Young and digitally savvy, Duncan Fulton is helping to re-energize marketing efforts at Canadian Tire and its recently acquired Forzani Group Ltd.
Chris Daniels interviewed Duncan Fulton for Marketing Magazine
The 36-year-old PR expert was spotlighted in a recent Marketing Magazine Q&A by Chris Daniels who bills Fulton as a “new breed of CMO.” His background is unusual for the position: he began his career in government, served as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s press secretary by the age of 25 and specializes in the digital space.
For Fulton, it’s all about breaking down silos to make marketing more effective. Since coming on board in 2009 as Canadian Tire’s SVP of Communications and CMO of Forzani Group Ltd., he’s adopted a shared-services group model, broadened the group’s scope (investing in earned media, organizing events, creating a community) and incorporated digital into the development and execution stages of campaigns.
Case in point is Fulton’s fresh approach to rebranding the customer experience of Forzani Group’s Sport Chek stores. He’s hired Montreal creative agency Sid Lee to create a more emotional consumer experience, and is leaving lots of room for digital in the retail outlets.
For Fulton, digital isn’t an ad-on, it belongs at the ground level of brand management.
As he explains in the Marketing Magazine piece, “most companies build siloed digital teams, and usually when you do this, it ghettoizes them. More often than not they’re brought to the table after the strategy is done. People who get digital need to be building the strategy because it is going to be executed digitally.”
Check out the full article here, and don’t miss Duncan Fulton at DX3 Canada, where he’ll be a keynote speaker.
[...] (from their college days in the ‘70s, through the dot-com era and the 2008 financial crisis), Forzani’s Duncan Fulton explained (paraphrasing Facebook’s Steve Irvine) that “if it’s not social in real life, [...]