Michelle Montgomery sets the rhythm for a brand

Marketing a mattress and marketing an insurance claim seem like unrelated assignments. One is soft, physical and tried under showroom lights. The other becomes real after damage, delay or disruption, when a promise has to turn into action. Michelle Montgomery has worked on both. Her career connects them through a question that most campaigns politely avoid: who explains the value when the marketing team is not in the room?

For a mattress brand, that person might be a retail sales associate standing among rows of nearly identical white rectangles. For Crawford & Company, the global claims-management business where Montgomery is chief marketing officer, it might be an adjuster, account manager or client-facing colleague. The person receiving the message does not separate the logo from the service. The explanation, the follow-through and the experience arrive as one thing.

Montgomery’s answer is to treat those people as participants in the brand rather than the final stop in a distribution chain. It is a simple position, but it changes the work. Marketing has to supply language colleagues can use, proof they can stand behind and a steady cadence that keeps a large organization moving together. The campaign is only one piece. The handoff is the job.

A career built on the handoff

Montgomery studied communications and government at American University in Washington, D.C., graduating with a double major. The pairing feels apt for the career that followed. Communications asks how an idea moves. Government asks how institutions coordinate people, incentives and decisions. Her professional education continued in agencies, where the distance between a good idea and a client’s willingness to act on it is impossible to ignore.

She moved through account leadership roles at WestWayne, Huey/Paprocki, Huey+Partners and Brunner. Along the way, her work touched companies and institutions including AT&T/BellSouth, Mizuno, Eaton, CNN, Russell Athletic, Mohawk Industries and the U.S. Library of Congress. The list ranges from shoes to industrial systems to public culture. The useful skill across them was not fluency in one category. It was learning a business quickly, finding the part of its story that could travel and aligning the people required to carry it.

Agency work also shaped how Montgomery later led corporate teams. She has said she does not use the word vendor for agencies. She considers them an “extension of our team.” That choice is more than courtesy. People asked merely to execute an order will optimize for completing it. People invited into the problem can share ownership of the result. Her leadership language returns often to broad collaboration, multiple perspectives and accountability.

Selling sleep when the showroom moved online

In 2012, Montgomery joined Serta Simmons Bedding and took responsibility for marketing communications for Beautyrest. Mattress shopping was being rearranged by online research, direct-to-consumer entrants, retailer consolidation and reviews. A shopper’s first encounter with the product increasingly happened before a store visit. By 2018, Montgomery said 63 percent of the brand’s marketing spend was digital, across paid, earned and owned channels.

The response combined consumer content, influencer work, retailer education and digital tools. Beautyrest developed material that gave shoppers reasons to believe and gave retail sales associates a clearer way to explain what they were selling. An augmented-reality tool let people look inside a mattress instead of relying on a field of similar surfaces. A video series translated confusing details into plain language. A business-to-business learning site helped associates build category knowledge, not merely memorize a promotion.

Montgomery once described the brand’s success as depending partly on the “kindness of strangers.” The phrase is playful, but its economics are serious. Beautyrest did not employ the people in every retail store. Yet those associates controlled an important moment of explanation. Marketing could buy attention, but attention would eventually arrive in a conversation the brand did not own.

At the 2018 SXSW Music Festival, the strategy became physical. Beautyrest partnered on the North American debut of Max Richter’s eight-hour composition Sleep. Mattresses replaced conventional concert seats for an overnight performance. The scene was memorable because the product belonged there. It gave festival-goers an experience worth sharing while making the brand promise tangible without a long explanation.

Crawford later credited Montgomery’s Beautyrest tenure with doubling consumer awareness and helping the brand reach the number two market-share position for the first time in a decade. The durable lesson was less about a particular medium than about designing for the people and moments between a company and its customer.

Turning an internal service desk into a strategic function

Montgomery joined Crawford in 2018 as vice president of global marketing and communications, then became chief marketing officer in 2021. Crawford sits across a broad claims ecosystem, from loss adjusting and third-party administration to catastrophe response, managed repair and forensic services. Its audiences include clients, employees, shareholders and people encountering the company during the practical work of a claim.

The company describes the marketing and communications group she inherited as task-driven. That is a familiar corporate trap. A business unit asks for a brochure, a presentation or a launch. The team produces the asset. The queue moves, but the underlying decision may never get sharper. Montgomery helped move the group toward a strategic role, involved with business leaders and organizational priorities rather than waiting downstream for requests.

Her remit now includes global marketing, corporate communications and social responsibility strategy. As a member of the executive leadership team, she works across functions to connect Crawford’s purpose and values to the programs the company runs. The change is organizational as much as creative. A global service business cannot build a consistent reputation through a central team alone. It needs colleagues across markets to understand what the company offers, why it matters and how to say it without sounding as if they swallowed a script.

That sentence carries a useful constraint. If employees are the brand, communications must begin inside the company. A new initiative has to make sense to the people expected to explain or deliver it before it can feel credible to a client. Client-facing colleagues possess direct evidence of whether the corporate story survives contact with daily work. Their confidence is both a distribution advantage and an early warning system.

Keeping time while other people take the lead

Montgomery’s most revealing metaphor comes from music. At a consumer icon, marketing might look like the singer or lead guitarist. At Crawford, she sees her team more like the bassist. The role is less visible but structurally important: establish the rhythm, help everyone stay in time and create room for colleagues closer to the client to take the lead.

It is a modest image for a C-suite function, and a demanding one. Rhythm requires repetition. It means equipping salespeople and account teams with a consistent narrative, then maintaining it across countries, services and media. It also means accepting that the best evidence of marketing’s work may appear in somebody else’s conversation. The bassist knows the song is working when the band sounds coherent.

This approach also explains Montgomery’s emphasis on relationships. In business-to-business marketing, paid activity can create visibility. Communications builds the ties through which a complex service becomes understandable and trustworthy. Crawford’s claims professionals and client teams are not merely subjects for a campaign. They are the channel through which the company’s competence becomes legible.

Her public comments about colleagues reinforce the point. At the end of 2020, she thanked her Crawford team for dedication, support and friendship. She has also been publicly involved with OnBoard, a Georgia organization focused on women in boardrooms and executive roles, and World 50, a community for senior executives. Earlier, she served on the board of Atlanta nonprofit Our House. These connections place her career inside a wider pattern of team building, professional networks and local civic life.

Purpose has to survive a difficult day

Insurance tests brand language under pressure. A slogan can sound polished when nothing has happened. A claim asks whether the operating system behind the words works. Montgomery has called purpose a “guiding light,” a phrase that makes sense only if it affects choices: which opportunities fit, how people behave and what the company is willing to promise.

Her career suggests that brand building is a form of coordination. At Beautyrest, it coordinated digital discovery, retail education and product experience. At Crawford, it coordinates a global organization around people who must respond with clarity and care. In both places, the customer’s impression is shaped by someone who cannot be managed through a media plan.

This is why Montgomery’s story feels less like a tour through two industries than a long study of trust at the edge of an organization. She keeps returning to the moment when the official story leaves corporate hands. A retail associate picks it up. An agency partner improves it. A claims professional has to make it true.

The CMO’s work, in her telling, is to prepare that moment. Set the rhythm. Invite the right people into the process. Make the language clear enough to travel and the experience solid enough to support it. Then let the person closest to the customer carry the melody.