PayPal Brings Back CMO Role to Hire Former Apple Executive Allison Johnson
January 14 2019 - 2:35PM
Dow Jones News
By Nat Ives
PayPal Holdings Inc. has named Allison Johnson executive vice
president and chief marketing officer, reviving a post that
disappeared from the company in 2013.
Ms. Johnson was vice president of world-wide marketing
communications at Apple Inc. from 2005 through 2011 and was
previously a senior marketing executive at HP Inc. She was most
recently a founder and managing partner at West, which she
described as a hybrid of a marketing and venture-capital firm. She
said she left last March.
"I wanted to get back into an operating role and have a seat at
the table," Ms. Johnson said, calling PayPal a company that is
doing consequential work.
Since its founding about two decades ago, PayPal has become the
dominant digital wallet in the U.S. Around 64% of respondents to a
March 2018 survey from Bernstein Research said they had used PayPal
at least once to buy something online in the previous year, around
triple the market share of its next closest competitor.
In recent years, PayPal has sought to branch out beyond its
best-known offering of a checkout button that enables shoppers to
easily pay for goods and services on retailers' websites. The
company is now involved in business lines as diverse as
cross-border remittances, mobile money transfers, making and
selling credit-card readers, and lending money to small and
medium-size enterprises. Its portfolio includes Venmo, the mobile
person-to-person payment service; iZettle, which makes payment
hardware; and Braintree, which enables tech companies like Uber
Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc. to accept mobile payments.
That's part of the reason it brought back the CMO role,
according to Chief Executive Dan Schulman, who said marketing had
been divided among brands and regions.
"It's a much more complex set of messaging to very specific
segments of the market, both on the consumer and the merchant
side," Mr. Schulman said. "So the sophistication required from a
marketing and messaging perspective has gone up exponentially for
us."
Payments and so-called fintech more broadly are also the focus
of strong interest among both established financial institutions
and startups. PayPal's former parent, eBay Inc., plans to replace
PayPal with Adyen BV as its primary payments processor next year,
though eBay users still will be able to use PayPal there.
Mr. Schulman said PayPal is creating products that allow it to
work with many players in the digitization of money. "The real war
is a little less between companies, and it's more a war on cash,"
he said.
Peter Rudegeair contributed to this article.
Write to Nat Ives at nat.ives@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 14, 2019 14:20 ET (19:20 GMT)
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