Sam’s Club’s Ciara Anfield fuels retailer's momentum

Ciara Anfield became Sam’s Club’s top marketer in early 2022 when it was already growing fast—then helped it grow faster still. While the chain often lives in the shadow of giant sibling Walmart, it’s a juggernaut in its own right, with sales soaring 14.5% to $84 billion for the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, Anfield’s first as chief member and marketing officer. Media spending measured by Vivvix and Pathmatics soared 89% to $268 million in 2022. Anfield, who had been VP marketing of Sam’s Club since 2020 and at Walmart since 2008, has an MBA from Harvard Business School and no inclination to simply stay the course even when momentum is positive. She launched a creative and media review shortly after taking her new job that brought two new agencies to Sam’s—Havas’ Arnold Worldwide and Horizon Next. “As we advance our capabilities and value proposition,” Anfield said, “it’s imperative that we evolve our brand in parallel.” See all of Ad Age's 2023 Leading Women here What advice would you give your younger self? You can start being the leader you aspire to be today. Every quality, trait and leadership characteristic you hope to embody one day can be demonstrated right now—in whatever space or role you’re in. Because being a leader has nothing to do with your title and everything to do with who you are, how you show up and your ability to grow and inspire others. What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken? Making the transition from marketing and strategy roles at Walmart’s corporate office to field operations, where I was responsible for a group of Walmart stores. Our children were young—our youngest was 11 months old—and the transition meant moving my family from our home of seven years to a place where we didn’t know anybody. All for a role that was out of my area of expertise. But this was something I actively sought out because I knew it would stretch me. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t listen to the people who said I couldn’t do it or that I was making a big mistake. The real mistake would have been letting fear stand in the way of my growth. If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing and why? Writing novels and/or running a jazz lounge. I love the idea of connecting with people through stories. So, if I wasn’t doing it as a marketer, I’d still be doing it in a different form. What should the industry do to encourage more women and people of color into its ranks? That’s an interesting question to me because it sounds like a business problem. If you asked any marketer or advertiser how they could grow with a new customer segment, we’d probably break it down methodically—like a simple, straightforward case study. First, you’d define the problem. Where are we missing women and people of color from the industry? In what jobs and at what levels? What is the impact or potential risk of their absence? Then we’d deep dive into understanding what’s causing the problem. What barriers and obstacles are standing in the way? Then we’d develop and implement strategies to address the problem, measure our progress, evaluate, optimize and scale. As an industry, we could encourage more women and people of color in our ranks by treating the absence as a business problem and applying the same level of strategic thought and discipline to solving it as we do our other business challenges. How do you expect emerging tech like Web3 and AI to impact your job in the future? Emerging tech like Web3 and AI are going to change the face and the pace of marketing. When I say change the face, I mean what it looks like and how most of the work gets done will be fundamentally different. And the speed at which these changes are happening is incredible. AI platforms are learning how to do the work faster than we are learning how to productively interact with them. If Web3 lives up to its promise of being able to put more control into the hands of end users, that’s an exciting proposition—and an endless wave of change that we need to prepare our teams to be ready for. As CMOs, we’ll need to be increasingly adaptable and permanent students of a rapidly evolving tech landscape. See all of Ad Age's 2023 Leading Women here

Sam’s Club’s Ciara Anfield fuels retailer's momentum

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