Hall of Fame Profile: Stephen Bettencourt

Stephen Bettencourt fully appreciates the power of rebranding. Although he has both undergrad and graduate degrees in management science, a college professor opened his eyes to the world of marketing research, and from then on, he had a new passion. 

His career has taken him to both the brand and retailer side, and he’s leaned heavily on insights to lead companies’ positioning efforts, often a momentous task that he takes very seriously. “It is intended to be the North Star that everything is built off of,” he says. “It informs everyone internally on the key audience(s), what the brand stands for, and how we go to business.” 

As CVS Health’s executive director of enterprise brands and retail insights, Bettencourt is charged with overseeing the brand identity, creative and advertising testing for the CVS Health family of brands as well as consumer insights for the CVS Pharmacy retail stores that are in local communities across the United States.

The Early Years

Bettencourt grew up in a small town in Massachusetts in a three-generation household that included his grandmother, his parents and two siblings. He describes his childhood as a “simple, happy life where our parents taught us the value of honesty, trust, kindness and hard work.” His dad worked for the Norfolk County Sheriff’s department, and his mom in the local elementary school.

His teenage years consisted of mowing lawns, watching neighborhood pets and then working at a local grocery store and a nursing home. But his next job at Lifeworks Inc., a workshop and group home that provided jobs, housing and recreation for adults with development and intellectual disabilities, made an indelible impression on his life. 

First hired at the workshop, Bettencourt went on to work at the group home in Foxboro, Massachusetts, for 13 years. He worked full time at the group home while attending Bridgewater State University, then moved to a part-time position and weekends only after he graduated. The home was situated in a residential neighborhood, and he says it was a fun and fulfilling job caring for the men who lived there. “They were simply living their life and just needed a little help, support and compassion as they moved through their day,” he says. 

It wasn’t until he was an upperclassman at Bridgewater State that he took a marketing research course and worked with his classmates on a local research project. Urged to take a sales course the next semester with the same professor, Bettencourt was able to finish the research project and, from that point on, knew that he wanted to target research roles in his career.

Career Development

Bettencourt’s first stop was at Hill Holliday in an entry-level research manager role. It was through connections there that he grew his early career, he notes. After four years, he went to Arnold Worldwide as an account planner for a short time, and then landed at FleetBoston Financial in brand/consumer insights for nearly seven years.

It wasn’t until the company was purchased by Bank of America and all senior level positions were moving to North Carolina that he started looking for his next opportunity. At the time, Stop & Shop was repositioning and reinvigorating its brand. He joined the company with a handful of others to make a new insights team, and started his first foray into retail. 

This was where the proverbial rubber met the road for Bettencourt. From what became his first of two tenures at Stop & Shop, he has spent his career looking through a retail lens, “understanding consumers, how they shop, how they navigate and what is important to them,” he says. 

And while the same tenets are still in place that have always been — the right price, the right assortment, ease of shopping — from an insights standpoint there are so many more ways to “get at it,” he notes. “Technology is playing a much larger role, and over time as I started integrating eye tracking, galvanic skin testing, facial coding, etc., it really started to lead us to different answers and understanding different parts of the store and their role.”

After five years, Bettencourt seized an opportunity at The Hershey Co. “They were putting together an entire cross-functional team to work on CVS,” he says, including sales, category management and shopper marketing. “They wanted shopper insights to round out the CVS team and help them drive not only the confection but total customer satisfaction.”

Bettencourt joined Bob Goodpaster and Susan LaPointe, who were starting up a new department focused on shopper insights. “This insights role worked between Hershey and many of the major retailers in the U.S.,” he says. “My goal was to help retailers understand their shoppers and the in-store experience, and identify opportunities to please shoppers, enhance the experience and grow the retailer’s total confection business.”

The new holistic approach brought with it a steep learning curve. “It wasn’t enough to just do great marketing research,” he says. “The role required that we put ourselves out there because we needed to show the retailers the power of the role and the type of insights that could be generated to significantly grow their business.” 

The team started to make a large impact on both the retailers’ and Hershey’s business. With that, the insights function grew quickly, and so did Bettencourt’s responsibilities. He started as the shopper insights lead on CVS and Kroger, then within two years had additional responsibility for the dollar channel and all retailers in Canada. Eventually as director of shopper insights, he led a team that was dedicated to the largest retailers in North America.

With an opportunity to build yet another insights department, Bettencourt made his way back to Stop & Shop after eight years at Hershey. He served as director of consumer insights for four years before becoming the consumer insights lead for Stop & Shop at Peapod Digital Labs through consolidation efforts within Ahold Delhaize. Less than a year into that role, he moved on.

Making His Mark at CVS Health

At this point in his career, Bettencourt was an experienced leader in helping companies rebrand and reposition themselves. A role opened at CVS Health for an insights lead on CVS Pharmacy that would focus on retail insights for the company. Bettencourt assumed his current post in January 2022, helping the retailer redefine the role of retail and how it can enable health and wellness and even help redefine healthcare, he says.  “CVS has an ambitious focus on customers, patients and colleagues and working toward evolving healthcare.”

Today, his insights teams fall under one of three umbrellas: enterprise brands, front of store, and pharmacy. His main focus is on looking across the CVS Health brands to understand their overall positionings and value propositions, stressing that the brand personality and voice needs to be clear and consistent. 

“Using insights to build, refine and pressure-test the brand positioning is so important,” he says. “Every word matters, and it all conveys the purpose and meaning behind the brand.” The goal of any rebranding effort is to communicate the focus to everyone who touches the brand. “The weight of trying to get that really right, clear and impactful is a challenge, but exciting,” he says. 

He is most proud of the work his team has done to help marketing, store design, merchandising and senior leaders develop a deeper understanding of CVS Health’s retail consumers. One way his team is doing that is through customer immersion sessions between senior executives and customers/patients. “We take off our business hats and they stay in their consumer role,” he says. Pairs go on shopping missions and reconvene to share experiences or listen to speakers on a variety of topics to understand what the company could be doing in the places it offers care. 

Bettencourt has repeatedly seen the lasting impression these sessions have on senior leadership. “It helps them stay very closely aligned to the mindset of our audiences,” he says. “We’ve helped to develop an internal understanding of what motivates shoppers, who our competitive set is, and what we need to do to win shoppers and grow the business.” 

The company is responding with changes across the business, with his team embedded throughout the process, Bettencourt says. “It’s gratifying to see the changes that CVS is creating are working. Consumers are responding favorably, and many are resulting in increased trips and unit movement — a first indicator that consumers are recognizing and appreciating how CVS Pharmacy is evolving.”

Into the Future

Bettencourt says his team is increasingly adding technology into its insights work, most recently incorporating neuroscience to understand the impact store changes have had on non-conscious perceptions of the CVS Pharmacy brand. The team is collaborating with research company partners to discuss the role of AI and how it can start to incorporate the technology into overall concept testing and message development. “It’s feedback that consumers can’t articulate,” he says. “Even if they tried to guess, they’d lead us in a different direction.” 

He and his team are also working with the neuroscience team at NielsenIQ, using EEG caps to monitor consumers’ brain activity in relation to their work. “We can tell what elements of our new store are really driving a brand connection,” he says. “That’s just something you can never ask consumers.”