A bank marketer is expected to speak fluently about customers, channels and growth. Suzy DePrizio can do that. She can also talk about navigation with the authority of someone who spent more than nine years as a U.S. Navy officer, accepted a forward deployment in Japan and worked across four continents. The unusual part of her résumé is not simply the distance traveled. It is the clean line connecting those assignments to the work she does now as a senior vice president of marketing at CIBC.
DePrizio has changed sectors more than once: military service, consumer brands, a large public enterprise, then financial services. Yet her own explanation of the career is strikingly consistent. She uses three North Stars: service, leaving a mark, and always learning and growing. They are broad enough to survive a career change, but specific enough to reject a role that merely looks impressive.
This is a practical philosophy, not a slogan polished after the fact. Her father encouraged her early to map out who she wanted to be, where she wanted to go and whom she wanted to take along. The language of navigation stuck. So did the idea that direction should precede motion.
The mission before the message
By 28, DePrizio had become Deputy Director of Government Affairs for the U.S. Pacific Command. Her job involved securing congressional support for programs and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding across the Asia-Pacific region. The scale is useful context. So is the structure of the task: understand a complex institution, translate priorities for a different audience, align many parties and keep the mission visible.
A public record from that period makes the behind-the-scenes work visible. In November 2001, Senator Daniel Inouye entered a Senate tribute to Lt. Suzanne R. DePrizio, noting her preparation for congressional testimony, coordination of congressional travel and ability to provide timely, accurate information. The praise arrived as she prepared to leave active duty for a civilian career. It reads now like a bridge between the two.
Those are marketing skills before anyone calls them marketing. A budget request and a brand campaign are not the same object, of course. But both fail when the audience cannot see why the proposition matters. Both become vulnerable when specialists optimize their own piece while losing the shared outcome.
DePrizio later gave that failure mode a memorable label: “collaboration paralysis.” It describes the corporate project with generous attendance and poor propulsion. Everyone contributes. Nobody quite owns the destination. Meetings become a substitute for movement.
“If I don’t regularly have butterflies in my stomach, then I’m getting too complacent and not pushing myself.”Suzy DePrizio on learning and growth
Her answer begins with the basics that military organizations make explicit: a shared goal, defined roles and a leader. Diversity of thought becomes powerful after the team knows what it is trying to accomplish. Without that center, collaboration expands sideways. With it, disagreement can sharpen the work rather than stall it.
Sixteen years in the same laboratory
After the Navy, DePrizio joined Johnson & Johnson and stayed for 16 years. Long tenure can be mistaken for a narrow experience. Hers moved through brand building, customer strategy, turnaround work, digital commerce and executive leadership in both Canada and the United States.
She eventually became Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Customer Strategy for the company’s Canadian consumer business. Later, she led digital and e-commerce transformation for its U.S. consumer operation. That sequence matters. Digital transformation is often presented as a technology program. A leader who comes through consumer marketing sees the other half: changing how an old organization understands demand, makes decisions and meets customers where they already are.
One campaign offers a compact case study. In 2019, DePrizio was credited as head of marketing on Motrin’s “Tina’s Uterus,” a deliberately comic platform designed for an audience that had stopped paying attention. The campaign won a Silver Strategy Award for turnaround strategy, and the awards record reported a 16 percent sales increase. Her public profile also lists two bronze Effie Canada awards that year, one for that work and another for an integrated Reactine campaign.
The campaign is useful because it joins creativity to an operating result. The joke earned attention; the category insight gave it purpose; the sales movement made the argument legible inside the company. DePrizio’s career repeatedly lands at that intersection between imaginative work and institutional proof.
More than nine years of service, with assignments across four continents.
Brand leadership, customer strategy, turnarounds and digital commerce.
Joined as senior vice president and chief marketing officer.
Appointed to the national board.
Began a new chapter as senior vice president of marketing.
A larger stage for service
In May 2021, DePrizio became a senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Centene. The move placed her in charge of marketing strategy, brand position and advertising across a broad portfolio. It also checked the boxes she had set for herself: service, impact and room to grow.
A year later, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America appointed her to its national board. The role provides a revealing extension of her executive work. Mentorship, in DePrizio’s telling, is not a pleasant activity around the edge of leadership. It is a way to make leadership compound. A person clarifies her own North Stars, then helps somebody else name theirs.
Her board appointment also tied together several strands of the résumé: organizational leadership, marketing, nearly a decade of military service and a long interest in developing people. “It’s an honor to join the BBBSA board at such a crucial time for our nation’s youth,” she said when the appointment was announced. The emphasis was on creating broader access to mentorship.
There is something circular in the image of DePrizio at an American Legion convention in 2023, standing at a lectern before veterans and military leaders. Her commercial career had taken her far from a wardroom, but the language remained collaborative: shared commitment, joining forces, serving a community. Different institution, familiar grammar.
The bank chapter
DePrizio joined CIBC in January 2025. The move brought her consumer, transformation and organizational experience into personal and business banking, a category where trust must coexist with constant pressure to simplify. The products are technical. The customer’s question rarely is. People want to know whether a financial institution understands the life on the other side of the transaction.
Recent work shows the shape of the brief. When CIBC subsidiary Simplii Financial appointed Courage as its creative agency of record, DePrizio praised the agency’s ability to express “the emotional side of money.” It is a compact phrase for a large marketing problem. Rates and features can be compared in a table. Feelings about control, possibility, confusion and confidence require another vocabulary.
She was also credited on CIBC Aventura’s 2026 “Everyday, Elsewhere” campaign, built around the idea that ordinary moments become more interesting when travel moves them somewhere new. Meanwhile, her marketing team convened a session on search, artificial intelligence and brand legibility: how a bank gets found, understood and trusted when machines increasingly mediate discovery.
These are different assignments, but they orbit the same question: can a complex organization make its purpose clear to a real person? DePrizio’s record suggests that clarity is not produced by copy alone. It comes from the operating system behind the copy - the goal, the roles, the insight and the willingness to change old habits.
The portable operating system
The easiest way to flatten a career like DePrizio’s is to call it an unlikely journey. That makes the transitions sound accidental and the lessons hard to use. A better reading is that she has been translating the same capabilities into new settings: mission clarity, audience understanding, coordinated execution, service and a tolerance for useful discomfort.
Her education reinforces the pattern. At Harvard, where she studied government on a four-year Navy ROTC scholarship, institutions and public purpose were already part of the frame. Duke’s Fuqua School of Business later supplied a commercial vocabulary for choices about markets, teams and value. Neither credential predicts a Motrin turnaround or a CIBC campaign. Together, though, they reveal a habit of crossing boundaries without discarding what came before. Government affairs informed stakeholder management. Military planning informed execution. Consumer work sharpened empathy. Business training helped join those pieces to a result. The stack is more interesting than any single line on the résumé because each layer makes the next one more useful.
Her “butterflies” test is especially human. Senior executives are usually rewarded for projecting certainty. DePrizio treats a little unease as evidence that learning is still happening. The point is not to chase chaos. It is to notice when competence has quietly become complacency.
A North Star does not remove hard choices. It makes them comparable. Does this opportunity serve? Can it leave a mark? Will it demand growth? Three questions carried from the Navy to consumer brands to a bank are enough to explain a career, and perhaps enough to redirect one.