Albertsons hires former Fresh Market executive as chief marketing officer

Albertsons has tapped Emily Turner, a former top executive at The Fresh Market, as its new senior vice president and chief marketing officer, the grocery chain confirmed Tuesday. Turner started her role on Monday and will oversee the retailer’s enterprise marketing strategy across the key functions that shape how we connect with customers, according to a spokesperson.

Turner’s appointment comes as Albertsons looks to reinvigorate its performance and dissuade shoppers from taking their business to rival retailers. The grocer has been striving to reset its value proposition against a backdrop of intense competition that has held back its sales and dragged down its stock price. Investors are clearly concerned, as the company’s shares fell by more than 23% on the day it released its latest quarterly results last month.

Albertsons is bringing on a new executive to oversee its marketing operations at a time of substantial upheaval for the supermarket company. The company also plans to use targeted price cuts to hold onto shoppers. In addition, Albertsons is looking for a replacement for President and CFO Sharon McCollam, who plans to retire later this year.

Turner is starting her tenure at Albertsons less than a month after the company unveiled a simplified operating structure in a bid to become more efficient.

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Turner brings deep retail marketing experience and a strong track record of building customer-first, data-driven strategies that enhance experiences and drive growth, the spokesperson said. She spearheaded The Fresh Market’s enterprise marketing operations and led efforts to improve digital experiences for shoppers. The spokesperson added that Turner helped the specialty grocer bring in more revenue from its retail media business.

Turner offered insight into her approach to building connections with shoppers in an interview with Grocery Dive earlier this year. When we think about what we offer to our guests, it’s all around taste and quality, and obviously freshness, Turner said. And the way that we think about freshness is not just the freshness of our produce, but helping our guest to discover new recipes [and] new things that they haven’t tried before.

Turner also said she places a high priority on sparking inspiration for shoppers during a virtual panel session hosted by retail data analytics firm Dunnhumby last year. We don’t want it to be that we are serving you promotions or products that we think that you’re going to buy because you buy them most often, because that doesn’t serve you as the guest … we know that you come to The Fresh Market because you want to find something new, she said.