Alicia Holt
Alicia Holt has spent her career helping brands navigate changing markets and evolving consumer expectations. A strategic, results-driven marketing leader with a track record in brand management and consumer marketing, she now leads marketing strategy at Progressive Insurance, guiding today's shifting risk landscape.
Traversing a Wider Risk Surface
Twelve years ago, I ran Arm & Hammer, a $500 million legacy brand. Back then, the biggest disruption of the year was a new retail pricing guideline, and that was the whole risk calendar.
Today, in a single quarter at Progressive Insurance, I'm navigating AI-assisted workflows, an interest-rate-driven pullback in consumer spending and a customer base that trusts a stranger's review over advertising. Same job title, entirely different risk surface.
Risk used to sit inside one line. It was competitive, economic or regulatory. Now it hits from every direction at once. That is why four fronts are converging in my work right now— workforce, trust, economic volatility and speed of change.
The Tension Nobody Names
Start with the workforce. The easy story is that AI will change jobs. The more honest tension is that teams are being asked to do more with tools that are still maturing. The anxiety that creates is a leadership problem before it's a technology one.
I managed teams through the last big shift, which was the paid search and SEO era, when digital transformation meant something narrower and more contained. At Tasty Bite, we drove 46 percent growth in web traffic and 20 percent growth in email open rates by adopting paid search, SEO and SEM. Those were new tools, but people could still fully understand and control them.
Being selected by our company president to join a six-person Core 4 commercial strategy team taught me that people commit to change when they help build the plan, not when it's handed to them.
The risk isn't that AI replaces roles. It's that leaders roll out tools faster than they build trust in them.
That's what I'd want leaders to sit with now. AI adoption is moving faster than most teams’ sense of ownership over it, and productivity gains are getting undercut by quiet anxiety and disengagement long before it shows up in the numbers.
Trust Is the Product
Disengagement inside a company is one kind of trust problem. Outside it, the meaning of trust is evolving altogether. Consumers no longer trust brands by default; they trust reviews and communities first.
For insurance specifically, trust isn't adjacent to the product. It is the product.
Early in my career, brand trust was built top-down, largely through advertising reach and shelf presence. That changed for me with a cause-marketing campaign I developed called The Good Seed, where we gave away free vegetable seeds and asked consumers to donate their surplus harvest to food pantries. It wasn't a claims-driven ad. It was a values-driven action. We built a CRM database of more than 80,000 consumers and moved over 500 incremental in-store displays, not because we told people to trust us, but because we gave them a reason to participate.
In insurance, that principle scales up. We aren't just selling a product people get excited to talk about, but selling a promise they hope to never need. Earning trust today means showing up transparently before the moment of need, not just performing well in the moment of a claim.
That's the promise. Whether people can keep believing in it increasingly depends on whether they can afford it at all.
Higher Stakes, Less Room for Error
Insurance is uniquely exposed to macro volatility, frequently impacted by rates, claims costs and consumer spending pullback. Packaged goods never carried that exposure. In CPG, a recession changes what people buy. In insurance, it changes whether people stay covered.
I've watched consumer behavior shift in real time from both sides of this.
At Tasty Bite, I helped grow our Amazon business from the 20th largest account to a top-five sales account, with a 4x return on ad spend. That growth carried a lesson. When budgets tighten, consumers don't stop buying; they just change where and how. In financial services, that same tightening can mean a customer drops coverage altogether, a far higher-stakes decision.
Marketing's job in financial services during economic volatility isn't just to protect market share. It's to help people see continued protection as something they can't afford to walk away from, without exploiting the fear of the moment to get there.
The Real Constraint and How to Overcome It
Underneath workforce, trust and economic volatility, there is a fourth aspect. Technology's capability is outpacing organizations' and people's capacity to adapt.
New channels and new tools aren't the risk. The risk is assuming an organization absorbs new capability at the same speed at which the technology arrives. That gap is where leadership actually happens.
I can share a personal example here. Relaunching Riunite, the largest and most iconic brand in our wine portfolio, meant introducing a heritage brand to a new generation. We used channels that didn't exist earlier in my career, such as connected TV, mobile geofencing and multicultural digital media. We drove a 14-point lift in consumption and a 13-point increase in brand awareness. But the campaign only worked because we invested as much in getting our own team fluent in those channels as we did in the media plan itself.
I've spent my career watching industries insist that this time is different. It usually is, and it also usually isn't. The job of leadership has never been to predict the next shift. It's to build teams and brands sturdy enough to meet it, whatever shape it takes when it finally arrives.
