Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Brunswick
Search every verified Lauren Beckstedt interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Lauren Beckstedt, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Brunswick, has discussed the company's efforts to modernize its brand and marketing approach. In a 2023 interview at CES, she described Brunswick's "most comprehensive Innovation strategy in its history," centered on autonomous, connected, electrified, and shared (ACES) technologies, and noted a brand refresh aimed at highlighting the company's technology story. She stated that the company has introduced electric propulsion options and a new boat brand, Veer, and emphasized making boating more accessible through initiatives like the Freedom Boat Club membership program. Beckstedt also said that hybrid workplace flexibility could lead to more time on the water and influence boat design. In a 2025 podcast appearance, Beckstedt addressed the perception of marketing as "fluff" and said her role involves redefining marketing as a "sales engine." She stated that Brunswick has set targets for sales attributable to marketing, with a goal of 50 percent of revenue supported by digitally assisted or marketing-attributable sales. Beckstedt described the company's use of a "digital thread" to gather consumer data and an always-on test-and-learn program to build belief in marketing's impact. She also discussed a "shadow P&L" model where marketing and business units jointly own revenue targets, and noted that tighter budgets made it easier to build a stronger marketing function when the business needed demand.
“We actually have targets, too, around sales attributable to marketing. So we kind of boldly said, by X date, we're going to have 50 percent of our revenue as a company will be supported by digitally assisted sales or marketing attributable revenue.”
“Marketing is now your sales engine.”
“We have a digital thread that helps you navigate through our ecosystem. And for us, it gives us the privileged position of having the most robust set of consumer data in the industry, which you can imagine how powerful it is in the world of AI.”
“We have done a lot of work to quantify what marketing is aiming to achieve, and we hold ourselves very highly accountable to hitting those numbers, as well as all of our online sales targets.”
“As budgets got tighter, I'm like, oh, here we go. I'm always selling. I'm going to have to fight. It surprised me, and this is obvious now, but how much easier it is to build an agenda around a stronger marketing function when the business really needs the demand.”
“One of the quotes someone gave me was, there are still folks who feel like marketing is just fluff. It's just make things pretty, and you need to help redefine what marketing really is.”
“We really hold ourselves accountable for democratization of boating and making it accessible to all.”
“Advertising is like a tax on weak brands.”
“We call it a pro forma or a shadow P&L. So the two sides own it jointly. Business owns the P&L, marketing owns the revenue target jointly.”
“We have an always-on test and learn program, AB testing, dark testing, and we bring all those case studies and results forward to just continue to build belief.”
“We have introduced the most comprehensive Innovation strategy in our company history and it is storied as you say but this is really kind of a next era for us and the brand that you are describing we it was just time to level up.”
“A lot of our strategies based on the tenants around Aces that we call it our Aces Innovation strategy so autonomous connected electrified and shared which are really just key themes generated from Next Generation consumer what they need.”
“We have introduced electric propulsion options, a new boat brand Veer which was a multi-use fishing vessel and then the heart of the story is how everything connects we've got aspects of the entire ecosystem in boating so seeing how all those pieces fit together and how you can give consumers more options of how they e...”
“We do have apps like you're describing, we do have connectivity that helps autonomous mode helps you kind of master boating even if you maybe aren't the best boater or maybe you've never done it it's easier than ever now.”
“One of the things about boating that we're just getting into is more flexibility in how you experience boating better access and so you described her compared to kind of an Uber Lyft we have Freedom Boat clubs so we're the largest boat club operator and Freedom Boat Club lets you buy into a membership program and then...”
"There are still folks who feel like marketing is just fluff, it's just, 'make things pretty,'" says Lauren Beckstedt. Her mission, as CMO ...
Brunswick Corporation's Lauren Beckstedt joins James Kotecki in the CES C Space Studio to discuss her brand refresh that was ...
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