community-marketing
(14)
Everywhere Agency Learned the Internet’s Oldest Trick: People Trust People
Before “influencer” became a line item, an Atlanta shop built a business around the stubborn fact that recommendations travel better through people than through media plans. Then the rest of advertising caught up.
The Switchboard Inside a $7 Billion Boom
Clarksville's economic-development office does not behave like a lone recruiter. It works as a switchboard - aligning industry, tourism, business, schools, and private money until a site, a workforce, and a story point in the same direction.
The Marketing Agency That Rides the Bus Before It Draws the Map
3fold Communications built its business around a stubborn idea: before an institution asks people to change, somebody should listen to how they actually live. The result is an agency that rides every bus route, turns recycling into a love story and measures trust in enrollment, ridership and action.
Luciano Kalil Still Opens the Dashboard Himself
Before AI agents became a boardroom obsession, Luciano Kalil had already spent decades turning messy human work into products. At Pipefy, the former programmer, repeat founder and community-marketing author has one governing habit: open the tool and look.
Cyntia Leo Knows Attention Must Be Earned
From a Broadway seat in childhood to the C-suite at Knix, Leo built a career by treating audiences as participants - and attention as something a brand has to deserve.
Catherine Wolpe Knows the Brand Is Built Between the Billboards
The former Princeton distance swimmer has spent nearly two decades learning why people choose, trust and gather around brands. At Bandit, her brief is to turn that discipline into a running company whose marketing behaves like part of the community.
Chris Mead’s Long Game: Make Insurance Matter Between the Games
Gallagher’s chief marketing officer treats sports sponsorship as a long relationship, not a logo rental. His playbook turns ballparks, rugby pitches and athlete transitions into a patient lesson in how a business earns attention.
Christa Hull Is Building the Marketing Channel You Cannot Buy
After two decades inside purpose-led lifestyle brands, the Vancouver fractional CMO is turning an old operating truth into a modern growth practice: belonging is built person by person.
The Instant Pot Sold Millions Without an Ad. Then the Debt Cooked It.
A computer scientist built a smarter pressure cooker, sold millions on word of mouth, and watched private equity turn a viral kitchen hit into a bankruptcy case study. Here is what the Instant Pot did, what it cost, and what a founder can actually copy.
Erik Thompson Makes Insurance Behave Like Entertainment
For two decades at Mercury Insurance, Erik Thompson has pursued a durable idea: when the product is complicated and the budget is finite, attention has to be earned with humor, culture and a reason to care.
Kyle Watson Turned a Fitness Niche Into a Brand Built for Everywhere
She learned marketing in stores, stadiums and scrappy beverage teams. Now Kyle Watson is protecting three distinct brand identities while turning community attention into durable growth.
Carolyn Manning Builds Brands at Human Speed
Across lululemon, Meetup, Outdoor Voices, Galileo and now Sage, Carolyn Manning has practiced a deliberate kind of marketing: listen closely, build the relationship, then let the brand earn its place.
Katie Babineau
Katie Babineau is the Chief Marketing Officer of Beyond Yoga, the Culver City premium activewear brand acquired by Levi Strauss & Co. in 2021. She spent roughly fifteen years in consumer technology - Sony Electronics, GoPro, Apple via TBWA\Media Arts Lab, and Snap Inc., where she was Global Head of Marketing - before joining Beyond Yoga as VP of Marketing in 2024 and stepping up to CMO. In 2025 she led the brand's first full reset, a platform called Seek Beyond built around the idea of progress over perfection, with actor and writer Issa Rae as the brand's first celebrity partner writing and performing a spoken-word anthem. She brings a test-and-learn technology mindset to apparel, argues loudly that brand and growth marketing should never be separated, and prefers hyperlocal, in-person community events to another round of picture-perfect ad creative.
Duel Tech
Duel is a London-founded B2B SaaS company that runs a Brand Advocacy Platform, helping consumer retail brands recruit, activate and scale tens of thousands of customers, creators, fans, employees and ambassadors into a measurable word-of-mouth growth channel. Founded in 2017 by adventurer-turned-entrepreneur Paul Archer and games developer Naio Tsarouchis, and certified as a B Corp, Duel powers advocacy programs for brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Lush, ELEMIS, Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and Pandora, and raised a $16M Series A in September 2025.