job so quietly that the buyer's customer may never know its name. The commercial problem is peculiar: the less visible the ingredient, the more precisely its value must be explained.
In June 2026, Knaub accepted that problem at portfolio scale. Momentive Performance Materials appointed him chief marketing officer, with responsibility for global marketing, portfolio positioning, value proposition development, go-to-market strategy and commercial enablement. The language is corporate, but the assignment is concrete. Decide what the company should emphasize. Give sales teams a reason customers can repeat. Help inventions travel from a lab bench into specifications, production lines and recurring orders.
Knaub came to the role with more than 24 years in chemicals and materials, including leadership at Dow and Rohm and Haas. His training is in chemical engineering, not advertising. He earned his bachelor's degree at Lehigh University, then added an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. That combination - how matter behaves, then how organizations allocate money - explains the shape of his career.
01 · The translation layerLearning the plant before writing the promise
Knaub's early work at Rohm and Haas included process engineering and business strategy. These are useful bookends. A process engineer learns that every elegant idea eventually meets pressure, temperature, throughput, maintenance and cost. A strategist learns that a technically possible product still competes for capital, attention and time. Put the two views together and marketing becomes less about adjectives and more about choices.
Rohm and Haas also placed him inside a Philadelphia chemical lineage that would later become part of Dow. Over the years he moved into global asset, marketing and business leadership. Momentive's account of his career emphasizes significant profit-and-loss accountability, team building, profitable growth, operational performance, margin expansion and long-term value creation. Those are not ornamental credentials for a CMO. They suggest someone accustomed to living with the downstream consequences of a positioning decision.
The public glimpses of that operating life are revealing. In October 2019, Knaub appeared before the U.S. International Trade Commission during an investigation concerning acetone imports. He introduced himself as global business director for Dow's Performance Monomers business. He explained that Dow was the country's largest purchaser of acetone and described plants in Texas and West Virginia, including assets the company had sold or was selling.
It was the opposite of a product commercial. The setting required him to connect trade policy with feedstocks, plant configuration, employment, exports and the ability of a downstream business to compete. Industrial executives often work inside exactly this tangle. A raw-material price changes. A tariff shifts. A plant loses flexibility. The effect eventually lands in a customer conversation, even if the route is several spreadsheets long.
“This is an organization with strong technology and big opportunities.”Jim Knaub on joining Momentive
His comments at the hearing also carried a preference that appears later in his career: treat the system, not merely one part of it. Dow, he said, understood both sides of the acetone issue. That phrasing matters. Customers in specialty chemicals rarely need a vendor to recite one position. They need a partner who can understand competing constraints and still recommend a workable formulation, supply plan or investment.
02 · Where science meets a purchase orderThe product story begins with the constraint
By 2025, Knaub was senior business director for Dow Coatings & Performance Monomers. At the opening of a BLUEWAVE technology facility in Lauterbourg, France, he described an investment that paired production capacity with sustainability and economic growth. The technology disperses polymers in water, opening paths to coatings that can support recyclable paper and board packaging while maintaining material performance.
The interesting detail is not the ribbon cutting. It is the commercial chain beneath it. A brand wants different packaging. A converter needs a barrier coating that runs on existing equipment. Regulators are tightening packaging rules. A chemical producer needs a waterborne technology, a qualified product and enough capacity to supply it. Marketing in this environment is the act of aligning the chain around evidence.
That experience maps neatly onto Momentive. Its silicone and specialty products serve agriculture, automotive, aerospace, electronics, personal care, consumer goods, building and construction, among other markets. A single materials vocabulary must stretch across buyers with very different failure modes. The electronics engineer worries about heat and bonding. The building-products formulator thinks about weathering and durability. The packaging team asks about processing and protection. “High performance” means little until it attaches to one of those problems.
Knaub's stated approach is “disciplined” and “market-driven.” Neither word asks the organization to become less technical. Discipline means choosing a market, defining the claim, proving it and building the commercial machinery to repeat it. Market-driven means starting with the customer's constraint early enough to influence what gets developed, rather than looking for a story after the science is complete.
Momentive CEO Craig Borkowski described Knaub's strength as transforming technical innovation into customer value and collaborating with sales and research and development. That three-way relationship is the center of the job. R&D knows what can be made. Sales hears what the account will adopt. Marketing has to build a common language between them, then turn the learning into portfolio choices that work beyond a single customer.
The Knaub operating pattern
- Begin close to the technical process.
- Connect the material to a specific customer constraint.
- Carry the economics through the positioning.
- Bring R&D, marketing and sales into the same feedback loop.
03 · The new briefA portfolio is a set of decisions
A broad portfolio can look like abundance from the outside and ambiguity from the inside. Many products can serve many applications. Salespeople accumulate local knowledge. Researchers see adjacent possibilities. Customers request variations. Without a clear architecture, the range becomes harder to navigate and every launch begins from zero.
Knaub's remit puts him at that intersection. Portfolio positioning determines which families of products stand for which outcomes. Value proposition development turns laboratory performance into customer economics. Go-to-market strategy selects the industries, applications and accounts where those economics are strongest. Commercial enablement gives the field tools and proof sturdy enough to carry the message.
The order is important. An enablement deck cannot rescue a blurry portfolio. A launch cannot compensate for an untested value proposition. The work moves from choice to language to execution, with customer response feeding back into the next choice. This is less like staging a campaign and more like tuning a production system.
“I’m excited to bring a disciplined, market-driven approach to how we position, launch, and scale our products globally.”Jim Knaub
His own announcement struck a collaborative note. He wrote about partnering with a talented team and helping shape Momentive's next chapter of growth. The aspiration is shared rather than solitary, which fits a company whose products are themselves collaborative. A specialty material rarely wins alone. It works inside another company's design, through another company's equipment, toward another company's promise to its customer.
There is also a useful tension in the title itself. A chief marketing officer is expected to create focus, while a materials company earns its resilience from serving many markets. Narrow the story too far and valuable applications disappear. Leave it too broad and every product sounds interchangeable. Knaub's years with global businesses give him a practical place to stand between those risks. A P&L makes focus measurable. Customer collaboration keeps it from becoming an exercise conducted only at headquarters. The portfolio can remain broad while the argument presented to each market becomes exact.
This is where commercial enablement earns its unglamorous name. The work may be a comparison tool, an application guide, a sample process or a better question for an account team to ask. Each small artifact reduces the distance between a scientific capability and a customer's decision. At global scale, reducing that distance repeatedly can matter as much as introducing another product.
That may be the most useful way to understand Knaub's move into the C-suite. He has not left engineering behind for marketing. He has carried the engineer's questions into a larger room. What exactly is the problem? Which variable matters? What evidence would change the decision? Can the result be reproduced at scale?
For Momentive, the answers will show up in less romantic places than an advertisement: a shorter qualification conversation, a portfolio that is easier to navigate, a launch that reaches the right application, a salesperson who can explain why a formulation earns its price. When the chemistry is meant to vanish into the finished product, clarity becomes the visible work.