Senior Vice President & CMO, Grocery Outlet Hldng
Search every verified Layla Kasha interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Layla Kasha, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Grocery Outlet, has discussed the company's marketing strategy in several recent appearances. She described the retailer's model as a "beautiful marriage of entrepreneurial spirit and the backing of a corporate brand," noting that its independently owned stores allow operators to tailor their offerings and community partnerships to local needs. Kasha stated that the company's marketing focuses on the people behind the business rather than just products, and that its decentralized social media strategy, which empowers store owners to post content, proved advantageous during the pandemic by enabling real-time communication with customers. Kasha has also spoken about her career experiences and the role of women in leadership. In a 2018 TEDx talk, she said that "every single break in my career has come from a man" and cited a 2011 UCLA study that found women often preferred male bosses. She described what she called the "queen bee syndrome" as a "career-killing phenomenon" and advocated for women to support one another professionally, stating, "Be the girl boss you wish you would have had." More recently, she credited women, including her boss Pam Burke, for her success and emphasized the importance of failing forward and taking risks.
“Grocery Outlet is just absolutely been here going into my ninth year at Grocery Outlet. I love it. People that come here love it. People that work on the corporate side all have that entrepreneurial spirit. It's how we help the people that are actually the real entrepreneurs in the trenches every day.”
“It's a beautiful marriage of entrepreneurial spirit and the backing of a corporate brand and all of the bells and whistles that you really need to be successful.”
“The owners get to pick who their partner is. That is one of the most beautiful things because the community knows what they need, the owner knows what they're connecting to and that's the story.”
“It's pretty challenging to market a business where the stuff on the shelf isn't the same at every store because in Ohio that operator might be like, 'Hey, I really like this thing and my community is going to love it and I'm going to buy it, but no one else around buys it.'”
“You never know what you're going to find. So deals don't last. So shop it fast. You see it, clean the shelf because that's how it goes. Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don't. That's the beautiful part and the surprise and the epiphany and the bliss of Grocery Outlet.”
“I think the most important lesson in general I've taken, and this again is my dad, you got to fail a lot and you fail fast and you fail forward. But the really cool stuff happens when you fall on your face.”
“Women struggle failing. I think we feel like we're always like, man, I got to do this. I got to do this. I got to do this and I can't let anything slip. I can't make a mistake. And I think the challenge we have as women is we got to be able to fail or we're not going to learn and we're not going to grow and nothing coo...”
“You're not the customer. Maybe you are, but most of the time you're not. And I think you need to be really savvy in that. It's not about what the CEO likes or what the other business partners like. It's what your customer is going to respond to.”
“I credit a lot of my success to women. Women that have pulled me up, women that have brought me back down to earth, women that have taught me things. I'm at the point now where I still have a mentor and I'm blessed enough that she is actually my boss at Grocery Outlet. She is a dream of a woman, Pam Burke. She's amazin...”
“The most important voice in the room is the voice that's there when you're not in it. When we're in the boardroom and we're in executive meetings, it's really important to be the voice for the people that aren't in that room yet but want to get in that room.”
“I use social media for a retail grocery for-profit business — this is my bread and butter, my wheelhouse. Ninety percent of our actual working media dollars have moved over to social media, and less than 10% of your followers will see a post, so you need to be posting way more than you think you should as a business —...”
“In our employee handbook at Grocery Outlet — we're a business — we cannot tell people you can or cannot post this or that on your social media, but best be sure that we are looking at it. You think you're a private page; there are ways for your business, your bosses, or leaders to see it, so be very intentional about w...”
“We are the nation's leading extreme value retailer, selling lots of items found in local grocery stores at deep discounts. Half of our products are opportunistic buys from closeouts, package changes, forecast errors, and cancelled orders, which means customers often see items once and should stock up when they see them...”
“Our stores are independently owned and operated, with owners living in their communities and deeply tied to them. This decentralized model gives us a unique advantage in both supply chain and marketing but also presents challenges like unpredictable product mix and lack of uniform store layouts.”
“I believe you need a strategy for a digital life because our shoppers live a digital life. They are on social media, apps, connected TV, and streaming radio. Facebook is one of the best platforms because it allows us to tell unique stories and get up to three minutes of attention from people.”
Grocery Outlet CMO Layla Kasha joins the podcast to discuss her career journey, how the food retailer shares its brand in new ...
Speakers: Phil Cooke and Layla Kasha.
As Grocery Outlet showed during the pandemic of 2020, a firm social strategy for retailers can be used quickly to empower the ...
Layla shares her experience and the troubles she's had moving up in her career when it depends on other women. She shares an ...
Sign in to search the full transcript archive, filter by topic, and access every quote from Layla Kasha.
The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →