The small victory was an email. Julie Kaplan had arrived at CareMetx with the sort of assignment that makes a blank whiteboard feel accusatory: build a marketing function that could create value, while learning a company, its culture, its customers and the people whose opinions carried weight. The necessary work was under the floorboards. She was choosing technology, installing playbooks and sketching the machinery of a department. Colleagues could not see any of it.
Then Kaplan learned that the company had never sent clients a corporate email about its products and services. She got one out. It was neither a grand reveal nor a fireworks display. It was useful, overdue and visible. People around the business could point to it and say that something had moved.
That email is a neat miniature of Kaplan's career. She likes the long plan, but understands the social value of the short proof. She listens for the work behind the work. Then she translates it into an action other people can recognize.
The wish list begins in the interview
Kaplan became chief marketing officer of Higher Logic in August 2025, after more than three decades moving through banking, media, consumer products, insurance and health technology. The industries changed. Her recurring material did not: customer insight, operating discipline, brand, loyalty and the persistent requirement to explain what marketing produced.
Her preparation for a new role starts before the first morning. During interviews, she listens for the organization's wish list. What do people believe should already exist? Where does irritation collect? Which quick improvement would feel meaningful to colleagues, even as the new leader is still assembling a deeper diagnosis?
The method has restraint. A wish list is information, not instruction. Kaplan studies how the company operates, who has influence and what customers say. She has described herself as a planner, but her plans remain editable. Evidence gets a vote.
“I would make the listening tour as long and as thoughtful as possible. And perhaps I'd take better notes than I did.”Julie Kaplan, reflecting on her first 90 days
There is an amusing modesty in “take better notes.” Executive advice usually arrives dressed for a keynote. This arrives with a pen. Yet it reveals the operating principle: memory is an unreliable strategy system, and the person with a fresh title is still a student of the place.
Listen for the wish list → map the people and the culture → deliver one visible improvement → build the foundations → earn room for the larger change.
A career in translation
Kaplan began in 1994 as a marketing analyst at First National Bank of Maryland, later Allfirst Bank. Discovery Communications followed, then T. Rowe Price. In 2001 she joined Healthy Directions, where her remit eventually joined marketing to customer experience. She remained for nearly thirteen years, a long apprenticeship in what happens after a campaign makes a promise.
At Aetna she led marketing for Innovation Health. At Versant Health she served as vice president of marketing through a period that ended with its acquisition by MetLife in 2020. CareMetx came next. Kaplan joined as vice president of marketing in 2021 and rose to senior vice president of marketing and revenue operations in 2022, building the two functions rather than asking them to become friends after the org chart had dried.
Banking and the discipline of numbers.
Discovery, T. Rowe Price and a long run at Healthy Directions.
Aetna's Innovation Health and Versant Health.
Marketing and revenue operations at CareMetx.
Global marketing leadership at Higher Logic.
At Higher Logic, Kaplan leads global marketing for software built around online communities and engagement. The fit is almost literary. Her own work has long concerned the passage between people: customer to company, marketing to sales, executive to investor, expert to peer. Community software makes those passages the product.
The company describes her job as connecting people, ideas and strategy to produce growth. In practice, that puts Kaplan near a contemporary tension: community is made from human exchange, while the software serving it is becoming more automated. In October 2025, she appeared in Higher Logic's announcement of a web crawler for its AI Search Assistant, a tool designed to unite information spread across an association's community and wider website. The product problem resembles her management problem. Valuable knowledge exists in separate rooms. Someone has to connect it without flattening what made it useful.
Kaplan's formal education prepared her for both sides of that equation. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, then completed an MBA at the university's Robert H. Smith School of Business while her career was beginning. Economics supplies the incentives; management supplies the meeting. Her résumé has required fluency in both.
Recognition arrived later in a pleasingly specific form. She was named among the Top 101 B2B Marketing Influencers in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Her listed “superpower” for the 2025 edition was making the most of a start-up budget. It suits a leader whose signature anecdote is an overdue email rather than an extravagant launch. Constraint, for Kaplan, seems less like a grievance than a design brief: decide what must work, prove that it does, and spend the next dollar with more information than the last.
The number with a passport
Marketing measures everything it can reach and occasionally a few things it cannot. Kaplan's public advice is to resist bringing the whole instrument panel into the executive meeting. Her preferred C-suite measure is marketing-driven pipeline: opportunities that marketing delivered, stated plainly enough to survive the trip from campaign review to finance conversation.
She does not claim this one number contains the entire value of brand, retention or customer experience. It has a different virtue. It can travel. Sales recognizes it. Finance can question it. Leadership can compare it with a goal. A metric becomes useful when people outside its home department know what to do with it.
The operating mix, as heard in Kaplan's interviews
Conceptual emphasis, not performance data. The order matters more than the bar length.
That portability matters especially in private-equity-backed companies, where Kaplan has spent much of her recent career. Her questions begin above the campaign: What is the investment firm trying to accomplish with its portfolio? What story does it expect this company to tell? What might an exit look like? Marketing choices improve when the team understands the business clock it is working inside.
“What story are they trying to tell with their portfolio? What does an exit look like for them?”Julie Kaplan on marketing in PE-backed companies
This is marketing as corporate literacy. A team can dislike the clock, misunderstand it, or learn to read it. Kaplan chooses the last option. Scale comes after proof because making a broken system larger is merely an expensive way to preserve the break.
The introvert in the crowded room
Kaplan has spoken candidly about introversion. A large gathering of strangers can still provoke the question of how to fit in, create value and begin. It is a pleasing counterweight to the polished CMO archetype, forever gliding through a ballroom with a name for every face and a slogan for every canapé.
Her answer is not to cosplay as the loudest guest. An introduction creates an opening; listening makes the conversation worthwhile. The same preference appears in her affection for CMO Huddles, the peer group she helped establish as a founding member. She once compared the group to a therapy session that is also pragmatic, yielding resources, connections and ideas she can use.
The line is funny because it admits what the executive costume tends to conceal: decision-making can be lonely, and peers are useful precisely because they understand the part no dashboard shows. Kaplan's style favors depth over drive-by charisma. A quieter room can carry better information.
When the audience became an electorate
In 2024, Kaplan placed her habits of evidence and persuasion into a more unruly system. She ran for the Howard County Board of Education in District 4, her first campaign for public office. Her platform emphasized fiscal responsibility, facilities, reliable transportation, classroom investment and preparing students for college or careers.
Kaplan led a three-candidate primary with 47.24 percent of the vote. In the general election she received 47.84 percent, finishing behind Jen Mallo. It was close enough to deny anyone the comfort of a sweeping moral. A public campaign also supplied a harder lesson in communication: an electorate does not agree on the dashboard, much less the target.
She continued local civic work in 2025 by joining the board of the Howard County Jewish Advocacy Group, contributing to near- and long-term strategic planning. Years earlier she had spent more than five years as webmaster for the Reservoir High School Boosters. Community work, in other words, was not invented for a campaign brochure.
There is a gentler artifact too. Kaplan co-authored Counting on Chicks, a children's counting book created to raise money for Heifer International. It is the sort of footnote that gives a résumé elbows: analyst, CMO, candidate, volunteer webmaster, children's author.
Useful before impressive
By the time Kaplan arrived at Higher Logic, her career had accumulated the familiar executive nouns: growth, strategy, brand, operations. Her verbs are more revealing. Listen. Ask. Build. Simplify. Call the customer. Show the opportunity. Adjust the plan.
In 2026, discussing private-equity-backed companies, she returned to the need to understand the investor's story and align marketing choices to it. The setting was new; the habit was old. Marketing cannot remain a private language spoken fluently only by marketers.
Kaplan's work suggests a practical definition of executive communication: make the complicated thing clear without pretending it was simple. The long plan still matters. So do the technology, the playbooks, the brand and the patient repair of foundations. But while all that is underway, send the useful email. Give colleagues something true they can see. Then get back to the notebook.