To Reach New Consumers, You Need Both Ambition and Humility

To get the full picture of Doug Zarkin’s marketing turnaround of Pearle Vision, it helps to imagine the CMO poring over his aging father’s inbox.

“At some point, we all have to start parenting our parents,” said Zarkin, who became vice president and chief marketing officer of the eye care brand in 2012, when his father was in his mid-70s. “Most of the email my father gets is spam, but about 20% is from established companies—real emails looking to upsell vaguely worded services or upgrades to existing services.