A Career Measured in Parades
There is a certain kind of professional who joins a company young, blinks, and finds three decades have passed with the same logo on the paycheck. Martine Reardon is that kind of professional, except the logo happened to be a red star, and the company happened to throw the largest parade in America. Few marketers can claim a résumé line reading "responsible for a 90-foot inflatable Snoopy." Reardon can, and she says it with a straight face.
She began at the bottom rung, in the special events department at Abraham & Straus, then part of the Federated Department Stores family that would eventually become Macy's, Inc. It was not a glamorous start. Special events is the corner of retail where someone has to make sure the ribbon is cut, the celebrity arrives on time, and the champagne is cold. It is also, as it turns out, an excellent finishing school for a future Chief Marketing Officer, because it teaches you that a brand is not a logo. It is a feeling people carry home.
By 2007 she was Executive Vice President of national marketing strategy, events and public relations. By 2009 she ran marketing outright. And in February 2012, she was named Chief Marketing Officer of one of the most recognizable retail brands in the country - a job that put her in charge of roughly 1,300 people across advertising, creative, brand development, social, mobile, digital, public relations, cause marketing, and the small matter of consumer data.
The Spectacle Business
Most CMOs measure their work in impressions and click-through rates. Reardon measured hers in balloons, floats and fireworks. As CMO she presided over the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Fourth of July fireworks - two events watched by tens of millions of people who, crucially, do not think of them as advertising at all. That was rather the point.
She understood something that eludes a lot of modern marketers: a tradition is the most durable form of brand equity there is. You cannot buy your way into being part of a family's Thanksgiving morning. You have to earn it over generations and then, having earned it, resist the urge to ruin it. "Our iconic events are part of the DNA of the Macy's brand," she said. "For generations, Macy's has been at the center of the traditions of millions of families across the nation and the world." It is the sort of line that could sound like corporate boilerplate, except that in her case the balloons actually flew.
Heritage Meets the Smartphone
The trickier assignment was keeping a very old brand feeling very new. Macy's roots stretch back to the 19th century, and legacy is a lovely thing to inherit and a terrifying thing to modernize. Reardon's approach was cheerfully blunt. "I'm very proud to say that Macy's is excellent at newness," she declared, which is not a sentence most people would associate with a department store, and which is precisely why she kept saying it.
Under her watch the company leaned into mobile and social when both were still novelties for a retailer of that scale, earning her a spot in the Mobile Marketing Hall of Fame. She talked about testing "newness" in the omni-channel strategy back when "omni-channel" still required a definition. The work paid off in hardware: her teams collected Emmys, Reggies, Clios, Effies, Racies and Art Directors Club Awards, an alphabet of validation that spanned television, advertising and retail.
Knowing When to Take a Bow
In April 2016, after 32 years, Reardon announced she would leave, effective that May. There was no scandal, no palace intrigue, no carefully worded statement papering over a fight. There was, instead, a rather refreshing lack of drama. "It's been an amazing run - three decades of building this incredible brand," she said. "It was a privilege. I loved it." You get the sense she meant it.
Retirement, however, was never really on the table. She joined the National Retail Federation as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive VP of content and membership, later shifting into a strategic advisory role on content and retail strategy for the industry's largest trade group. She took board seats too, becoming an independent director at Empire Company and its Sobeys grocery chain, and lending her time to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Illinois. The marketer who spent a career making a department store feel like a national institution simply moved on to making the whole industry's case.
The Human in the Machine
These days the retail conversation is all algorithms and artificial intelligence, and Reardon is happy to talk shop about it - with one caveat that reveals exactly where her instincts lie. Personalization will keep advancing through AI and robotics, she allows, but "machines cannot replicate human empathy," and empathy, in her telling, is the whole game. It is a fitting conclusion from someone who built a career on the idea that the best marketing does not feel like marketing at all. It feels like a parade you would have watched anyway.
For a brand as large as Macy's, that instinct was worth a great deal. Reardon's marketing years lined up with a run of comparable-sales growth for the company, and her fingerprints were on the campaigns, the stunts, the spectacles and the sheer institutional stubbornness that kept a heritage retailer culturally relevant deep into the digital age. Not bad for someone who started out making sure the ribbon got cut.