Leadership Lessons with Rob Weston, Chief Marketing Officer & Commercial Officer at Loop Earplugs

Daniela Mamica, sat down with Rob Weston, Chief Marketing Officer & Commercial Officer at Loop Earplugs. They explored how his marketing strategy has evolved, the rise of agentic commerce and what the next generation of marketing leaders needs to master.

How has your marketing strategy and approach changed this year in comparison to previous years?

Our strategy with regard to where we want to play and how we’ll win hasn’t changed. What has changed has been the pace of execution. We set ourselves four operating priorities: keep Meta working while diversifying faster into YouTube and TikTok; build the brand while protecting our unit economics; develop new products with a positive impact on CAC:LTV; and take a DTC brand into physical retail. We’ve been lucky to find success in all areas, so our approach is simply about continuing to build momentum.

How do you approach brand and performance marketing?

‘Brand’ and ‘performance’ are tricky terms because people use them with different meanings. They can refer to above the line versus below the line; hard versus easy to measure; long-term versus short-term effects; demand generation versus demand capture; and probably more besides. These are all important debates, but the terms themselves can often leave people talking at cross purposes.

Where I start is diagnosis of the problem and a clear expression of the job to be done. For our concert earplugs, we have five clear objectives. First, problem awareness: most people think that ringing ears are a sign of a good night, as opposed to permanent hearing damage. Second, solution awareness: not everyone knows that acoustic filters for clubs and concerts exist. Third, stigma: historically, people have worried about looking stupid wearing earplugs. Fourth, brand awareness: not everyone has heard of Loop yet. Fifth, brand performance: why Loop is the right earplug brand to choose.

With a clear view of what needs to be done, I then look for the most efficient and effective mechanisms for affecting this change. Influencers, partnerships and UGC have worked very well for us over time because they’re great at taking people through all five of these steps very quickly. Each of these blends aspects of brand and performance, however you want to use the terms.

What are the biggest changes in consumer behaviour taking place right now, and how does marketing need to adapt to this?

It’s an obvious answer, I’m afraid: agentic commerce.

Our working hypothesis, and I’d call it a hypothesis rather than settled fact, is that it will be disruptive for brands competing on rational, comparable grounds like features, price and spec, because that’s exactly the kind of decision an AI agent is built to handle well. Those brands need to focus hard on brand authority, making sure an agent can read a consistent, comparable story about them, plus all supporting signals. Brands that lean more on desire, where the decision was never fully rational to begin with, may be more insulated. You can’t run a Gucci handbag through a spec sheet, and I don’t think an agent’s going to manufacture that kind of want on anyone’s behalf.

How are you adapting AI into your marketing practices, and where would you provide cautionary use?

At Loop we made the decision to be an AI-first company a long while ago. Indeed, AI was one of the first questions I was asked about in my interview process. We’ve adopted AI across all our creative operations, with 95% of assets now influenced in some way by AI. We were also the subject of a Google case study on AI adoption last year.

There are three areas of caution I’ve observed, all related to the pace of change. The first is consumer opinion. We watched attitudes towards AI-generated humans harden live while we were mid-production on our first two 30-second ads last year. I remember our PR team being very nervous at launch. Second, making calls on which technology to invest in can be tough: in just eight weeks of production, some of the tools we were using at the start looked almost old school by the end when it came to things like lighting effects. Finally, marketers need to keep a close eye on changes in the law. For instance, the EU brings in a disclosure requirement for AI-recreated humans this August, which is a direct response to the shift in consumer opinion we discussed earlier.

How has your approach to marketing leadership evolved, and what leadership fundamentals still anchor your style?

Over time I’ve become far more attuned to clarity of communication in both directions: what I say and what makes its way to me. I love the dinosaur’s tail analogy General Stanley McChrystal uses in his book Team of Teams. He explains that senior leaders often move like a dinosaur with a long tail. If the dinosaur suddenly decides to turn to look in a different direction, its tail swooshes behind it in the opposite direction, causing a trail of destruction to which the dinosaur itself is oblivious. The more senior you get, the bigger the effect of your tail.

With this in mind I try to do three things: be deliberate and consistent with my comms around direction; be careful in communicating a clear ‘why’ if direction changes; and keep a constant dialogue going with as many people in the full team as possible, so that I have a good idea of what is really going on.

What’s the most significant challenge you’ve faced in aligning marketing strategy with broader organisational goals?

Marketing strategy isn’t separate from organisational strategy; it exists to enable it. The CMO’s job is to represent the customer and the brand inside that strategy, then support the whole exec team in executing it, not run a separate agenda alongside them. That means being in the trenches with the commercial teams day to day, while keeping one eye on the long term, because the job is to deliver both the short-term commercial priorities and the longer-term transformation agenda, not trade one off against the other.

How has the CMO’s role and influence at board level changed in recent years?

My observation is that it’s been remarkably fluid.

If we take the role, both titles and exec representation have shifted considerably over the last decade. For one thing, the title keeps shifting: CMO, CRO, CCO and all sorts of other Os. I’ve also seen the position yo-yo on and off the board in a lot of companies.

In terms of influence, that also seems to have been a rollercoaster. I remember an HBR study found that four in five CEOs were not fully convinced by their CMO, which probably explains why CMOs, according to a Spencer Stuart study, have had close to the shortest average tenure in the C-suite for much of the last decade. A separate academic study also found they were the first to go in a company where the category itself is in decline.

It’s not all a tale of woe, though. That HBR study is almost ten years old now, and a fair bit has moved on since. COO is now the lowest tenured C-suite position in the most recent data, several companies are reinstating CMO to the board, and measurement has improved enormously. While attribution is still an imperfect science, MMM, DDA and incrementality testing offer plenty of ways to triangulate marketing effectiveness. Proving marketing’s worth has always been one of the role’s biggest challenges.

It’s also worth noting that the same HBR study found the real driver of mistrust was a mismatch in expectations about what the role was actually there to do, not the ability of any individual CMO. The lesson: before you start a new role, make sure you and your boss are crystal clear on your remit, the levers at your disposal and how you’ll be measured. That alone puts your influence on far more solid ground.

What do you think the future CMO must master, and what guidance would you offer a rising marketing leader trying to build those capabilities?

Keep an eye on what changes and what doesn’t. The fundamentals of the job will not change: diagnosis, strategy, execution and influencing customer behaviour. The ‘how’ is the bit that keeps moving, primarily driven by technology. In the last decade it was the digitisation of advertising channels, and the next decade will likely be the rise of AI.

In terms of guidance, while I don’t have a crystal ball, I’d make sure you have a genuine grasp of the fundamentals. There’s a wealth of ways to build that, from books to mini-MBAs to full MBAs to company training. Then get as much experience with the variety of channels and technologies on offer as you can. Where I’ve seen people hit a ceiling is specialising too early, and it usually happens from one of two directions. Junior marketers who grow up entirely inside performance channels can become highly technical and commercially fluent, but struggle to build the broader brand instinct a senior role demands. Those who grow up inside brand can build real craft and storytelling, but sometimes never develop the commercial rigour to back it up, or the confidence to be measured on it. Both are talented people who’ve simply specialised before they had the breadth underneath them. By the time a senior role calls for both, it’s a much harder gap to close than if they’d built it earlier.

The truth is that for the long term, all bets are off on exactly how the function will evolve. So my real advice is simpler than any single skill: keep doing the diagnosis-strategy-execution loop, on yourself, not just on the business. Work out what’s changing around you, decide what that means for what you need to learn next, then go and learn it. The mechanism will always be the newest thing in the room. The fundamentals are the only things that were there before you walked in and will still be there after you’ve left.

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Daniela Mamica is UK Marketing Lead, working across senior and leadership level roles. She brings a wealth of experience, having recruited into the marketing space for over 11 years. Daniela previously worked with network media agencies (WPP Media, Omnicom Media Group, Publicis Groupe and Dentsu), successfully growing their paid and organic media functions. She also has extensive experience supporting independent media, marketing and digital agencies, finding sought-after digital marketing.

Hanson Search Group is a global talent consultancy providing executive search, recruitment and leadership advisory services. Built on more than twenty years of trusted relationships, we operate as a connected global platform of specialist practices with expert consultants embedded in key markets.