Lauren Beckstedt has a useful theory about opportunity: the people who raise their hands build networks faster. They are curious in public. They volunteer before every variable is settled. They become the person a colleague thinks of when the next difficult project appears. Beckstedt says that pattern opened many of the doors in her own career. It also explains how a marketer who once felt out of place in talent management ended up running enterprise marketing across Brunswick Corporation's sprawling marine portfolio.
The route was not plotted like a voyage. Beckstedt began in marketing and communications, joined the Brunswick organization through its former Life Fitness division in 2010, and worked on InMovement, a workplace product business that sat between furniture and wellness. The assignment required new language for a new category. It was an early lesson in translating technical credibility into a story a buyer could use.
Then came the detour. Brunswick moved her into talent strategy while the company was changing its operating model. She has said the role made her feel like an impostor at first. But a senior human-resources leader noticed an overlap: persuading employees to participate in a talent strategy resembles persuading consumers to participate in a brand. Both require insight, clarity and an understanding of behavior.
I talk a lot about hand raisers. They build networks faster.Lauren Beckstedt, Building Better CMOs
The detour was the training
Talent management became what Beckstedt calls a masterclass in leadership behaviors, high-performance teams and effective organizations. Just as important, the work put her alongside David Foulkes, then a senior operating leader and now Brunswick's chief executive. Together they saw a marketing function scattered across brands and agencies. A marketer sat here, another there, each solving a local problem. The portfolio had scale on paper, but its marketing capabilities did not consistently travel.
Beckstedt volunteered to help define the missing structure. By 2018 she was serving as chief marketing officer across several Brunswick divisions. In 2021, she became Enterprise CMO. The apparent zigzag - marketing to talent and back again - had given her exactly the perspective needed for the job. She understood that an operating model is not a diagram. It is a set of habits, incentives and relationships that either help people share what works or encourage them to rebuild it alone.
The work did not mean flattening Boston Whaler, Mercury Marine, Sea Ray, Lund, Freedom Boat Club and Navico Group into one voice. Their products, customers and purchase paths differ. The useful question was which capabilities should remain local and which lessons should cross the company. Media management developed at Freedom Boat Club, for example, could inform the boat brands even when the customer journeys were not the same. Learning once is cheaper than learning 60 times.
Listen before you launch
A connected portfolio needs a connected view of the customer. Beckstedt established Ripl, an advisory community of 15,000 boating enthusiasts across many brands. Members react to needs, interests, innovation previews, trends and even color palettes. Instead of treating research as a report that arrives after a decision, Ripl functions as an always-on listening post.
The distinction matters in boating because the category is inherited as much as it is purchased. People commonly enter through a close relationship - a father, brother, grandfather or friend who already knows the rituals. Beckstedt worries about whether children are still growing up with those experiences and how the industry can create new points of entry when they are not. Boat ownership is only one path. Membership through Freedom Boat Club and products such as Flite electric foils offer other ways onto the water.
That expansion agenda is commercial, but it is also personal for her. Beckstedt moved from fitness to marine, two categories built around passionate lifestyles. She travels most weeks and has estimated that she personally attends roughly 50 boat shows a year. The docks no longer feel wobbly. Getting onto boats and onto the water, she says, is a privilege of the job. Her family has a boat on Lake Michigan and a Lund kept on an inland lake.
Brand is memory; performance is motion
Beckstedt gives marketing a plain-language job description: build strong brands and generate demand. The simplicity is deliberate. It gives finance, sales and operating leaders something they can repeat. It also protects against a familiar mistake. When budgets tighten, measurable performance activity attracts money because it produces a quick receipt. But an endless stream of sales messages gives a consumer little material from which to form an opinion about a premium product.
Her case is not an argument against accountability. It is the opposite. Digital interactions create evidence that can shape the entire marketing mix. Brunswick has used weekly demand and inventory planning, test-and-learn investments and quarterly business reviews to connect marketing choices with commercial conditions. In one difficult market, Beckstedt entered a meeting expecting to defend a plan to double spending in a few test markets. Business leaders, including the chief financial officer, told the team to run it. The greater risk was learning nothing.
Without a strong analytics capability, you are flying blind.Lauren Beckstedt, digital transformation case study
The 2026 ChicagoCMO ORBIE program credited the resulting operating model with more than doubling marketing-attributable revenue, lowering acquisition costs and expanding customer lifetime value. Brunswick's own announcement described an integrated enterprise model connecting brand, digital, data and customer experience. Beckstedt received the Global CMO of the Year award in May, but her response was telling: she put her marketing team and cross-functional partners at the center of the recognition.
Networks start with one specific ask
The hand-raiser philosophy extends beyond assignments. Beckstedt once told her father that her network had grown organically and that she was unsure where her career was headed. He advised her not to stay in the box, to ask people for help and, crucially, to follow through when someone suggested meeting. She took the advice literally.
Beckstedt contacted an adviser at Kellogg and asked for one introduction relevant to rebuilding her network. The adviser connected her with Deb Wahl, then chief marketing officer of General Motors. Beckstedt did her homework, identified similarities in the companies' channel transformations and noticed Wahl's work with the Marketing + Media Alliance. At the end of their conversation, she asked for a connection. MMA chief executive Greg Stuart called within days. Beckstedt later joined the organization's North American board.
This is networking stripped of its cocktail-hour fog. The sequence was precise: decide what you need, ask one trusted person, prepare for the conversation, find the shared problem, then make a modest next request. Curiosity created the opening; preparation made the opening useful.
Raise your hand for work that expands your range. Write down what you are learning when the organization lacks a common language. Ask for one relevant introduction, not a vague network. Protect each brand's real differences while moving reusable capabilities across the portfolio. Put consumers near the start of the decision, not at the end.
The next competition is the experience
Beckstedt expects artificial intelligence to make information easier and faster to obtain. When product education becomes less scarce, she argues, brands will compete closer to the consumer, through the quality and continuity of the experience. For a company spanning engines, electronics, boats, memberships, dealers and digital tools, that is a formidable coordination problem. The customer does not care where one business unit ends and another begins.
It is also a natural extension of her career. Marketing taught her to move consumers. Talent strategy taught her to move organizations. Portfolio leadership requires both. The aspiration is not only to sell more boats, but to broaden participation, keep boating relevant for a new generation and make the journey onto the water feel less fragmented.
Her favorite practical advice about boating doubles as a management principle. You will sometimes hit things, she says. The art is to go slowly into them. It is a funny line because it rejects the polished fiction of flawless leadership. Beckstedt has said that leaders should be candid about the mess and trade-offs behind the scenes, especially so younger colleagues do not conclude that perfection is the price of advancement.
A goal still matters. She tells teams they need an objective, then adds that they may change their minds a hundred times. Direction and rigidity are not the same. The most interesting part of Beckstedt's career is not that every turn now appears inevitable. It is that she kept moving before it did.