New marketing supremo comes to terms with tough challenges
Chrysler's new marketing chief said that the chance to turn around an American icon was an irresistible challenge that lured her away from Toyota.
"The chance to really work and develop and expand those brands and take them to the next level is the opportunity of a lifetime," Deborah Wahl Meyer said as she began her second month on the job at Chrysler LLC. "You don't have many of those chances in your career."
Meyer, the daughter of a former Chrysler plant manager, is one of the most high-profile new hires at Chrysler, which has been a private company in the hands of Cerberus Capital Management LP since its split from Daimler AG in August.
Meyer's former boss at Toyota, Jim Press, also made the jump to Chrysler, where he is now a vice-chairman overseeing sales and marketing.
Cerberus also lured Robert Nardelli, the former chairman of Home Depot Inc, to be the automaker's new chairman and chief executive.
Meyer said Press and Nardelli are encouraging her to experiment freely with new media.
She's looking into programs that let companies target their television advertising by area code. Chrysler already targets Internet ads based on potential customers' Yahoo searches, she said, but she wants to take what the company learns to the local level so dealers can beef up their own efforts to target customers.
Meyer, 44, is no stranger to challenges. After earning her master's in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, the Detroit-area native headed to W.L. Gore and Associates in Paris, where she marketed a product for people allergic to dust mites.
France has around 20,000 independent pharmacies, Meyer said, and she had to come up with a strategy to reach them all.
Agencies
(China Daily 10/09/2007 page15)
