Women in Marketing: Masters of Change

Alexis Kerr

Vice President of the Mahogany Brand, Hallmark Card, Inc.

Alexis Kerr is vice president of Mahogany, the beloved Hallmark brand that has built a relationship of trust with the Black community by honoring, celebrating and supporting emotional connections among Black families, friends and loved ones for more than 30 years. In this role, Alexis elevates how consumers see and experience the brand and is expanding Mahogany into new spaces in the marketplace.

Alexis’ passion for creating meaningful connection for the Black community brought her to Mahogany, and since 2021, she has expanded the presence and conversation of the brand into new categories and across a variety of touchpoints. Some of her notable work includes the launch of an all-new Mahogany.com website, which features a writing community that centers on the voices of Black women who uplift and empower one another and serves as a marketplace where shoppers will easily find Mahogany products as well as ones from Black owned businesses. In addition to managing experiential and social media for the brand, she is leading a partnership with Hallmark Media Family Networks that brought Mahogany to life on television in 2022.

Before joining Hallmark, Alexis spent 9 years with General Motors in a variety of roles. In her last role as Head of Multicultural Marketing at Cadillac, she led the brand’s efforts to increase opinion, consideration, and market share by 40% amongst diverse consumers. She also managed Corporate Social Responsibility and Music efforts, which were directly aligned to the brand’s global marketing strategy and served as strategic lead for internal and external efforts around the Diversity Equity and Inclusion for the brand. A career highlight includes working closely with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Spike Lee to oversee the creative execution of the 2021 Cadillac Escalade reveal short film, which was largest reveal in Cadillac’s history.

Prior to that, the New York native served as the luxury brand’s Head of Operations of “BOOK by Cadillac,” the first-ever mobility start-up in the industry’s subscription service space. Alexis also spent time in the UAE, where she created and led the Customer Experience team in General Motors Middle East Operations, managing Dubai’s expansion of culture throughout the entire organization. This experience led to her to training the dealer body of eight Middle Eastern countries.

Before joining General Motors, Alexis managed a Business Development portfolio at Delphi exceeding $750 million. Kerr holds an undergraduate degree in both Engineering from Kennesaw State University and Computer Technology from Kent State University. She also holds an MBA in Marketing from Central Michigan University.

As a thought leader, she has had the opportunity to speak to audiences including the Harvard Kennedy School – Black Student Union, The NextUp Conference, Disney Dreamers, Forbes 30 under 30, The National Urban League and the Ford African-Ancestry Network.  She has been invited to American Sesh and other broadcast programs to share her expertise. Lastly, Kerr has also received numerous awards like the 2023 ColorComm 28 Black Women in Communications Making History Now, International Women of Power – Lionheaart Business Award, Michigan Chronicle – 2020 Women of Excellence, and 2022 Microsoft Legacy Project honoree.

In her personal time, Alexis indulges in a variety of activities from jewelry making to blogging. She is also an avid traveler, having visited more than 60 countries. Service is a central theme in her life – she has mentored young girls, served as Deacon at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church and sits on several boards, including the Knight Foundation in Detroit, “EarlyStart” (formally United Inner-City Services), and the Greater Kansas City Chamber’s Executive Women’s Leaderships Council. She is a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated.

Lisa Bowman

CEO and CMO of Marketing Mojo & Chair- Elect for AMA National Board of Directors

Lisa Bowman is the CEO and Chief Mojo Officer (CMO) of Marketing Mojo. Both a “marchitect” building for brands at the intersection of Purpose and Profit, where good businesses live, and a “Brandvangelist” who story tells to convert ideas to action, Lisa most recently served as the global Chief Marketing Officer for United Way Worldwide; the world’s largest privately funded global non-profit ($4.8B). She led the organization’s marketing, brand, communications and data analytics teams to enable the fight for the health, education, and financial stability of every person in every community.

She joined United Way Worldwide from a 15- year career at UPS where she began her career in 2000 as Vice President of Market Development for UPS e-Ventures, the company’s dot-com incubator. In subsequent senior level marketing roles with the logistics company, she led several high-profile marketing initiatives designed to transform UPS from its historical position as a business-to-business entity into business-to- consumer player.

Following UPS’ 2001 acquisition of the former Mail Boxes, Etc. network of nearly 4,000 franchised retail locations, Lisa led the integration and re-branding to The UPS Store™. In 2009, she developed and launched UPS Direct-to -Door, a co-op media product intended to compete with direct mail.

She then took as role as the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of The UPS Foundation. As part of her $80 million social investment portfolio, she also oversaw the transportation company’s United Way campaign. By leveraging a traditional marketing approach and treating United Way as a product with a compelling value proposition to UPS employees, Lisa grew the donations made by UPS employees to United Way by 35%; from $48M to $65M over a four-year period. She also had responsibility for a $20M social investment portfolio oriented on Diversity where she led the organization’s relationships with premier NGOs in the Diversity sector including the National Urban League, NAACP, 100 Back Men of America, Unidos US (formerly NCLR) and the Human Rights Campaign. Helping to shape the Foundation’s alignment with the business priorities of UPS, Lisa added a focus on measurement and impact by creating a model for measuring ROI for philanthropic investments in the education space, allowing UPS to have insight into the lifetime earnings value of those who completed programs funded by UPS versus those who did not. As the head of Marketing & Communications for the Foundation, she led the development of a thought leadership strategy including whitepapers and a Social Impact Report. Following her role in the Foundation, Lisa was asked to lead the development of UPS’s inaugural global Human Rights Strategy.

When United Way, the world’s largest privately funded non-profit ($5B) recruited her from UPS to lead their global marketing team, the refreshed brand narrative she launched in May 2016, Join the Fight, galvanized the network of 1,800 independent local United Ways into a stronger more unified fund-raising organization with consistency of mission while winning awards including PR News ‘PSA of the Year’ for its portrayals of the harsh and often neglected social crises realities facing our communities, and largely communities of color, today.

Lisa also helped digitally transform the business operations of United Way when they partnered with Salesforce to launch Philanthropy Cloud, leading to new and increased engagement across the multi-cultural and multi-generational donors and volunteers who supported United Way. As a result, United Way’s brand equity positively benefitted, and trust, which directly drives donations increased. United Way, a 135-year-old legacy non-profit organization was named one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” in 2019.

During her tenure with United Way, Lisa initiated a philanthropic partnership with Beyoncé, launched a reality series, THE HERO EFFECT, which premiered on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), and re-imagined

 

the organization’s 40-plus year relationship with the NFL by implementing a digital education program, CHARACTER PLAYBOOK that impacted the socio-emotional development of over 500,000 middle schoolers.

Known as “a leader with a presence”, Lisa has been front and center as the key “face” and the spokesperson for United Way and UPS, in times when both organizations earned accolades and addressed key challenges.

Target Marketing Magazine recognized Lisa as their MARKETER OF THE YEAR in December 2019. She was also honored by the American Marketing Association as their 2017 Non-Profit Marketer of the Year. Her work has received numerous awards inclusive of the Harvey Communications Awards, multiple Gold Stevie® Awards, multiple PR News Awards, and multiple Gold MarComm awards. The PSA campaign she launched on behalf of United Way in her inaugural year was recognized as PSA of the Year by PR News. Under her leadership,

United Way’s research team also received a DigitalEdge 50 Award for Performance Link, the organization’s first Business Intelligence tool.

Lisa holds a B.A. in Marketing from Columbia and has completed Executive Education at Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business. She is the Vice Chair of the National Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association and holds several advisory board positions.

LISTEN TO/WATCH LISA SPEAK AT THE FOLLOWING

Non-Stop Non-Profit Podcast LISTEN

Driving Brand Growth; Purpose Over Profit LISTEN

ComCast NewsMakers; Women United WATCH

“I believe Lisa can do whatever she puts her mind into.
Her energy, diligence and persistence lead to her success”
– David P. Abney, CEO of UPS (Target Marketing Magazine, Dec 2019)

Katherine Chambers

VP, Revenue Marketing, Cart.com

Katherine Chambers is a seasoned marketing professional with over 25 years of experience across a variety of industries. Currently VP of Revenue Marketing at Cart.com, Katherine has played a key role in leading the company’s marketing efforts since its inception two years ago. Prior to joining Cart, Katherine co-founded and served as CEO of a healthcare SaaS business in partnership with the head of the Geriatric Fellowship program at Harvard Medical School. She also held leadership positions in marketing for well known consumer brands in the travel industry, including HomeAway, Inc and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. Her 25 years of professional experience spans true B2C, B2B, non-profit positions, Fortune 500, early-stage start up and mature unicorns experiencing rapid growth.

Katherine is passionate about collaboration and is an avid follower of Margaret Heffernan’s clever thesis around getting the most out of what we do (watch her TED Talk) and strongly believes in the IDEO model of human-centered design and the importance of interdisciplinary and collaborative teams that will drive innovation and solve the world’s most pressing problems. She’s been an operator in this Web2 world since its inception helping to create products and programs for individuals, companies and communities and sees the brightest future ahead for all the creative and open minds that are eager to jump into the ring.

Molly Soat

Vice President of Professional Development at the American Marketing Association