Executive summary
For Christina Bylin, Chief Marketing Officer at CarParts.com, global growth only succeeds when brands balance heart and data. With a career spanning Procter & Gamble, Visa, Google, Twitter, and now a $700 million e-commerce retailer, Christina has built her leadership on a simple principle that customer trust fuels scale. Performance marketing may drive short-term wins, but long-term loyalty requires relevance, empathy, and a clear sense of purpose.
In this episode of In Other Words, Christina sits down with host Jason Hemingway to discuss what it takes to rebuild marketing from the ground up. She explains how she has transformed CarParts.com from purely a lower-funnel, conversion-focused operation to a brand-led, insight-driven organization. She shares why purpose matters more than budget, how to create messages that travel across cultures, and why consistent testing is essential for staying relevant globally..
The result is a refreshingly human view of modern marketing: commercially sharp, culturally aware, and rooted in authentic connection.
From global tech to a category ripe for reinvention
Christina’s career spans some of the most influential global brands. She began at Procter & Gamble, where she learned full-funnel brand building. That foundation followed her through global roles at Visa, Twitter, and Google, where she led marketing strategies that reached audiences across continents.
What attracted her to CarParts.com was the chance to apply that mix of creativity and commercial rigor to a category that had long been focused almost exclusively on transactions.
“When I joined, we were focused primarily on the lower funnel,” she says. “There hadn’t been much brand building, retention, or loyalty.”
That gap opened the door to reshape marketing around customer insight, brand purpose, and sustainable long-term growth.
Rebuilding marketing from the customer up
Christina’s first step was grounding the entire organization in insight.
“It starts with knowing the consumer and rooting everything you do in data,” she says. “Start with the insight, then figure out the creative that tells the story.”
She expanded CarParts.com’s presence into channels that reached customers before they were ready to buy, refreshed the brand architecture to create coherence across dozens of private labels, and repositioned the brand to build familiarity and preference.
This was a significant move. A company once reliant on bottom-of-funnel tactics now engages customers through stories, community involvement, and early inspiration.
Brand and performance working together
Christina firmly believes that brand and performance are not opposing forces.
“You get strong sales today and a brand people remember tomorrow when you connect emotional relevance with sharp targeting,” she explains.
Working at global leaders taught her that big brands scale not because they spend more, but because everything ladders up to purpose. Values, mission, and strategy shape decisions across products, messaging, and markets.
“It’s easy to start at the bottom,” she says. “But if you don’t start with purpose, you end up throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.”
At CarParts.com, she has brought this discipline to a category often defined by price sensitivity rather than emotional connection.
Structuring for scale
Christina likens the CMO role to conducting an orchestra. It requires alignment with the CEO, CFO, and CTO, clarity about company goals, and the ability to translate strategy into the actions teams take day to day.
“You have to start at the top with a global insight, then figure out how it fits into a localized, personalized level.”
The challenge is ensuring that teams across regions feel empowered while staying connected to a unified brand story. For Christina, clarity of purpose enables that balance. Once teams understand what the company stands for, they can adapt messaging in ways that reflect cultural nuance without losing brand cohesion.
Testing for cultural resonance
Christina emphasizes that relevance in global markets requires evidence, not assumptions. Testing plays a central role in her approach. She uses pre-market research to validate reasons to believe in different countries, pairs it with in-market A/B testing, and analyzes platform performance since audiences behave differently across channels.
“The big idea stays the same, but the reason to believe may differ between markets.”
This experimentation builds confidence before scaling campaigns internationally and helps teams avoid forcing messages that don’t resonate locally. It also ensures that brand purpose can flex naturally in different cultural contexts, which Christina sees as a hallmark of global brands that endure.
Keeping teams close to the real customer
Even with dashboards and data science, Christina believes insight lives in the real world. She frequently sends teams into the field to listen to customers, visit repair shops, and observe competitors.
“Insights don’t live in spreadsheets,” she says. “They’re out in the real world.”
In a tactile category like automotive parts, understanding customer anxieties, motivations, and expectations helps shape more empathetic messaging and more intuitive experiences. It also keeps teams grounded in the realities of diverse markets rather than assumptions created in conference rooms.
Using AI without losing humanity
Christina sees AI as a powerful accelerator but rejects the idea that it can replace the human voice. “AI is an amazing tool, but you still need great people who know how to use the tools appropriately,” she says. “We’re still trying to reach the human on the other side of the computer.”
CarParts.com has already deployed an AI shopping assistant, Spark, to help customers navigate a catalog with millions of SKUs. It has reduced customer service volumes and improved speed and accuracy, especially valuable when many support agents do not drive themselves. Instead of replacing people, it enhances their expertise with richer product knowledge.
But Christina is adamant that authenticity must be preserved.
“People can see when something is fully AI-generated. There has to be a human touch.”
Encouraging experimentation and creating space to learn
For Christina, staying ahead requires continuous experimentation. She allocates a portion of the team’s time and budget to exploring new AI tools, often partnering with companies like Google to bring hands-on training directly to the team.
It’s not enough to simply encourage testing. Christina has deliberately built it into performance expectations.
“I found that even though I encouraged people to test, they weren’t,” she says. “Now that it’s built into performance goals, there’s a deeper level of commitment.”
This shift helps the culture move from passive curiosity to active exploration at both global and local levels.
Lessons for global CMOs
When asked about the biggest lesson from her career, Christina didn’t hesitate.
“Growth comes when you balance bold ideas with measurable impact. Don’t be afraid to be different.”
It’s advice shaped by decades of building brands that operate across cultures, channels, and industries. For Christina, global success depends on one word: connection. The brands that create it emotionally, culturally, and practically are the ones that endure.
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