CARY, N.C. -

To the outside observer, it would seem the role of chief marketing officer is largely focused on building and/or maintaining that entity’s brand as well as overseeing the promotion of its goods and services through advertising and other means.

But for Michelle Denogean, the CMO at Roadster, the job has an additional, unique responsibility: heading up analytics.

“One of the things that does make my background, I think, unique is, I don’t know that many chief marketing officers that also run analytics at a company,” Denogean said in a November interview. “And that just is … the natural marriage between the creative aspect of being a marketer and the data-driven quantitative nature of bringing those two worlds together.

“I always tell people, the two things that are most effective from a marketing standpoint are when you can tell great stories, and when you have data,” she said. “Those two things just naturally, to me, go hand-in-hand.”

Denogean is also “an educator at heart,” as noted on her company bio, so those roads of data/analytics and education often intersect when she shares digital retail insights and best practices through speaking engagements at conferences, Roadster webinars and writing thought-leadership pieces.

“From an education standpoint, it started out very much with just passion for educating people especially when we first started at Roadster; we first started in this big category called digital retail,” she said.

“Nobody understood it. Everybody had a different definition of it. And so, it just felt like a very natural place to go, which was we need, as an ecosystem, whether it's us or one of our competitors, we need to educate the industry so that it raises the boats for everybody — the tide,” Denogean said.

“I think that for me, it started there and it started with thought leadership and speaking at conferences and writing best practices and surfacing of stories of what other dealerships are doing,” she said. “I fundamentally believe that as much as they want to hear from me, they would love to hear from people like them.”

In 2020, Denogean and the team at Roadster went “a little deeper” with dealer training. One of the focus areas what showing that with digital retail, “it's really only 20% the technology; it's 80% what you do with it,” Denogean said.

“And what you do with it is such a critical aspect that we had to go deep into educating people on that,” she said. “So now we're working on multi-day courses, teaching digital retailing. We're partnering with all sorts of trade organizations to try to get that education out.”

They began co-hosting weekly webinars during COVID-19, with dealers as guests. Roadster would interview the dealer guest, Denogean said, and the attending dealers could ask follow-up questions.

Denogean emphasizes the importance of people learning from their peers who have similar experiences.

“It’s as much about understanding how people learn as it is about the teaching. If we can put a dealership who has figured it out in front of a dealership that hasn't and let them talk, that's just going to expedite the learning process,” she said.

Denogean also emphasized that teaching has to go beyond theory and into application.

Given her own penchant for being an educator, she says she admires vAuto founder Dale Pollak, who Denogean has found takes a similar approach.

She met him when they were both speakers at an event.

“The educator (piece) is probably the connection there. I look at him and what he's done … yes, he started vAuto. That was his company, but he never comes to the table really representing it fully. He comes to the table really trying to educate. And sometimes, he even tells people that, 'Don't use this because it's just not for you right now. Or, I made a mistake and this is a better direction to go.' 

“I’ve just always respected how respected he is in the industry and how he's an educator at heart,” she said.

Denogean’s approach to her work as CMO has also been shaped by a book from one of her mentors: “Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies,” by former Proctor & Gamble CMO Jim Stengel.

“It's all about purpose and how ideals, setting ideals for your company and bigger purpose for your company, can really impact the bottom line,” Denogean said.

Of Stengel, she said: “He just fundamentally believes you have to have a higher purpose beyond just selling your product to connect. That really had a foundational element on me from a branding perspective, because I was not traditionally trained. A lot of people that are marketers and get into chief marketing roles come from that type of background. Like Jim. They worked at Proctor & Gamble; they were trained on branding.”

Denogean came of age professionally as a marketer in the digital world.

“And I think that that really influenced me in a moment that I needed to have that sense that it wasn't just about analytics and digital; it was really about brand and creating connection,” she said. “I think that really drove a lot of the storytelling aspects and the research that I now do to deeply understand customers.”

Denogean had met Stengel during her time at Edmunds, which is where she began her career in automotive in 2006, eventually becoming the company’s CMO.

She said she was recruited to the Edmunds position given her background in tech prior to her automotive career, and while she’s “not a big car person,” the innovative problem-solving in automotive attracted her to the segment

“I'm a big people person. And so I love studying consumer behavior, customer behavior and am drawn to areas and industries where there's sort of big, meaty problems to be solved, so to speak. That innovation is really what draws me in. That was what drew me in at Edmunds, definitely what drew me in at Roadster,” she said.

And while she didn’t necessarily seek out the auto industry, “it's actually a super cool industry once you're here,” Denogean said.

“And I'm just really excited to continue to be a part of it. And I think so many things are changing in the landscape, even from when I first started. Things that nobody thought was going to ever happen or possible, or that retailers would be open to,” she said.  “So, it's actually a really exciting time.”