Skills
About
I've spent over 30 years helping technology companies tell the truth about themselves in moments when the stakes are highest. As CEO and Founder of Red Fan Communications, I work with CMOs and CEOs of B2B technology companies navigating transactions, leadership transitions, and the pressure to claim AI leadership before the internal reality has caught up. The track record we're proudest of sits at the intersection of strategic narrative and high-stakes execution. We positioned Q2 Holdings for its NYSE debut and subsequent M&A activity, guided CSI through its transition from public to private ownership, and led Hyliion's NYSE listing, the only IPO during COVID with on-site executive presence. We positioned Fluence Bioengineering for competitive acquisition, transformed Six Nines IT into Nextira with investment and acquisition secured in four months, and built the brand recognition that positioned MyEdu for Blackboard acquisition. My background as a high-tech journalist covering microprocessors taught me the discipline of translating complex technology into language a reader can actually use. That instinct shaped everything since: directing JPMorgan Chase's communications across 18 countries from Hong Kong, launching technologies at IBM Research, and now building Red Fan around the conviction that the strongest brands are built on what employees can defend in their own words, not on what the communications team produces. We are often the first call when something is brewing. A management change. An M&A signal. A CEO who needs a strategic sounding board before the board meeting. Our clients value the listening, the forward-thinking counsel, and the team that knows the difference between a comms problem and a clarity problem. Kathleen@redfancommunications.com
Kathleen Lucente
Published content
expert panel
Marketing leaders are often urged to let data drive their decisions, particularly when budgets are tight and the stakes are high. But a new Journal of Business Research paper suggests there’s another variable that dashboards can’t capture: What’s happening in a CMO’s personal life may affect the way they approach marketing strategy, from planning and product development to communications and channel management.That doesn’t make data-driven leadership less valuable. It does, however, underscore its limits. Data still has to be interpreted, trade-offs still have to be weighed and decisions still have to be made by people whose judgment, energy and perspective don’t exist separately from the rest of their lives. Stress combined with time pressure can impair decision-making, affecting attention and making people more likely to overlook beneficial options. That makes the support surrounding senior leaders more than a matter of workplace well-being. What should companies be doing to help CMOs make sound decisions when personal pressures inevitably arise? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share their perspectives on the human limits of data-driven leadership, how organizations can build stronger support around the people making high-stakes marketing decisions, and how life experiences can expand a marketing leader’s creativity and impact.
expert panel
For years, search marketing has been built around a familiar goal: earn enough visibility to get a customer to click. AI-generated search results are changing that equation. For example, a 2025 analysis found that Google users clicked traditional search results in just 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when it didn’t—suggesting brands may have fewer opportunities to speak for themselves on their own turf.When an AI system becomes the layer between a company and a prospective customer, brand reputation isn’t shaped only by what the company publishes. The system may synthesize information from a range of sources, and that synthesis isn’t guaranteed to be accurate. Widespread problems, from speculative answers to fabricated links, have been found with the ways generative search tools retrieved and cited source material. For CMOs, that makes the broader information ecosystem surrounding a brand a more immediate marketing concern, since an incomplete, outdated or inaccurate answer can influence perception before a customer ever reaches the company’s website—if they reach it at all.As AI changes how customers discover and evaluate companies, marketing leaders need to rethink what it takes to earn authority when they may not control the first—and sometimes only—description a buyer sees. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and the rise of AI in marketing, discuss how CMOs can approach brand authority, message consistency and reputation in an AI-mediated search environment.
expert panel
expert panel
The modern marketing calendar can feel like an airline flight board—constantly updated, rerouted and in need of attention. When a trending conversation erupts, a platform changes its algorithm or a competitor jumps on the meme of the moment, sitting out can feel like falling behind. But a brand that’s always changing course may never give its customers a clear sense of where it stands.Timely marketing certainly has value, but speed and effectiveness aren’t the same thing. Maintaining a coherent identity across channels helps strengthen recognition, trust and loyalty. Constantly shifting a brand’s messaging, voice or presentation in response to external events can make that invaluable customer bond much harder to build.At the same time, brands can’t afford to tune out cultural shifts or emerging conversations altogether. Trends can reveal changing customer interests, new expectations and opportunities to participate in moments that matter to an audience. Brands today have many ways to engage with culture as it unfolds, but doing so effectively requires speed paired with sensitivity and sound judgment. The challenge for marketing leaders, then, isn’t to ignore what’s happening around them. It’s to recognize which moments can strengthen the brand—and which will merely pull the team off course. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank draw on their expertise in brand storytelling and customer engagement to examine the mistakes leaders make when immediacy takes priority over long-term brand-building and explain what teams should do instead.
expert panel
Is your marketing team producing more content than ever, yet still failing to convert customers or align employees around a single story? The problem might not be content at all; it's clarity. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank break down the specific signals that separate a content gap from a clarity gap, and the first, often counterintuitive, steps to close it.Ask five people inside the same company what it actually does, and you might get five different answers: The VP of sales talks about solving one problem. Marketing's slide deck talks about another. The newest hire on the support team simply repeats whatever's on the website. Customers notice the mismatch even when they can't name it, and the result is hesitation, not conversion.It's tempting to solve that hesitation with more content: another landing page, another explainer video, another round of ads. But volume rarely fixes what's actually broken. According to a Forbes Agency Council analysis of e-commerce checkouts, a Baymard Institute study found that the average cart-abandonment rate is more than 70%, driven largely by confusion and surprises at checkout—not by a lack of information. The same pattern shows up well before checkout: when a brand's story shifts depending on who's telling it, messaging confusion sends buyers straight to a competitor, no matter how much content sits behind it.So how does a leadership team tell the difference between a company that needs better content and one that needs a clearer story altogether? And once that diagnosis is made, where's the right place to start? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, whose backgrounds span brand strategy, performance marketing and high-stakes corporate communications, share the signals they watch for and the first moves they'd make to turn a fuzzy narrative into one everyone in the building can repeat with confidence.
expert panel
Marketing teams have never had more data, automation or channels to work with. Yet the problems that stall growth, weaken trust or drain a team’s energy often aren’t technical at all. They’re rooted in people: how customers feel, how teams collaborate, how leaders handle uncertainty, and how organizations respond when old assumptions stop working.That tension is becoming harder to ignore as AI changes both the volume and nature of brand communication. Americans remain cautious about AI’s broader impact, and recent industry conversations have pointed to a related marketing reality: As AI-generated content and commerce tools multiply, brands still need real trust, relevance and direct human connection to stand out.A marketing problem may look like a messaging issue, a measurement issue or a channel issue, but to resolve it, leaders often need to look deeper. Because no matter how many campaigns launch or what dashboards say, marketing is only effective if it reaches and connects with the audience—and that requires both inward and outward focus on the humans who write and receive the story.Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with expertise in brand storytelling, customer engagement and the rise of AI in marketing, share and discuss examples of the human challenges that will always impact marketing and how teams can adjust their strategies once they adopt a human-centered viewpoint.
Company details
Red Fan Communications
Company bio
Red Fan Communications is a senior B2B technology communications firm built for moments when the stakes are highest. Founded in 2008 by Kathleen Lucente, a former technology journalist and global communications leader at JPMorgan Chase and IBM Research, the firm specializes in transaction communications, brand authority strategy, and the work of helping technology companies tell the truth about themselves in moments of growth, transition, or acquisition. Red Fan operates on a deliberately exclusive model. One client per category. No junior teams. No B-roster. Every engagement is led by senior strategists with direct experience in IPOs, M&A, leadership transitions, and the high-stakes moments where messaging carries real consequence. The firm's work has supported the NYSE debuts of Q2 Holdings and Hyliion, the public-to-private transition of CSI, the acquisitions of Fluence Bioengineering, Six Nines IT (Nextira), and MyEdu, and the brand authority engines behind companies positioning for their next milestone. What distinguishes Red Fan is the conviction that the strongest brands are built on what employees, customers, and analysts say in unguarded moments. The firm's Positioned to Win Method, developed over more than a decade of high-stakes transaction work, helps leadership teams align the external narrative with what the organization can actually defend, so the story holds up under the scrutiny of buyers, journalists, AI engines, and the market itself.