She has spent 25 years walking into financial firms mid-transformation and doing the unglamorous work: finding the culture, naming it, and getting everyone to own it.
The job of a chief marketing officer is usually framed as ownership. You own the logo, the voice, the campaigns, the account. Joan Khoury spends most of her energy trying to give all of that away. "At the end of the day, I want the brand to be owned by everyone," she says. "I'm just the custodian." For a woman who has run marketing at five of the largest names in American finance, it is a strange thing to want. It is also, on closer inspection, the whole method.
Khoury is Senior Managing Director and Chief Marketing Officer at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., the investment firm that traces its roots back 145 years. She arrived in early 2016 into a role that had not existed before her - the company created the CMO seat and handed it to her on January 4. Since then she has become one of the more quoted voices in financial-services marketing, not because she chases attention, but because she keeps saying plain things that turn out to be hard to do.
A career built on walking in mid-storm
Look at the shape of her resume and a pattern shows up quickly. Before Oppenheimer she was CMO of LPL Financial, the largest independent broker-dealer in the country. Before that she ran marketing for Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, where she led a marketing organization of roughly 90 people and repositioned the wealth business. Earlier still she was Global Head of Marketing for Wachovia Evergreen Investments, and before that she headed the global marketing division at Bank of New York Mellon. She began, of all places, at a United Way in Macon, Georgia, managing communications for a nonprofit.
The through-line is not the size of the logo. It is the timing. She tends to show up when a company is in the middle of changing into something else. "In the midst of chaos, you can find opportunity," she says. "And that's when marketers are really needed the most." It is easy to read that as a slogan. It is more useful to read it as a hiring pattern - she keeps being brought in precisely when the ground is moving.
The listening part is the work
Most rebrands begin with a deck. Khoury's begin with a chair. When she joined Oppenheimer she spent her early months sitting in on real conversations - watching bankers work, listening to advisors talk with clients, paying attention to the small behaviors that never make it into a survey. "You absolutely have to experience conversations in real time," she says. "Research can't tell you everything."
That belief - that brand and culture are the same raw material - is the reason she treats research as observation rather than a questionnaire. She wants to hear the words people use when they are not being asked to describe themselves. Then she hands those words back to them as a brand and checks whether they recognize it.
"That's who we are"
The clearest example is the platform she built at Oppenheimer, "The Power of Oppenheimer Thinking." Rather than launch it outward at clients first, she ran it inside out. Employees came first, then the firm's frontline producers, then the wider market, then customers - in that order. Before any of it went public, she tested whether the story was actually true to the people who would have to live it. A documented 92% of employees said they were proud to work there. When she showed them the new brand, more than 90% looked at it and said, in her telling, "That's who we are."
Out of that came "145 Voices," a campaign celebrating the firm's 145-year history. Its casting choice is the tell. No actors, no stock footage of glass towers - just employees telling the story in their own words. It is a strategy that only works if the internal alignment is real, which is why she spent so long on the listening before she spent a dollar on the launch.
How to get a board to fund a feeling
Brand work has a chronic problem: the people who approve budgets tend to think of it as decoration. Khoury's answer is a translation trick that has hardened over 25 years. "Build a business case," she says. "Don't make it about brand - make it about the growth of the company." She puts brand on the same table as acquisitions and technology, framed as an investment in a growth engine rather than a line item for creative. The word "brand" almost disappears from the pitch. What replaces it is a number the board already cares about.
A microphone in a crisis
When the pandemic shut down the usual channels, Khoury did not wait for them to reopen. She launched a podcast, "Let's Talk Future," to keep a direct line to clients at a moment when face-to-face was gone. It ran for more than two dozen episodes and drew roughly 10,000 downloads - modest by entertainment standards, meaningful for a wealth firm trying to stay in conversation with the people it serves. It is the "chaos is opportunity" line made literal: the channels broke, so she built a new one.
Curiosity, listening, and being uncomfortable
Ask her what she looks for in marketers and the list is short: curiosity, active listening, and a willingness to embrace discomfort. It is a revealing set, because none of the three are creative skills. They are temperament. She is describing people who can sit in an unfamiliar business, resist the urge to perform expertise, and stay in the not-knowing long enough to hear what is actually going on.
That temperament extends to newer tools. On AI she is neither breathless nor dismissive: "We have to experiment. We don't know yet. But we want to make our work quicker, better, faster." The specific aim is to strip administrative weight off frontline teams so advisors can spend more time with clients - technology in service of the human conversation, not a replacement for it.
Where the tank gets refilled
For all the talk of business cases and sequencing, Khoury credits her creative renewal to places well outside a boardroom - opera, museums, theatre, and film, alongside her team and her family. It fits the rest of the picture. A person who believes brands are built from culture would naturally go looking for culture on her own time. She is also a member of the Women's Forum of New York, and studied business administration at Wesleyan College before any of the Wall Street chapters began.
The custodian framing, in the end, is not modesty. It is a bet about how brands actually survive. The ones a marketing department guards tend to feel like rules. The ones everyone in the building believes tend to feel like the truth. After 25 years and five firms, Khoury has decided the second kind is the only kind worth building - and that her job is to hold the pen just long enough to hand it to everyone else.