Profile: Megan Mahan, Senior Customer Marketing Manager, GE Appliances

It was never clearer to Megan Mahan than during the pandemic that the ability to generate well-crafted plans in response to the changing forces around you is no small feat. Yet, making those shifts while balancing the needs of the core business is a demonstration of what’s possible when you have the right cross-functional teams moving in the same direction, says Mahan, senior customer marketing manager for GE Appliances on the Best Buy account.She is a graduate of the University of Illinois in advertising, and also holds an MBA from the University of Connecticut. She began her career on the agency side, with Hachette Filipacchi Media, Campbell Ewald and Colangelo, before moving into brand management at Subway in early 2009. Nearly four years later, she added innovation to her brand duties at Long John Silver’s. In mid-2014, she joined Thorntons as its senior brand category manager of dispensed beverages and stayed with the gasoline and convenience store chain until she moved to GE Appliances in July 2016.“When we developed our joint marketing plan with Best Buy in late 2019, there was no way to know the pivots we would have to make in order to deliver on the business in 2020,” Mahan says. GE was exploring the idea of reentering the countertop appliances category, which Mahan saw as an opportunity to launch a new micro-enterprise in a way that could build long-lasting value for the company.With the challenge of launching more than 20 products across three different brands at the same time in a new category, GE’s product and commercial teams were knee-deep in logistics, production and transportation – “the ‘behind-the-scenes magic’ that brings good things to life and possible,” she explains. “There was a real need for leadership in crafting our story, setting a go-to-market strategy and forcing some of the hard questions we needed answers on going into that conversation.”Through research, data and talking with the cross-functional teams, she was armed with the necessary information to craft a concise and compelling story. “I drafted an annual marketing plan, ripe with tools and tactics that would best bring our new offering to life,” she says. “I even mocked up web pages and social posts to demonstrate how this new line would fit into our larger portfolio of brands and tap into our existing consumer segments.”In February 2020, Best Buy officially became GE’s small appliances launch partner, displacing competitive floor spots and securing the presence needed for a successful launch in the fall. Tests were slated for a couple of hundred stores to feature GE’s new coffee makers and toasters. Due to the pandemic, the endcaps were successfully developed, tested and approved through the first-ever virtual coordination between Best Buy, GE and their supplier partner, Rapid Displays.The full lineup of small appliances became available online for the holiday selling season and was introduced to consumers through three major campaign pushes in collaboration with the Best Buy team and GE’s customer marketing agency, Scoppechio.

Profile: Megan Mahan, Senior Customer Marketing Manager, GE Appliances

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