Why marketing cosmetics and beer prepped the Kansas City Chiefs’ CMO for her biggest role yet

This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles here.

In some ways, Lara Krug is the embodiment of many modern Kansas City Chiefs fans. She rides for the team, often hosting watch parties at her house, but she joined the fandom a bit later in life, and did so more for the community aspect than because of any deep-seeded love of the game.

In other ways, though, Krug is a lot closer to the Chiefs than the average fan. She is the team’s first chief marketing officer, after all.

At first glance, Krug’s résumé reads a bit like a shopping list before a night out; she worked in clothes, cosmetics, and beer before landing in the sports space a few years ago. But her appointment to the Chief’s top marketing role was hardly a stretch, with her experience at international companies like AB InBev and L’Oréal serving as a training ground for someone who’d go on to market a sports organization that Krug says is aiming to be known as “the world’s team.”

“Industry aside, what’s consistent is understanding who your end user is,” Krug told Marketing Brew. “Whether it’s a drinker, whether it’s a buyer, whether it’s a fan, whether it’s a consumer, whether it’s a shopper—we [have] all these different ways of talking about the people that we’re trying to market and sell to. At the end of the day, they’re all humans.”

Culture fan to fan culture

Krug remembers wanting to be a part of the pop culture and entertainment landscape since at least her college days, when she majored in mass communications with a minor in marketing at Miami University in Ohio. It was during Krug’s college years when she became a football fan, she said.

Growing up in Connecticut, which tends to have something of a split fandom between New York and New England teams, Krug’s family wasn’t big on sports, with the exception of Thanksgiving football or attending the occasional nearby sporting event like a Yankees game in the Bronx or a US Open match in Queens.

But Miami University is a Division I school, and it’s also where Krug met her husband, a born-and-bred Chiefs fan. She attended her first Chiefs game on New Year’s Day in 2006, she said, and was hooked.

“When I came to my first-ever Chiefs game and watched a tailgate, I’d never seen or experienced anything like that, and I realized very quickly why people want to be part of something like that,” Krug said.

That fandom means her kids are growing up a little differently than she did. “I think their first outfits were probably the baby Chiefs onesies,” Krug said.

When a recruiter got in touch with Krug about her current role, she’d recently moved to Kansas City with her family after spending more than a decade in the New York area. “It was an amazing opportunity in a city that I had already chosen,” she said, but it wasn’t just the location that made Krug want to work for the team.

At the time, the Chiefs were looking to grow their brand awareness globally, Krug said, an ask she was familiar with from her time at L’Oréal and AB InBev. Plus, the Chiefs are a “premium, legacy brand” with plenty of opportunities to tie into media and pop culture, she said.

“My eyes just lit up,” Krug said.

Bottle service

During her time at L’Oréal in the mid-2010s, Krug was responsible for applying the company’s global brand positioning to new product releases in local markets around the world, she said. From there, she was recruited to the global team that was responsible for media, digital, social, experiential, and sponsorships across AB InBev brands, she said.

Krug got some sports marketing experience in that role, having managed the company’s relationship with the NBA, worked on the Stella Artois Wimbledon sponsorship, and negotiated a deal between Corona and the World Surf League, she said. She even worked on one particularly memorable Super Bowl campaign during her time leading Stella’s US marketing, according to Rob Siegler, who was on Krug’s team at the time and currently serves as VP of sales for Goose Island Beer Company.

Instead of running an ad that year, Stella activated on the ground in Miami, Siegler recalled. Unfortunately, the Super Bowl fell on a particularly rainy weekend, causing some chaos. To encourage him through the weekend, Siegler said Krug reminded him that “good things happen to good people.” Krug eventually got him a coffee mug with that phrase, which he said he’s held onto ever since. And sure enough, the event went over well, earning media attention from publications like the New York Times. The real kicker, though, was that the Chiefs won the Super Bowl that year.

“She did a very good job of making success yours and failure ours, which is, I think, the perfect example of what a leader should do,” Siegler said. Krug remains a friend and mentor to Siegler, he said.

Krug did a lot of traveling at that point in her career, building an understanding of how global brands operate, but she eventually transitioned to a US-focused role at AB InBev when her daughter was born, she said.

Working on brands like LandShark helped Krug learn about more local marketing strategies (LandShark is sold nationally, but it’s distributed heavily in certain states like Florida, she said), and serving as VP of US marketing for Stella Artois taught her how to grow awareness for a “super premium” product. But unlike hair products or beer, football doesn’t come in a bottle, Krug said, and marketing a team was a “big transition.”

“Coming over to the sports side, you’re essentially marketing an intangible product,” she said. “You can’t touch and feel it…But again, the core fundamentals of connecting people with a product, physical or not, remain consistent.”

Make your (hall)mark

Lately, Krug has been tasked with continuing to grow the Chiefs brand. With a “somewhat endless” NFL audience, Krug and her team tend to develop their marketing initiatives with different demographic groups in mind, and try to create platforms that authentically engage them all, she said.

The team’s partnership with Kansas City-based Hallmark, for instance, was designed with millennial parents and women in mind, Krug said. The forthcoming movie, Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, will ideally invite people in those demographics to “connect to the Chiefs, perhaps outside of the core game of football,” she said. The team also got involved in flag football as a way to drive interest among parents and their kids, according to Krug.

“Our continued focus is on becoming the world’s team, and doing that by growing our brand awareness and engaging more deeply with our fans, both existing and new fans,” she said. “Our goal is to focus on…connecting with fans in a way that they believe in, and trying to evolve the types of experiences, products, creative assets, [and] media properties [we use] to do that, to reach as far and wide as possible.”