Mary MacIsaac goes to a friend's house and, sooner or later, the cupboard becomes market research. She opens the refrigerator. She studies the shelves. Then come the questions: Why did you buy this? What about that one? The ritual, she has admitted, drives her husband crazy. It also explains something essential about the executive who runs marketing at Canada's largest retailer. For MacIsaac, brands are not abstract assets stored in a presentation. They are choices sitting between the mustard and the milk, evidence of what a person valued in one ordinary moment.
That curiosity now operates at industrial scale. As executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Loblaw Companies Limited, MacIsaac leads marketing and a private-label portfolio that includes President's Choice, No Name, Life Brand and Farmer's Market. She sits on the company's Management Board. Her teams work across products, stores, promotions, digital experiences and reputation, all inside a business that reaches most Canadian households.
The job asks for two instincts that can pull in opposite directions. Build affection, but prove the business effect. Move quickly, but do not chase noise. Give a national portfolio a coherent point of view, but let a neighborhood store sound like the people who shop there. MacIsaac's answer is less a slogan than a cadence: listen continuously, connect the signals, make the work, then course-correct.
Curiosity needs an instrument panel
MacIsaac has a phrase for the acceleration she sees: marketing must move from the speed of retail to the speed of culture. The wording is sharp, but her version of speed is not frantic. She calls agility a discipline. That means creating systems that notice change before a campaign brief has hardened into assumptions.
Her team built a customer insight hub and a customer scorecard. Brand health sits at the top. Qualitative research supplies the texture. Stores provide operational feedback in real time. Social listening adds another current. Instead of treating insight as a study that ends, the system treats it as a pulse that changes. The important move is organizational: the observation in a store or online can travel into product development and seasonal storytelling.
The President's Choice Innovation Hub is where much of that current becomes tangible. Its work appears in the seasonal Insiders Report, a mix of product development and editorial theater. Holiday planning overlaps with summer work; the next product cycle begins while the current one is still reaching shelves. The portfolio is always running on several clocks.
“We need to focus on agility. And that agility has got to become a discipline for us.”Mary MacIsaac
One promise, five doors
President's Choice carried an unusual problem. The brand had moved well beyond groceries, yet many people still understood it primarily through food. Financial products, loyalty and grocery delivery shared the PC name without always sharing a clear place in the customer's mind. The internal portfolio made sense. The external story needed a spine.
“Possible Lives Here” became that spine. The work imagined an interlocking world in which PC employees helped make daily life easier, shifting the masterbrand from a collection of separate businesses to one idea about possibility. It did not ask the audience to study a corporate diagram. It dramatized the reason those services belonged together.
The reported results give the architecture weight: 69 percent awareness of all five business units, more than 106 million video views, more than one million clicks, 93 percent positive sentiment on social media and a 25 percent increase in belief in the uniqueness of the products and services. The One Show recognized the work in 2026, including a Bronze Pencil for moving-image craft and a Merit award.
The useful lesson is easy to miss amid the scale. A masterbrand earns coherence by making a promise broad enough to travel and precise enough to mean something. MacIsaac's team did not flatten the businesses into sameness. It gave them a common street to live on.
A backyard is a media channel
Another campaign started with a smaller, almost domestic constraint. Younger urban consumers wanted to host friends but often did not own a home or have a yard. For the 2025 Summer Insiders program, President's Choice and agency partner Zulu Alpha Kilo created Bookable Backyards, an Airbnb-like way to reserve a private outdoor space in Toronto or Vancouver for an afternoon of PC food.
The experience sold out quickly, logging more than 1,000 bookings. People generated hundreds of posts, and Insiders products recorded a 42 percent year-over-year sales increase. It worked because the campaign was not merely placed near a real problem. It briefly removed the problem. A brand that sold food for gatherings also supplied the missing place to gather.
Bars use separate scales and show reported magnitude, not a direct comparison.
The same sensitivity to place shaped work for No Frills. More than 300 owners operate in communities across Canada, each delivering the chain's value promise in a slightly different setting. For “The No Frills Thing To Do,” teams entered stores, recorded on iPhones and asked owners to speak about the cultural moments that mattered locally. Owners posted their own videos. The national brand supplied the frame; the community supplied the voice.
MacIsaac's earlier No Frills work already understood the power of tone. In 2016, she described the banner's DNA as plain, simple and fun: if shoppers did not want to pay for frills, the brand should say so without dressing up the message. A decade later, the method has become more participatory, but the center holds. Value is strongest when the execution itself feels economical and direct.
The coach inside the operator
MacIsaac arrived at Loblaw in 2011 after a career that moved through Corby Distilleries, Robin Hood Multifoods, Ontario Craft Brewers and BreakOut! Coaching and Consulting, along with work at Andrew Peller and Playtex. She also taught at the Canadian Management Centre and Toronto Metropolitan University. An MBA from York University's Schulich School of Business sits beside internationally recognized coaching credentials.
That mixed training makes sense for a portfolio job. Spirits, packaged food and craft beer teach category codes. Consulting teaches diagnosis. Coaching and instruction teach the less visible work of moving people through change. At Loblaw, her rise from vice president to senior vice president, Management Board member and CMO unfolded over 15 years, long enough to know the machinery and still question its habits.
Her public description of leadership contains four parts: creativity, innovation, customer obsession and comfort with data. Then come decisions, risk and course correction. It is a balanced list because modern marketing is a chain of handoffs. A clever thought must survive research, product, production, stores, media and the customer's judgment. No executive pushes all of that through alone.
MacIsaac has emphasized the collective in her own reflections, crediting marketing and brands colleagues as well as agency partners. She led Loblaw's Go Further Women employee resource group for more than three years and serves on the board of President's Choice Children's Charity. Colleagues publicly describe her as a mentor. The pattern is consistent with the coach's view of scale: better work appears when more people can make good decisions.
“You have to be customer obsessed. You need to be comfortable with data.”Mary MacIsaac
Love, measured daily
Strategy named MacIsaac one of its 2026 Marketers of the Year. Grocery Business selected her for its 2026 Hall of Fame class. Those recognitions arrived after a year of campaigns that moved between national feeling and household detail: a masterbrand designed to make separate services legible, local operators speaking in their own communities, and a backyard becoming a bookable stage for dinner.
Her most revealing line is also the simplest: “You've got to get up in the morning and go to bed at night loving your brands.” In weaker hands, brand love can sound like corporate romance. MacIsaac makes it practical. Love is opening the cupboard. It is checking the scorecard. It is asking an owner what the national office cannot know. It is changing course when the data says the customer moved.
The shopping cart has always moved quickly. What changed is the number of signals around it and the speed at which those signals become culture. MacIsaac's work suggests a way to keep up without losing the plot: stay close to ordinary life, build a system that can hear it, and let curiosity survive the trip from a friend's refrigerator to the boardroom.