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Consumer behavior, culture, and technology are changing rapidly, creating a new challenge for brands, namely how to cut through the noise and stay relevant. Erin Condon, CMO of CVS Pharmacy, is tackling this challenge by transforming her marketing team into a strategic growth function. It’s a powerful model for any brand looking to innovate, not to merely keep pace but lead at the speed of culture.
Moving at the speed of culture with the Customer Intelligence Engine
CVS Pharmacy has over 9,000 locations and a growing e-commerce business. Founded in 1963, it is the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S. and faces the same challenges as many retailers: shifting consumer behaviors, upstart competitors, supply chain disruptions, and more. In an increasingly fragmented world defined by microgenerations, “where even individuals living in the same household can consume content and engage with brands in wildly different ways,” aggregated audience data is no longer enough, Condon explains.
The mandate, as Condon puts it, is to go “one click deeper” to find the insight behind the insight. For CVS Pharmacy, the answer isn’t just more content but a radical focus on foundational analytics, innovation to meet customer needs, and a commitment to operating at the “speed of culture.”
The mandate is to go “one click deeper” to find the insight behind the insight and a commitment to operate at the “speed of culture.”
To do this, Condon has built a team of strategists, analysts, planners, and more, supported by a customer intelligence function that allows CVS Pharmacy marketers to make the most of their first-party, third-party, search, social, and qualitative data to understand what matters to customers in the moment and meet opportunities in real time. This rapid-response approach allows Condon and her team to turn a nascent data point into content and creative in days, not months.
Condon encourages experimentation with new approaches to content creation that meet the evolving needs of customers with dedicated but calculated efforts:
- 60% is tried and true.
- 30% is dedicated to moderate risk.
- 10% is invested in “big swing” innovation.
Condon explains that this breakdown ensures they are devoting time and budget to explore. “Because if we don’t put anything in the ‘big swing’ category, we won’t innovate and somebody will do it before us and we’ll be catching up. We can’t be catching up in a world where there’s increasing commoditization and convenience is more accessible.”
Insight to action: Late night and local athlete connections
A compelling example of this data-driven agility came from the team’s deep dive into time-of-day trip growth. Looking at foot traffic from their stores, the team noticed a significant spike in customer visits outside standard business hours. Digging in, they realized these late-night visits were happening in local markets where the nearby competitors were already closed. This simple, data-backed insight was then rapidly converted into clever marketing.
Within a week, content was deployed in markets with a high concentration of 24-hour CVS stores, promoting the availability of items like cough medicine or snacks late at night. This entire process, from insight to deployment, was completed in less than seven days — a dramatic acceleration from the six to eight weeks a traditional marketing approach might require. The result? Measurable sales lift, trip lift, customer engagement lift, and a strong ROI benefiting from operational efficiencies in quick decision-making, proving that agility and data-driven insights are a powerful combination for growth.
CVS takes YouTube Shorts viewers on a tour of the pharmacy’s late-night hours.
An example of a smart risk was CVS Pharmacy partnering with student athletes under the NCAA’s Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) policy. CVS was one of the first brands to partner with student athletes once the policy was in place. This initiative was grounded in the insight that local athletes could authentically connect a national brand like CVS Pharmacy with the communities it serves. The program has since scaled, demonstrating measurable impact. “Being able to take a nationally trusted brand and localize the experience with the help of favorite hometown hero sports stars is exciting and a little bit daunting,” Condon says.
In-house audiences and channel: Front-line colleagues
A unique aspect of Condon’s strategy is an emphasis on the internal audience. In a retail organization with thousands of pharmacists and front-line store staff, Condon champions the idea that CVS colleagues must be viewed as a critical marketing audience, on par with the external consumer.
“Our people are truly the face of our brand,” Condon notes. To activate and inspire this audience, colleagues not only need to understand what the brand is doing but why. This means the same marketing content customers see should also be seen by CVS colleagues, fostering a consistent sense of pride and ownership. CVS Pharmacy also features its own front-line workers in advertisements, leveraging its pharmacists and front-line colleagues as credible, trusted resources across social platforms.
Watch the video
In a YouTube video for CVS Pharmacy, a pharmacist shares her secret for calming children when they get a flu shot.
The future CMO’s formula with ‘critical-thinking athletes’
As the marketing landscape evolves, Condon argues for a shift in the ideal marketer’s skill set. “I see a world five to 10 years from now where the marketing profession is made up of what I call ‘critical-thinking athletes.’” Condon says. “I think resilience and grit, in addition to technology proficiency, are going to be some of the most desired and sought after skills in the future for marketers.”
