After three decades marketing well-known brands, Cammie Dunaway left the world of Frito-Lay, Nintendo and Yahoo in October 2010 to become U.S. president and chief marketing officer of KidZania, a theme park chain founded in Mexico City in 1999.
Kidzania is a radical departure for Dunaway. She led sales and marketing at Nintendo of America from 2007 to 2010. Prior to that she was Yahoo's chief marketer after spending 13 years in various sales and marketing positions at PepsiCo's Frito-Lay. Her first goal at Kidzania is to launch a U.S. site by 2013.
A 1990 Harvard Business School grad, Dunaway, 48, started her career at the Martin Agency, a Richmond-based firm, after graduating with a marketing degree from the University of Richmond in 1984.
FINS spoke with Dunaway about why mentors are important, being open to new challenges and why you should always take your birthday off.
Chris Prentice: What first led you to a career in marketing and sales?
Cammie Dunaway: I started off as a psychology major at the University of Richmond and just happened to take a marketing class. I really liked the idea that marketing is about understanding what motivates people.
CP: What was the most important thing you learned at your first marketing job?
CD: I got an internship at the Martin Agency one summer and then got a marketing planner job with them coming out of college. That was a fantastic rounding in consumer insight. I learned that whenever you have a business problem, you start by figuring out what's going on with the consumer. This typically provides good clues for how to grow your brand.
CP: After that, you went to Harvard Business School. Why get an MBA?
CD: One of the things that I started to realize is that marketing communications is an important part of building a brand, but there's much more to it. You have to have the right product. I decided to go back to business school. I wanted to move from the agency side to the client side.
CP: You went to work for Frito-Lay out of business school and moved from marketing to sales. Why sales?
CD: I really wanted to build skills so that I could run a business one day. In many marketing positions, until you get very senior in the organization, you are only managing a handful of people. These are people who have MBAs, and they come from similar backgrounds. In sales, I ended up running the Pacific Northwest region at Frito-Lay. I managed 100 people and ultimately about 2,000 people. They were people from varied backgrounds. It required me to learn to be a better listener and to be respectful of different types of talents than the ones I naturally possessed.
CP: How important are mentors in building your career? Who are yours?
CD: They're so important. They're people who challenge you, who help open up doors for you, who believe in you and push you to try new things.
I was very fortunate to have a great boss and mentor at Frito-Lay, John Compton [now CEO of Pepsi's Americas Foods division]. We began working together when I first started in sales. I knew that John was incredibly results-driven, so I made sure I always delivered on my commitments to him. I learned to speak the truth to him. When senior execs find young people who will really tell them the truth about what's going on and will have the courage to respectfully disagree, they find that incredibly valuable.
He was my mentor throughout many years. Whenever John got promoted, I would get promoted with him.
CP: Why leave an established brand like Nintendo for KidZania?
CD: This was an unprecedented opportunity to build a brand into a household name. The further along you get in your career, the more your days are spent administrating and sitting in meetings. The chance to really roll up my sleeves and to be part of building a company was an exciting challenge.
One of the themes of my career is to never turn down an opportunity to learn something new. Whether it's learning how to drive a route truck or learning about digital media and direct marketing. Those are the times when I've had the greatest growth and the greatest success.This position has that in spades. I'm doing everything from setting up health care for my employees to finding real estate to choosing technology platforms.
CP: What business book do you think everyone should read?
CD: The one I've come back to time and time again is Leadership Is an Art by Max DePree, who was the CEO of Herman Miller, Inc. I first read this book probably in 1994. He defines leadership as helping the people around you achieve their potential, and that philosophy has served me well. I've given that book to dozens and dozens of people who have worked with me through the years.
CP: How do you balance your work and home life?
CD: There are times when you have to really buckle down and put more emphasis on work and be clear with your family that that's what is necessary. There are other times when you make sure that family comes first. One of the simple things I've done do through the years is to prioritize birthdays in my family. We take each other's birthdays off as holidays. I will not miss that. It's about having the confidence to say, "Hey, I'm going to achieve my objectives, but I have to take this time off for my son's birthday."
CP: How much has luck been involved in your success?
CD: I've also tried to stay open to opportunities and tried to make the most out of every one that presented itself. There's a saying at Nintendo -- it's actually the meaning of the word Nintendo -- which is "work hard and leave the rest to heaven." I think that's pretty apt for my career.
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Chris Prentice
