Amex Global Business Travel has created separate CMO and chief product and strategy officer positions as it looks to boost the role of marketing and product at the business.
American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) has split the chief marketing and strategy officer role to create separate CMO and chief product and strategy officer positions.
Alisa Copeman, who joined Amex GBT in 2023 as senior vice-president of global marketing, takes on the global CMO role. She will be responsible for leading the firm’s brand and marketing strategies.
Meanwhile, Evan Konwiser, who held the former chief marketing and strategy officer position, takes on the product and strategy chief role. He will lead Amex GBT’s corporate strategy, communications and corporate sustainability agenda, as well as its product team.
The company says the split “further elevates” the role of product and marketing at Amex GBT and is part of its “dedication” to invest in its platforms and solutions to best serve its customers.
Prior to joining Amex GBT, Copeman was CMO at Barclays UK, before which she spent nearly two decades at American Express, most recently as vice-president of marketing for global commercial payments in Europe.
Konwiser has been a member of Amex GBT’s executive team since 2020 and has held several leadership roles in his 14 years at the company, leading on global marketing, corporate strategy, sustainability, global communications and public affairs. Prior to Amex GBT, he was a strategy consultant at Bain & Company.
Copeman and Konwiser will both report into president of Amex GBT, Drew Crawley.
Rich Atkinson-Toal’s role as vice-president global brand & marketing is unchanged.
He spoke to Marketing Week in September about Amex GBT’s evolving marketing strategy. Over the past decade, it has invested $1.6bn (£1.2bn) in new technologies to improve customer experience.
He said the challenge in travel is taking something that is “uniquely about experiences, getting from A to B” and finding ways to “invest technology and AI into that, and then present that story to customers”.
He believes this challenge is intensified in B2B because the audience is much more complex, not only because the buying cycle is longer and there are a lot of stages, but also because the audience are experts in the category.
“If you’re selling a travel solution,” he explained, “the people who you are talking to in a business are travel experts. Their job is to look after travel and so you have to be really laser-focused on understanding what their needs are, and helping to convince them that you are the right solution for them.”
