The top leader in Experience Relationship Management (ERM), AnyRoad selected Lauren Sommers as its first Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Lauren Sommers is a marketing, events, and branding expert and has more than 15 years of experience in the respective field. She will lead the strategic global marketing efforts of the company that will help in forming a new category of consumer events and experiences powered by software as brands across the world seek to capitalize on the experience economy.
Recently, Lauren Sommers has worked as Interim CMO at Hopin which is a virtual events startup that reconsiders how people connected all over the world during the covid 19 pandemic. The startup has a valuation of nearly $8 billion. At Hopin, she lead a marketing team of 40 members which contributed 70 percent of the company’s sales and helped it to grow over $100 million on ARR within two years.
Before working at Hopin, she worked in the post of VP of Corporate and Brand Marketing at customer intelligence platform Gainsight. There she handled globally integrated marketing programs which include corporate events and field marketing. In her career, Lauren had leadership roles at Marketo, Blue Yonder, and App Annie.
Chief Marketing Officer of AnyRoad, Lauren Sommers said that creating and measuring brand experiences are vital for building long-lasting customer relationships. As she is an event marketer herself and has been selling brands for many years, she knows very well the challenges that exist in the industry.
Lauren Sommers further said that AnyRoad brings clear value and ROI to an area that often lacks any real measurement or data. She is looking forward to playing an important role in changing how brands incest in experiential and helping them take an advantage of data to attract affinity and loyalty.
Lauren has joined AnyRoad at a time when it has 400 brands providing 200,000 in-person experiences every month that rely on the platform to develop their experiential programs and capture meaningful data to build stronger customer relationships.
To sustain with global demand for the experience economy, AnyRoad has recently raised $47 million in a series B funding round and has made many other strategic hires including Iain Hassell as its first Chief Financial Officer and Greg Klingaman as VP of Strategy and Field Operations, EMEA which is its first Europe-based leadership hire, previously of Diageo.
Co-founder and CEO of AnyRoad, Jonathan Yaffe said that the most successful brands of the next decade, brands that build emotional connections, will look more like experience providers than traditional goods businesses. He further said that their customers are evolving their businesses constantly and the company continues to grow with them. He said that Lauren is the most suitable person for their first CMO role.
Lauren’s deep SaaS knowledge integrated with her passion for creating human-first connections through experiences will help grow the organization to the next level.
