Business Growth Strategies For CEOs: Top CMOs On Marketing Strategy Implementations

Adriana Lynch

Strategy and brand management leader Adriana Lynch has more than 20 years of global experience in the consumer products, healthcare, skin care, leisure, hospitality, and food industries. She joins Chief Outsiders as a fractional CMO after serving in roles as Director of Strategic Brand Management at The Walt Disney Corporation, VP of Family Meals and Multicultural Marketing at ConAgra Foods, and CEO of the HearAid Foundation. Her brand positioning and international experience led her to work with well-known brands such as Pillsbury, Haagen-Dazs, and Disneyland Resort, where she utilized her deep knowledge of Latin culture, cultural consumer needs, and consumer behavior to move into new markets, launch new products, and maximize revenues. Lynch is a Harvard Business School graduate and speaks fluent English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

What Is Marketing, Really? Why Founders and CEOs Must Lead the Most Misunderstood Function in the Business

Thu, Jul 9, 2026 | Posted by Michael Lang

Executive Takeaways

Marketing is a core enterprise capability, not a support function, and deserves the same CEO-level engagement as Finance and Operations.
Without a unifying system, individually reasonable decisions accumulate into random acts of marketing.
Modern tools make execution faster, but they don't create strategic clarity, so the gap between activity and alignment keeps widening.
CEOs can't delegate marketing entirely. Leading it means ensuring insight, strategy, and execution stay connected.

This blog is part of Chief Outsiders’ Marketing Leadership for CEOs series, an ongoing examination of the critical dimensions of Marketing (the capital “M” is intentional, as you’ll see) that every CEO needs to understand.

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Maximizing your Digital Marketing Channel Mix

Wed, Apr 17, 2019 — “Going digital” with your marketing mix has never been more essential. Most advertisers continue to increase their digital marketing spend in 2019 as billions of consumers are using online social media as a jumping off point into purchase decisions. With more money flowing into digital marketing, the digital channel mix continues to grow in complexity. Though search marketing, display advertising, social media, and mobile remain the mainstays of a digital advertising footprint, each has its role in supporting a particular business objective. When integrated properly, they maximize how we attract consumers, and turn visits into revenue. But before you leap into the digital marketing fray, it’s critical to understand your enterprise’s goals and objectives: Are you seeking to simply educate the public about an innovative offer (market education)? Do you want a target audience to gain greater awareness of your offering as a viable alternative (Brand Awareness)? Are you simply looking for more people to buy your product (raw traffic)? Or, do you want to motivate your current consumers to buy more of your product (higher net per sales)?

Building a Long-Lasting Relationship Between Hispanic Consumers and Your Business

Tue, Sep 18, 2018 — When a business looks at how to approach the U.S. Hispanic consumer, it is quite easy for it to rely on commonly known facts: Family is important to them, their households are larger, and they over-index usage of mobile devices to gather information and shop online. Let’s not forget that they love soccer – and are deeply religious. However, to develop the most meaningful connection, it’s essential to dig a little deeper than the obvious. The same analytical rigor and behavioral curiosity we apply to our core US consumer (also known as the general population) needs to be involved in studying the Hispanic consumer and how they relate to your category. First, we’ll begin with an examination of the data, then uncover insights to understand what truly matters to this exquisite target.

The US Hispanic Consumer Cultural Evolution: You CAN Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Tue, Sep 4, 2018 — Hispanics, or Latinos (which kindly includes my native country, Brazil, where we speak Portuguese), have been a strong influence in the US economy for decades. As an integral part of the workforce seeking the “American Dream”, more and more Latinos tried, as time went by, to “fit-in” to the American culture to succeed and achieve that Dream. Latino parents would only speak English with their kids, so they would fit-in in school. When American neighbors came to visit, they made sure to serve peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the kids and hot dogs for the adults (“keep the tamales in the fridge, Mi Amor!”). You get the picture. The process of trying to “fit-in” to an alien culture is called acculturation. It does not have much, if anything, to do with which generation you belong to, but it is a phenomenon statistically proven to be correlated with two major variables: How easily you flip-flop from your native language to the country language. In this case, how effortlessly a Latino goes back and forth between Spanish (or Portuguese) and English, and; How similar the purchase basket is of a Latino family or individual to an American one.

Growth Insights for CEOs