The CMO Census: Sandra Moore on brands, bravery and betting on yourself

Sandra Moore has spent more than two decades reinventing brands, and reinventing herself along the way.

Her career reads like a masterclass in lateral moves. She went from the sales floors of GM dealerships to leading brand marketing for Buick and GMC through the company's post-bankruptcy turnaround. From there, digital marketing at Ford, then relaunching heritage intimates brands Maidenform, Bali and Playtex at Hanes. Most recently, she was the CMO at Sporting Kansas City.

Along the way she's learned to ask the questions other marketers skip, to build confidence like a muscle, and to fail fast without losing her nerve.

We sat down with Sandra to talk brand strategy, imposter syndrome, and why the smartest thing a marketer can do is ask "who is this brand, really?" 

Here’s the Q&A.

You've moved between automotive, CPG, retail media, and sport. What enabled those pivots, and what would you say to marketers who feel boxed into one discipline?

Every time, the organization was looking for someone who didn't have that exact background. So there are two parts to it. One is that the company has to be willing to take a chance on someone with fresh, outside eyes. The other is personal, you have to ask yourself, do I think I can do this? And the answer is always yes, because it's about the willingness to try. If you fail, you fail fast, you pivot, and you try something else.

There's a statistic that a woman will look at a job description and if she doesn't meet 80% of it, she won't apply; a man will apply at 50%. So my advice is: don't ask whether the job description fits you to a T. Ask whether you could learn what's missing. If the answer is yes, it's worth taking the chance.

You always start with consumer research before defining strategy. What should marketers be asking before they reposition a brand?

Not every brand needs a full repositioning: sometimes it just needs to be tweaked, or nurtured back to health. What I like to do is come in and ask who the brand is, not what it is. If you ask that question of enough people, internally or externally, and you're not getting a straight answer, that's when you know there's a real challenge.

At Hanes, we had three women's brands, Maidenform, Bali and Playtex, and when we asked "if this brand were a woman, who would she be?", it was genuinely hard to answer for most of them. The one brand that was clearly defined was Playtex: bold, structured, built for a fuller-busted woman regardless of her age. That clarity is what you're chasing. It's what eventually builds your brand voice, your architecture, how you talk about the brand at every level.

At Sporting Kansas City we asked a version of the same thing: if the club were an animal, what would it be? It sounds playful, but it tells you exactly where the gaps are.

From Buick to Hanes, you've worked with heritage brands needing renewed relevance. How do you modernize an iconic brand without losing what people already love about it?

You can never lose the foundation the brand was built on. With Buick, we did in-home research with owners in the US and in China, where the brand still sells in huge volumes, and asked what they loved about it. The answers surprised us, people said their Buick felt like part of the family, and that Buick owners loved "living life as locals," supporting food, wine and art festivals in their community. That wasn't something we could have guessed. It became something we knew we had to protect.

So you find your foundation before you touch anything, like finding the foundation of a house before you decide whether to add a second story or an extra bedroom. If you go in and try to tear the whole thing down, it usually doesn't work. Jaguar tried a total repositioning a couple of years ago (very editorial, very cosmopolitan) and people were up in arms, because that wasn't who the brand was. You have to stick to your roots.

Do you use brand tracking to measure sentiment before and after a repositioning?

We'd use it, but I wouldn't call it one of my primary metrics, too much of it is affected by external factors happening in the world at the same time. Honestly, at GM I sometimes used it internally to make the case for more budget: "look how much brand sentiment has improved, imagine what we could do with more investment." It's a useful tool, just maybe not always for the purpose it's intended.

How should marketers balance long-term brand building against pressure to deliver short-term performance?

It's a dance everywhere I've been. My biggest recommendation is to get your CEO and whoever owns revenue on board with the long-term strategy, while reassuring them you're not neglecting the short term. It's not a one-and-done conversation; it's constant.

I always think about the Dallas Cowboys, consistently the most valuable NFL franchise despite not having had a Superbowl season in years. Their whole ethos is "do no harm to the Star": protect the brand, and the long-term value holds even when short-term results don't. And it's not just the team: the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have built their own personal brands on top of it. Increasingly, a brand is the people behind it. If you just keep talking to the same people at the bottom of the funnel over and over, you're not going to grow. You have to keep feeding the top of the funnel too, even though it's harder to measure and harder to defend in a boardroom deck.

What role do you see AI playing in B2C marketing teams today?

I have young, talented creatives who are purists, they resist AI because they feel it compromises their art. Someone gave me a great reframe recently: instead of asking "what can AI do for me," ask "what's the part of my job I hate doing?", and see if AI can take that off your plate. That shifts the whole conversation. It's not about replacing the human, creative side of the work; it's freeing people up to do more of it. I compare it to the early days of social media: we're in another wild west moment, and it's here to stay. You just have to find your best use case.

Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome as a CMO?

Yes, absolutely. I remember sitting in a marketing leadership session at Northwestern, surrounded by people from Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Lenovo, thinking, what am I doing here? But you have to talk to that voice and say, I deserve to be here, I was invited, and I'm here to learn. I've never been afraid to steal a good idea: I've taken things I learned in cars and applied them in apparel. That's what it's about: taking the best of what others have done and asking how it applies to your brand.

There's also this ongoing "is the CMO dead, is the CMO the new growth officer" discourse. Peter Drucker said the only two functions that matter in a business are marketing and innovation; you need both, or you won't make it. That's the part I love about this job.

What's your advice for handling mistakes without spiralling?

Give yourself the grace you'd give a colleague. If a direct report came to me and said "I messed this up," I'd say, okay, what did you learn, let's move on. We rarely extend ourselves that same grace, but it's exactly what makes good marketers, when you can actually do it.

What advice would you give younger marketers about taking risks and building confidence?

Taking risks is only as successful as the company you're in: a conservative organization is going to be more risk-averse, so you have to assess the fit. Adaptability is everything.

On confidence, I recommend a book called Brag: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It by Peggy Klaus. It teaches you how to talk about your wins without sounding like a jerk, something most of us are genuinely bad at.

What's the biggest career mistake you've made, and what did it teach you?

I left GM, a huge, highly matrixed public company, for a tiny, roughly 100-person private startup. It wasn't a mistake to leave GM. But the jump was too extreme: no processes, no tools to build them with, a completely different culture. It taught me that when you're assessing a move, you have to look honestly at the size of the cultural gap, not just the opportunity. In hindsight, a midsize company with a bit more structure would have been a better bridge. But every door that closes opens another one; you never really know where a "wrong" move will lead you.

Sandra Moore is a Passionfruit Partner. You can follow her journey on LinkedIn.