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Another CMO Makes the Uncommon Leap; Cracker Barrel Quantifies the Pain; Starbucks CEO Says Nobody Wants to See a Robot Make Espresso
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Good morning. Today, the fitful CMO-to-CEO pipeline comes to life at Hinge; Cracker Barrel cuts ad spending to match the moment; and Starbucks likes its technology out of customers’ sight.
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Hinge marketing under Jackie Jantos has focused on Gen Z singles. Kate Green/Getty Images
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Match Group said Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod is stepping down to start Overtone, an AI-driven dating app in which Match will lead the first funding round.
It’s an unusual strategy to find new growth in the challenging dating sector, but Match didn’t stop there, Josée Rose and Katie Deighton write. It also promoted Jackie Jantos, president and chief marketing officer of Hinge, to succeed McLeod as CEO.
I asked Katie, my colleague at the WSJ Leadership Institute, why that might be surprising. She said:
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Jantos joins a growing but exclusive group of marketers who have landed CEO roles. The club includes Starbucks chief Brian Niccol, once the CMO of Pizza Hut and later Taco Bell, and Krisin Lemkau, who was promoted to run J.P. Morgan Wealth Management after almost six years as CMO of J.P. Morgan Chase.
Only 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs had marketing experience when McKinsey considered the question in 2023. Only 4% had ever held a CMO-like role, with most coming from operations or finance.
The sigh of marketers, who say their contributions aren’t taken seriously, has lasted for decades. Consultants and recruiters counter that they’re often just bad at proving their worth among the C-suite.
For Jantos, though, the figures were clear. Revenue and user growth were so healthy in the first half that Match Group’s CEO said on an August earnings call, “Hinge is crushing it.”
Jantos had also already been leading much of Hinge’s day-to-day business in her role as president.
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Katie also points out that Jantos’s successor as CMO is Tamika Young, a PR operator through-and-through. As advertising holding companies consolidate the agencies where many marketing executives have started out in the past, maybe the typical path to CMO is changing too.
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Content from our sponsor: Deloitte
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Customer Experience in Banking M&A: Minimize Disruption, Unlock Value
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When banks put customers at the forefront of strategic decision-making, mergers and acquisitions can present an opportunity to deepen relationships and unlock long-term deal value. Read More
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Working Through Some Issues
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Julie Felss Masino, president and CEO of Cracker Barrel, said the chain is ‘rebuilding trust one guest at a time.’ Jeenah Moon/Reuters
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The numbers are in on Cracker Barrel’s late-summer rebrand-and retraction:
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Restaurant same-store sales over the three months ended Oct. 31 declined 4.7%.
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The chain’s retail business fell 8.5%.
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And a 1% decline in foot traffic in the first half of August turned into a 9% drop for the period as a whole as the debacle grew.
And the company’s not out of the woods:
Foot traffic is off 11% this quarter so far, though it seems to have stabilized.
So what’s next? Not a brand-repair blitz. The company plans to cut advertising this quarter by $12 million to $16 million from a year earlier.
“We have a brand reputation issue that we are, that we are working through, and that takes rebuilding trust one guest at a time,” CEO Julie Felss Masino said. “And that’s going to take some time. And that’s why we’re so focused on operations, so that everybody who comes in has a great experience.”
Cracker Barrel also wants ad spending “in line with our current traffic levels and the imperative of reducing non-guest facing costs,” Masino said.
There’s such a thing as diminishing returns on ad spending, in other words, and this is no time for it.
Brighter note: Over 40% of sales now run through Cracker Barrel’s loyalty program, Chief Financial Officer Craig Pommells said. “We're able to talk to those guests directly in a more cost effective way,” he said.
It still stings: The company also just spent more than usual to promote the relaunch—even after the reaction went bad. “Obviously that didn't go as planned,” Masino noted, “but that was already committed.”
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95%
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Share of CEOs who say AI will be transformative, according to a poll presented by Stagwell at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit. Just 5% called AI overhyped, Stagwell CEO Mark Penn said, saying the poll results indicated “unbridled enthusiasm for AI.”
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Against Clankers for Coffee
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Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol told the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit that espresso-pulling robots would hurt the ambiance that customers want. WSJ Leadership Institute
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Starbucks continues to focus on fixing the cafe experience, even for customers who want to get in and get out.
That’s meant bringing back seats at locations that previously removed them to service a mobile-order culture, CEO Brian Niccol said at the Journal’s CEO Council Summit yesterday.
“I do firmly believe that even if you want to come and grab and go, you’d rather grab and go from a place than a soulless experience,” Niccol said.
Starbucks is relying on tech to sort and time orders for baristas.
“We can sequence those orders correctly so that we’re on time for the mobile order and then we’re also timely for the customer that’s in-cafe,” Niccol said. “....The other thing we’re testing now is allowing you to schedule your order.”
That could help commuters stay on schedule and stores remain ready. “So if you know you want your coffee at 5:30 a.m., ideally it takes out some of the unexpectedness.” he said.
One more commitment to the vibe:
“This is still a craft business,” Niccol said. “I think it’s important for you to see the espresso shot get pulled….There’s a lot of people that believe you can have a robot do it. I just think it takes the soul out of the experience.”
Watch: Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol discusses order sequencing and the scheduling test. [WSJ]
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“I wouldn’t even have known about the ban without social media.”
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— Noah Jones, 15, on Australia’s new social-media ban for people under 16 years old. Jones says he got a warning from Snap but passed as over 16 in a facial scan. Teens who don’t pass “are just going to scan their older brothers’ faces,” he said.
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Adobe is working to increase its AI offerings, and its annual recurring revenue from AI exceeded $250 million in the third quarter. Getty Images
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Adobe Photoshop, Express and Acrobat will be directly available on ChatGPT under a new deal with OpenAI. [WSJ]
McDonald’s Netherlands pulled an all-AI Christmas ad from YouTube after heavy criticism online. [BBC]
But you can still see it here. [Culture Crave on X]
Target opened an overhauled location in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood designed to reassert the chain’s sense of style. CEO Michael Fiddelke called it “a punctuation point.” [CNBC]
Google ad executive Dan Taylor said “there are no current plans” to bring ads to its Gemini AI chatbot, saying an Adweek report about company reps claiming otherwise was based on “uninformed” sources making “inaccurate claims.” [Dan Taylor on X]
Remember Katie Deighton’s article on the shift against sans-serif fonts? Secretary of State Marco Rubio has joined the trend, reversing the State Department’s official adoption of Calibri. [NYT]
Tony Dokoupil has been named the new anchor of “CBS Evening News,” taking over the storied program as CBS News undergoes a major transformation. [WSJ]
Wheaties put Timothée Chalamet on a limited-edition box as his ping pong-playing character from “Marty Supreme.” [Muse]
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