About The Marketing Edit, Powered by Rokt
The Marketing Edit, Powered by Rokt is an original video series from The Female Quotient that spotlights bold leaders shaping the future of marketing. Each episode features leaders from the world’s most influential brands sharing the defining decisions, lessons, and leaps that changed the trajectory of their careers. Together with Rokt, The Marketing Edit explores how today’s marketers are unlocking the Transaction Moment™ to build real-time relevance, drive growth, and meet customers in the moments that matter most.
In this episode, Shelley Zalis, CEO of The Female Quotient, sits down with Michelle Crossan-Matos, Chief Growth Officer at SharkNinja, to discuss the power of staying relevant throughout the customer journey, from awareness to intention,and how agility and empathy shape modern marketing leadership.
Mid-funnel is the new battleground
Most marketing strategies focus on the top of the funnel, where brands fight for attention, or the bottom, where they push for conversion. But for Michelle Crossan-Matos, the real opportunity lies in the middle.
“When is someone going to get obsessed with the middle part?” she asks. “That’s where people move from awareness to intention.”
It’s in this space, between curiosity and commitment, that Crossan-Matos believes brand growth happens. At SharkNinja, her team builds this connection by making data and creativity work together in real time. Attribution, agility, and fast feedback loops are essential.
“You’ve got to know if your content’s working,” she says. “We look at results hourly. If something’s not landing, we pivot.”
Relevance starts with empathy
Crossan-Matos has both growth and customer experience in her remit, a combination that ensures the voice of the consumer stays central to every decision. That means listening deeply, not just measuring engagement.
She recalls sitting in on call center calls and hearing an older customer struggling with a product issue. Instead of passing it along, she acted immediately.
“Imagine that’s your grandfather,” she says. “If you can’t feel that, you’re not going to fix it fast.”
That moment became a catalyst for change. Her team resolved the problem quickly and that empathy became embedded into SharkNinja’s operating model.
Speed fuels creativity
When it comes to innovation, Crossan-Matos challenges her team to think boldly and move fast. While many brands take months to bring an idea to life, she believes creativity accelerates under pressure.
During Cannes Lions, a casual “imagine if…” conversation led to The Joy Project—a collaboration with Deepak Chopra launched in record time.
“Give an unreasonable deadline,” she says. “Then watch how the must-haves shrink, and the nice-to-haves fall away.”
For Crossan-Matos, urgency doesn’t compromise quality; it clarifies it. The result is a culture that prizes experimentation and turns ambition into action.
Why this moment matters
The insights from The Marketing Edit go beyond SharkNinja, they’re a call to every marketer rethinking how to connect with modern consumers. The Transaction Moment is no longer confined to checkout; it’s shaped by every signal of intent, every conversation, every chance to add value.
Crossan-Matos proves that when brands move with empathy, agility, and intent, they unlock more than conversions, they unlock connection.
There's a lot of focus on relevance at the top of the funnel, but how do you think about staying relevant
at the moment of purchase? I've been a CMO multiple times and we're obsessed by that, but where is someone
gonna get obsessed by the middle part? And that's when it's like awareness to intention. We're a brand builder
of products for Shark Ninja. That intention is where people say, Oh, really? I heard there's a slushie. Oh,
did you hear that they can do frose? And it's that that part of like making sure you've all the right agency
partners that can serve you different parts. But if you don't have attribution, how do you know if it's working
or not? And then you have to be very agile. Like, if you come from retail and e-com, like I've done, we get
sales daily and hourly. And so don't you want to know if your content's working in certain parts of the funnel
in a very high frequency so that you can pivot your content? But I would say middle, get some more insight into
your middle, make sure you have the agencies that support you from the top to the bottom and attribution being
really key and having an operating model that allows you just pivot. It is a superpower if you're able to step
into the shoes of your consumer and imagine their pain points, their dreams and how brands can really serve
them. I oversee growth, but I also oversee the consumer, the consumer experience. And as a part of that, my job
is to find problems and fix problems. And I sit in call center calls. I heard a consumer, an older gentleman
talking about one of his vacuum cleaners and again I imagine like it was my grandfather. I was like well that's
not fair is that right that he has to go through that? And all of a sudden that passion for caring for that
individual allowed us to really look at it with an expedited fashion, allowed us to really solve that problem.
And Shark Ninja is really good at facing problems because they realize that makes consumers lives better if we
eliminate the pain points. How do you even encourage your whole team to come up with these big, bold ideas and
staying in the framework of corporate companies and the mandates of sort of playing it safe? Well, so I'm really
lucky because my new company, Shark Ninja, that's what they do all the time. Time and so naturally you had to
I had to hack my way there and find a way to get people excited about putting themselves outside of the comfort
zone. So just last year we were doing camp we're walking on the Cuisette and I was with a few of team members.
And I was like, imagine if dot dot dot. And, you know, imagine if and it was like that. And then an hour later,
I'm like, gosh. Remember that thing we're talking about? Imagine if and we built on it, and then we were riffing
and riffing. And then before you know it, by the end of Cannes, we had created the Joy Project with Deepak Chopra.
And then right, so you have the idea everyone's like excited. And then they're going to say, well, it takes six
months to a year to implement it. Well, what would it take if I want to do it next week? Like, you give an
outrageous deadline. Something so unreasonable, then all of a sudden what people think are must haves become
nice to haves. Now, well, actually, all we really need is an announcement of whatever. Right? Or a logo. And then
we just strip it down the bare bones and then add in some next to house. And then you're. Hi.
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