How Josée Perreault Made Adventure Easier to Enter

Before the engines, there was a fitness club in downtown Montreal. Josée Perreault had studied urban planning at UQAM, but managing a Nautilus Plus location gave her a more immediate map to read: customers, staff, revenue, choices. She liked running a business. In the 1980s, she enrolled in Concordia University's MBA program and found language for the instincts she had been testing on the floor.

One classroom exercise stayed with her. The assignment was to evaluate a real Montreal company. Perreault concluded the business had to go bankrupt. The answer earned an A, but the grade was less memorable than the conclusion: “the right decision isn't always easy.” It is an unusually sober origin story for a marketer. No clever slogan. Just a willingness to look at a system as it is, decide what must change, and accept the discomfort attached to the answer.

That instinct would travel. Perreault joined Oakley in 1994 and spent 23 years with the performance brand, moving through brand management, sales, retail and general management. Her assignments took her from Montreal to Paris and Zurich, then to California. By 2010, she was Senior Vice-President, World Business, responsible for a commercial machine that crossed wholesale, owned retail, web and franchises.

“Oakley gave me my wings.”Josée Perreault on the company where she spent 23 years

The line is affectionate, but the work behind it was concrete. She helped establish and develop Oakley's Canadian division, introduced company-owned retail, and restructured European sales and operations. Her responsibilities grew with the geography. She learned how a product built for insiders could carry a global identity without losing its technical edge.

A reset in Montreal

In 2015, a change in corporate ownership dismantled Oakley's executive team. Perreault returned to Montreal, where her husband worked, and where her son was entering university. She rebuilt her network. The move home was personal, but it also placed her near a Quebec company with a familiar appetite for performance: BRP.

The apparent leap from eyewear to powersports was smaller than it looked. Oakley's first product had been a motocross grip. Both companies made objects that sat at the intersection of engineering, identity and recreation. Both sold to people who cared about how a product performed and what joining its culture said about them.

Perreault joined BRP in October 2016 as Senior Vice-President of Can-Am On-Road. Her mandate was focused and entrepreneurial: create an incubator inside a large manufacturer and rework the three-wheel category. She assembled a team of 30. The result, unveiled in 2018, was the Can-Am Ryker, a lighter and more attainable sibling to the Spyder, designed for easier operation and extensive personalization.

At launch, Perreault described a market that could triple with the Ryker in the range. She was equally careful about declaring victory. Ski-Doo and Sea-Doo carried decades of recognition; the new vehicle still had to earn its place. That combination of ambition and restraint matters. Market creation requires a large thesis and a tolerance for evidence arriving slowly.

The product was only one barrier

A less expensive, automatic three-wheel vehicle could lower the mechanical and financial threshold. It could not, by itself, fix the social one. Motorcycling remained a male-dominated category. A prospective rider might still face licensing rules, an intimidating training environment, unfamiliar dealers, or the quiet suspicion that the culture had been built for someone else.

Perreault's Can-Am team treated those obstacles as part of the market, not as somebody else's problem. Rider education made the machine easier to try. A discounted three-wheel course reduced the cost of learning. Mentors answered questions that newcomers might hesitate to ask in public. Dealers were pulled into the experience. The go-to-market plan reached beyond media and into the sequence of confidence.

The Women of On-Road mentorship program made that logic visible. It paired experienced riders with newcomers in a setting designed to feel safe and non-intimidating. When the planned 2020 launch collided with shutdowns, the team paused, then moved the conversation online. A private community grew to roughly 6,000 members in its early months. Instead of waiting for normal conditions, the program used mentors, videos and group discussion to keep the idea of riding alive.

“The more we see women riding, the more women will want to ride.”Perreault on the compounding effect of visibility

The sentence contains the growth model. Representation was not a campaign garnish. It reduced uncertainty for the next person. Each visible rider made the category more legible to somebody watching. The community became infrastructure: a place to learn, picture the experience, and move from curiosity toward a license.

This is the transferable part of Perreault's work. Enthusiast brands often obsess over desire. Their products photograph well, inspire loyal owners and generate fluent insiders. But the next customer may already want the feeling and still be blocked by the first mile. The useful marketing question is not only “How do we create demand?” It is “Where does existing interest turn into hesitation?”

From a category to the whole journey

Perreault's remit widened. In 2021 she became Senior Vice-President of Omnichannel Experience and Apparel. In 2022 she was named Executive Vice-President, Omnichannel. The titles tracked a larger version of the same problem: how should a customer move among a website, a product configurator, a dealer, a piece of riding gear and the experience after purchase?

Omnichannel is often reduced to matching inventory and interfaces. At BRP, the products make the emotional stakes more obvious. A snowmobile or personal watercraft is not a routine replenishment. It begins with imagination, requires practical confidence, passes through a dealer network and continues into a community of use. The brand promise is tested in every handoff.

In 2024, BRP appointed her Chief Marketing Officer. Two years later, the company introduced a refreshed corporate identity around “Get Moving,” tying BRP more clearly to Ski-Doo, Lynx, Sea-Doo, Can-Am and Rotax. Perreault described the line as a rallying cry and the design as a way to strengthen the connection among the parent company and its brands.

The assignment is bigger than giving a corporate name more attention. A portfolio effect works only when the relationship helps customers understand something useful: shared engineering, a common attitude, a family of experiences. The challenge is to connect icons without flattening the identities that made them valuable.

Her route to that assignment matters because it is unusually broad for a CMO. Perreault has held a country role, regional posts, a world-business job, category leadership and responsibility for the channels where a promise meets a transaction. Sales and general management sit beside marketing on her résumé. That range can change the questions asked in a brand meeting. A campaign may be memorable, but can a dealer deliver it? A configurator may be elegant, but does it help a first-time buyer make a decision? A community may be active, but does the company hear what members are teaching one another?

Her 2018 Ryker mandate offers a compact example. The vehicle had to attract younger customers, give them room to personalize and support a larger three-wheel business. Yet the public comments around the launch moved easily between market size, product price, retail configuration, licensing schools and the humility required when introducing a new name beside established ones. Those are not separate marketing anecdotes. Together they form an operating model: see the whole route from an industry's economics to one person's first confident action.

Systems for belonging

Perreault's undergraduate degree in urban planning now reads like an accidental preview. Cities are systems of movement, thresholds and signals. So are retail networks. So are customer journeys. Across her career, she has worked on the points where people enter, orient themselves and decide whether they belong.

Her board work adds another layer. She has served with ESG UQAM, WSP Global, Lumenpulse and BonLook, among other organizations. The sectors differ, but the roles put her near questions of governance, growth and institutional change. At BRP, she has also chaired the company's diversity, equity and inclusion council. The recurring interest is less a single category than the design of organizations and markets around people.

There is still an outdoors person inside the operator. Perreault has said she spends as much free time as possible on an electric mountain bike. The detail feels consistent with a career built around performance products: she does not encounter movement only as an abstract brand promise.

The lesson to borrow is practical. When a category wants growth, map the path taken by the person who is interested but uncertain. Price may be one barrier. Language, training, representation, retail rituals and fear of looking inexperienced may be others. None is solved by a headline alone.

Perreault's work has repeatedly pushed marketing into those operational spaces. The result is a definition of brand building that includes the lesson, the mentor, the dealer and the first ride. Adventure may be the promise. Access is the work that makes the promise believable.