Her Story
About Morgan
I've been in marketing since 2017, starting with more hybrid sales and marketing roles that were customer-facing, which really helped me bridge into a pure marketing role later in my career. I graduated from the University of Tennessee for my undergrad in marketing, and I was also a swimmer there who went to Olympic trials in 2016. I got my master's in marketing at Kellogg Northwestern University in 2024. I've been part of a lot of different organizations within marketing, most recently social media marketing and sports culture. Today I do digital capabilities and AI, which handles a lot within the GEO space and also with Gatorade.com, so I do a lot with e-commerce. I typically balance between 13 to 15 projects against the whole entire organization. Within sport and fitness at PepsiCo, we have so many brands including muscle milk, Gatorade Water, Gatorade Lovers Sugar, enhancers with powders, and equipment. I work with all those team brand leads to bring products to life on Gatorade.com. I'm the one-stop shop for everybody within the organization and any partners, working on what copy looks like, what language we're putting online, and making sure all our information is cohesive across different platforms like Amazon and Walmart so that AI like Gemini and ChatGPT can pull that information. I love people at the end of the day, which is what drew me to marketing. Gatorade really sang to me because this is what I drank my whole entire life to be a top elite athlete myself. Today I'm half-blind with my own unseen disability after going through health scares, but I'm able to still be such a great team player to others and much more collaborative than ever with a lot more empathy. I see myself becoming more niche within my marketing specialties, really leading into sports marketing and relationships. I absolutely loved social media before everything happened within my own health life, and I had so much fun with it. I can also see myself in an inspirational leader sort of role where I'm able to lead an ERG and lead conversations of vulnerability, talking about what it means to be disabled and the gray spots of life.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Morgan
01What do you attribute your success to?
I love people at the end of the day, which is what really drew me into marketing. I started out in more hybrid sales and marketing roles where it was a lot more customer-facing, and that really helped me bridge into a pure marketing role later in my career. I was an athlete in college, a swimmer who went to Olympic trials in 2016, so that competitive drive and discipline has always been part of who I am. Even after everything I've gone through with my health, I've become so much more effective because I'm able to still be such a great team player to others and much more collaborative than ever with a lot more empathy with everything I've gone through. I think everyone's so much more effective when you realize who you are as a human, rather than just seeing us as just a number within a company. The fact that I'm able to have this type of conversation and be recognized today is a testament to how much I've been able to still have with my output, even during a trying time.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
In the words of what I've learned from Harry Kramer at Kellogg, it's not work-life balance, it's just life balance. Everything, you can't have too much of one thing, and I do think that at the end of the day it's about prioritizing what's the most important for you as an individual and then doing your best to balance and work with others. I'm not one to say I stand for everything, because if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing, in my opinion. But I am one person that I juggle multiple things at the same time to make sure that I'm successful. I'm not all in on just one singular thing either.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think social media is an ever-changing landscape that you're learning all the time about the average person and what people are consuming these days. It's a different way to look at things, and it's hard to break through. So I think it's a really big challenge for most companies today, but it's something that's absolutely necessary at this point. I also think the more complex our world becomes, especially with AI, the more gray it's going to get. There's a lot that can happen within our personal lives that can really make us better as leaders. I do want to see myself further my career with my master's degree and bring people along the journey of what's going on in your life and how can we translate that into your career, because I do think that everyone's so much more effective when you realize who you are as a human rather than just seeing us as just a number within a company.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I love people at the end of the day, and that's what really drives me. I think there's so much we can do for athletes with disabilities, which I'm so passionate about while actually looking back at my past and being that top athlete and what it looks like now these days at 31. I'm able to still be such a great team player to others and much more collaborative than ever with a lot more empathy with everything I've gone through. I think a lot of people want to hide what they're going through and always come off perfect, but in my opinion it's like why don't we share those things because we're all going through hard stuff. I do want to lead conversations of vulnerability, talking about what it means to be disabled and talking about the gray spots of life. I think there's a lot where people like to say the answer's black and white, well it's not anymore. I think everyone's so much more effective when you realize who you are as a human rather than just seeing us as just a number within a company.
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