Lee says Silver Arrows loyalty program has under 200 US members
Melody Lee, the chief marketing officer of Mercedes-Benz USA, said she reframed her department’s work as an “infinity loop” rather than a traditional marketing funnel, in remarks published Wednesday in Nat Ives’ CMO Today newsletter, a Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute product.
When Lee took over as CMO, she said, some people at the company thought her team was just “good at picking out cocktail napkins and arranging flowers.” She dismantled the stereotype by showing them the science of what she does. Lee turned the concept of the marketing funnel into “an infinity loop” for colleagues, she recalled during a conversation with CMO Council members, and plotted her department’s work onto “that infinity loop that goes from the path to purchase to the path to passion and back and forth.”
“For the first time, Lee told CMO Council Chair Maryam Banikarim, “I saw lightbulbs go off like, ‘Oh, wow, marketing’s actually part of the entire journey in a really meaningful way.’""
A prime example of that work, Lee said, is the loyalty group called Silver Arrows, whose members might be invited to Monaco to see Formula One in action or receive access to a new model that nobody else will get for months. Asked how exclusive the program is, Lee said the member roster in the U.S. is under 200 people.
Lee is meanwhile seeking future customers by capitalizing on the growth of motor sports among an unexpected audience: Gen Alpha and Gen Z women. Some people have suggested “it’s because the drivers are young and cute,” according to Lee. “Women are not that simple,” she said. “Let’s not be that reductive.”
The same newsletter covered Jaguar’s reveal of its long-promised Type 01 electric vehicle at a preview event and launch party in New York on Tuesday. The vehicle was first teased in 2024 with an avant-garde promo video showing models striding around a fuchsia landscape, followed by a concept car in pink and bright blue varieties. Some brand loyalists recoiled; President Trump later called the video “disgraceful.”
The actual showroom-ready Type 01 that Jaguar showed off nearly two years after that first brand film is silver, with an “orchid white” interior. The first ad for it returns to familiar tropes of auto advertising, with a handsome driver, wet pavement, and the cars on the road.
In a Q&A with Ives, WSJ Leadership Institute’s Katie Deighton, who attended the launch party, said she predicted “they’ll be able to move into this new era fairly easily because I imagine the average consumer doesn’t remember much about that 2024 campaign, outside the fact it was pink and a little bit weird.”
Deighton compared the episode to the Bud Light–Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. “The original video was only meant to live for a brief moment online — it wasn’t playing on cable TV or anything — and was only amplified by outrage and the fact there wasn’t a car in it to talk about,” she said. “Now they have a car and, judging by the comments on our story so far, it’s that which people now want to obsess over, not the branding.”
Deighton rated the event on a scale of 1 for avant-garde to 10 for traditional car types. “I’d give it a 2 for the beautiful, tiny sashimi that was prepared live on the floor for approximately 15 minutes,” she said. The rest — “the models, the step and repeats, the Veuve Clicquot, the British motoring journalists complaining about the size of said sashimi” — “felt like a solid, traditional 9.”
Jaguar Managing Director Rawdon Glover, in comments to Deighton, framed the 2024 campaign as deliberate. The quirky video was “trying to herald the new design language and the new direction that Jaguar was going in,” Glover said. “This is a production car that’s in the real world that real people want to buy, and putting it in a context that felt more grounded felt very important.”
The newsletter also reported that David Ellison’s megadeal combining Paramount and Warner Bros. closed Tuesday, “ushering in a new era for Hollywood,” per the WSJ, and that the WNBA playoffs are drawing record audiences for the league, per Front Office Sports. Crocs is expanding beyond Jibbitz to embrace “elevated” customization like temporary shoe tattoos and attachable ballet ribbons, Modern Retail reported.
Revlon’s president of North America, Dana Medema, said at Advertising Week New York that “there’s nothing wrong with being a heritage brand.” Revlon is trying to make its 87-year history an asset with consumers while simultaneously updating its appeal. The newsletter also noted that Porsche plans to raise average prices for its top-end models to boost exclusivity and profits — an increase the newsletter characterized as approximate in amount — and that 7-Eleven’s updated crust is “the last thing pizza chains need,” per Restaurant Business.
Stagwell introduced Stagwell Media, a media agency building on Assembly and using the company’s agentic technology platform, Machine OS, per Marketing-Interactive. The functional food trend is pushing caffeine where protein went before it, into a range of packaged foods and drinks from beef jerky to water, Fast Company reported. A group of influencers is on a mission to stop people from paying medical bills, per the WSJ. The latest cuddly mascot in AI emits the “ear-piercing forever hum” of a data center when squeezed, as part of a satirical campaign targeting AI infrastructure, per Creative Bloq. The newsletter also cited an Ad Age piece on how marketers can update their teams as AI eliminates old entry-level roles.
The WSJ Leadership Institute’s CMO Council Summit is scheduled for Nov. 17 and 18 in New York, featuring marketing leaders including FUBU founder Daymond John, Visa’s Frank Cooper III, Mars Inc.’s Gülen Bengi, IBM’s Jonathan Adashek, United Airlines’ Josh Earnest, PepsiCo’s Mark Kirkham, e.l.f. Beauty’s Oshiya Savur, and the National Women’s Soccer League’s Rachel Epstein.