There is a certain kind of marketing job that arrives with a campaign calendar, a tidy org chart and a cupboard full of branded pens. Rebecca Heron seems to prefer the other kind. Her public career comes into focus at moments when the machinery is incomplete: a team that does not yet exist, a demand engine taking its first turn, a company assembled through acquisitions that needs to explain itself as one company. These are less like blank canvases than rooms full of labeled boxes. The creative act is deciding what belongs together.
Today, Heron is Chief Marketing Officer at Lexipol, the public-safety technology company whose products serve law enforcement, fire and rescue, emergency medical services, corrections and local government. Its work spans policy management, training, reporting and grant assistance. That is a broad portfolio sold to audiences for whom a vague promise is not merely annoying. Their working lives are structured by procedure, documentation and consequence.
Heron’s public footprint is restrained. There is no sprawling archive of keynote performances or personal manifestos. What exists is more useful: a set of comments from her previous role at PerkSpot, plus a later colleague’s account of the work at Lexipol. Read together, they show a marketer with a durable thesis. Marketing should help decide how a business grows, build the system that supports that decision and then measure what happened.
Start with the empty org chart
At the beginning of 2021, PerkSpot did not have a dedicated team focused on client marketing and demand. Heron, then its Vice President of Marketing, built one. By early 2022, she said, the team had reached six people and was growing. It was beginning PerkSpot’s first serious work in digital marketing and demand generation, learning the audience while building the function intended to reach it.
Her description of the year was candid about the team’s infancy, but not apologetic. They planned. They tested. They learned. They went into the market to understand the people they hoped to reach. The sequence is almost comically sensible, which may be why so many companies skip it. An organization can buy software in an afternoon. It cannot purchase judgment with the same speed.
PerkSpot’s product was an employee discount marketplace offered through employers. In early 2022, when retaining workers had become a boardroom concern, Heron framed practical benefits as part of the employee experience. She was speaking for a company that had added 150 clients during 2021, according to a fellow PerkSpot executive interviewed alongside her. The new marketing function was being built inside a business experiencing rapid demand, not in the calm of a rehearsal room.
A seat comes with a scoreboard
Heron had set a condition before joining PerkSpot. She would make the move only if the company and its leadership treated marketing as a strategic growth driver. She wanted an appetite for investment in people, technology and resources, along with permission to test, learn and improve. She had no interest in a department confined to making internal requests look attractive.
“They don’t want to be order-takers, they want to be strategic growth drivers.”Rebecca Heron, on what marketers seek from leadership
The distinction is sharp, but it is not a demand for prestige. Strategic influence brings a bill. Heron spoke about measuring marketing so the team could see its effect on the business and on revenue. The reward was directness: a person could connect her work to a change in the company instead of watching it disappear into a folder called “assets.”
This is the operator in Heron’s approach. The work begins with an argument about what marketing is for, then proceeds through hiring, technology, experiments and measurement. Brand and demand are not rival camps in this picture. Brand makes the company easier to understand; demand tests whether that understanding travels.
Marketing asks to shape growth. In return, it accepts measurement, cross-functional work and responsibility for whether the story produces movement.
Let the customer referee the meeting
Building a new function creates borders. Product has its language. Sales has its urgency. Marketing has its channels. Design has standards worth defending. PerkSpot’s antidote, in Heron’s account, was to keep returning to the member using the service. Specialists remained specialists, but the customer supplied a shared point of reference.
“People here are specialists in their area, but nobody is territorial.”Rebecca Heron, describing collaboration at PerkSpot
That observation contains more management theory than it first appears to. Territoriality thrives when teams measure success in incompatible currencies. A shared customer does not erase disagreement, but it gives disagreement somewhere productive to go. Which choice makes the experience clearer? Which message helps the buyer decide? Which channel reaches a real need rather than flattering the department that proposed it?
Heron’s PerkSpot colleagues described cross-functional work among product, client success, business intelligence and design. Her own contribution was to make customer focus a working rule rather than a decorative phrase. The rule travels well because it does not depend on the category. Employee benefits and public-safety software look unrelated until one notices that both ask an institution to choose a service that other people will use.
From perks to public safety
Lexipol presents a more intricate storytelling problem. The company began with law-enforcement policy manuals and daily training bulletins, then expanded across disciplines and capabilities. Acquisitions added online learning, grant services, public-safety media properties and reporting tools. By 2022, Lexipol said it served more than 10,000 agencies and municipalities in the United States and Canada. The company continued to add capabilities after that.
To a customer, this breadth can be useful. To a marketer, it can also become a small republic of product names, inherited messages and competing histories. Every acquired brand arrives with people who care about it and customers who recognize it. Consolidation therefore requires more delicacy than changing a sign. The task is to preserve the value while removing the friction.
The portfolio problem Heron helps make legible
In February 2026, former Lexipol revenue executive Jason Blais offered a glimpse of that work. Reflecting on two years at the company, he described a long-needed effort to gather acquired brands under the flagship Lexipol identity and sharpen the way the business appeared as one partner with a portfolio of solutions. He credited Heron and senior marketing leader Shannon Pieper with driving the work and steadying marketing through a year of significant change.
The phrase “brand cleanup” can make this sound like housekeeping. In a multi-product company, it is closer to urban planning. Names create routes through a portfolio. Positioning decides where the roads lead. A coherent identity reduces the number of translations required in a sales conversation and gives demand generation a clearer destination. The aesthetic layer matters, but the larger prize is organizational comprehension.
The discipline of making things legible
Heron’s known work at PerkSpot and Lexipol is separated by category, scale and stakes. The method remains recognizable. Build capacity where none exists. Learn the audience instead of performing certainty. Give specialists a common customer. Link marketing activity to business results. When expansion produces a thicket of names, make the portfolio navigable again.
There is also a refreshing absence of romance in this method. Marketing is not treated as corporate magic. It is a set of choices, systems and feedback loops performed by people with distinct skills. Heron argued for those skills to be respected in the same way a company respects technical or financial expertise. Respect, in her version, is paired with accountability.
That combination helps explain the progression from building a six-person team to leading marketing at a public-safety platform. The CMO title can invite grand declarations. Heron’s public record points toward something sturdier: make the work visible, make the organization intelligible and make the numbers available for inspection.
A company that grows by acquisition eventually has to answer a childishly difficult question: what are we, together? A company building its first demand function faces a related one: how will we know if this works? Heron has occupied both questions. Her answers are operational before they are ornamental.
The result is a career best understood through verbs rather than adjectives. Build. Test. Learn. Measure. Unify. None is glamorous on its own. Put them in the right order, and marketing becomes something more valuable than a louder voice. It becomes the discipline that helps a complicated company speak plainly.