Hagerty Elevates Marketing Leadership, Signals Brand Infrastructure Shift
The automotive collector platform appoints dual executives to orchestrate a major brand evolution and campaign expansion.
Hagerty has promoted Marc Burns to Chief Marketing Officer and named Matt Teshera as Senior Vice President of Marketing. The dual appointment signals a fundamental restructuring of how the brand will manufacture its presence across platforms, audiences, and physical touchpoints. For a company built on heritage and collector passion, this move indicates a pivot toward more disciplined, data-driven identity architecture at scale.
Burns and Teshera inherit a brand that has occupied a distinct position: the insurance and community platform for automotive collectors. Their elevation, announced in tandem, suggests the company is moving beyond single-channel campaigns toward an integrated branded identity infrastructure—one that extends beyond digital into experiential, event, and tangible branded objects that maintain collector-grade standards.
What the Promotions Signal About Brand Architecture
When a company elevates two marketing executives simultaneously, it typically means the incumbent structure has reached capacity or missed a strategic requirement. Hagerty's move points to a deliberate separation of duties: Burns as steward of overall brand narrative and identity (CMO work), Teshera as the executor of campaign velocity and channel deployment (SVP Marketing work).
This distinction matters for principals and operators watching the space. A CMO-and-SVP structure allows one leader to keep long-term identity coherent while the other manufactures campaign velocity without compromising brand discipline. It's the structure you see when a company recognizes that heritage positioning and aggressive growth require different muscle groups reporting to the same intent.
For Hagerty, this likely means the brand is preparing to imprint its presence more deliberately across premium events, collectible-adjacent partnerships, and higher-touch owner programs. The collector economy moves slowly but decisively. These appointments suggest Hagerty intends to move faster without losing the restraint that keeps collector trust intact.
Where Identity Infrastructure Expands Under New Leadership
The next phase of a dual-CMO structure typically manifests in three places: branded objects and keeper pieces that go beyond digital; experiential programming that extends the collector community offline; and partnership-level brand integration with luxury and automotive heritage operators.
Burns and Teshera will need to produce a coherent identity layer that works across owned media (the platform itself), earned media (collector press and automotive journalism), and sponsored experiences (events, partnerships, branded environments). This is where many brands falter—they elevate leadership but fail to imprint consistent branded identity infrastructure across all three channels.
Operators in the premium sales and event space should note the timing: a new CMO and SVP typically means budget reallocation within 90 days and campaign deployment within six months. If your organization partners with Hagerty or competes in the collector space, this window is when those companies determine which partnerships advance their brand narrative and which do not.
What Principals and Operators Do During the Transition Window
For Single Family Office principals and their Chiefs of Staff, this move signals that Hagerty is serious about competing for mindshare beyond its existing base. The collector market is growing, but so is the noise around it. New leadership means new priorities and new partner criteria.
Operators—CMOs, VP Premium Sales, event planners at the $250K+ tier—should interpret this as a signal to audit their own branded identity infrastructure now, before Hagerty's new leadership establishes what they consider best practice in the space. The company will publish new brand guidelines, new campaign frameworks, and new partnership criteria. Alignment happens first for early movers.
The way this gets handled separates operators who keep pace with evolving brand architecture from those who stay locked into legacy campaign models. Hagerty's promotions indicate the collector space is entering a more sophisticated phase. The infrastructure required to keep up has already changed.
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