“I wanted to get back into an operating role and have a seat at the table,” Ms. Johnson said, calling PayPal a company that is doing consequential work. Ms. Johnson was vice president of world-wide marketing communications at Apple Inc. from 2005 through 2011 and was previously a senior marketing executive at HP Inc. She was most recently a founder and managing partner at West, which she described as a hybrid of a marketing and venture-capital firm.
She said she left last March.
By Nat Ives
The Wall Street Journal
Jan. 14, 2019 2:05 p.m. ET
PayPal Holdings has named Allison Johnson, a former Apple marketing executive, its new chief marketing officer. PHOTO: ALLISON JOHNSON
PayPal Brings Back CMO Role to Hire Former Apple Executive Allison Johnson
Lapsed post returns to help company whose portfolio has become more diversified
PayPal Holdings Inc. has named Allison Johnson executive vice president and chief marketing officer, reviving a post that disappeared from the company in 2013.
Ms. Johnson was vice president of world-wide marketing communications at Apple Inc. from 2005 through 2011 and was previously a senior marketing executive at HP Inc. She was most recently a founder and managing partner at West, which she described as a hybrid of a marketing and venture-capital firm. She said she left last March.
“I wanted to get back into an operating role and have a seat at the table,” Ms. Johnson said, calling PayPal a company that is doing consequential work.
Since its founding about two decades ago, PayPal has become the dominant digital wallet in the U.S. Around 64% of respondents to a March 2018 survey from Bernstein Research said they had used PayPal at least once to buy something online in the previous year, around triple the market share of its next closest competitor.
In recent years, PayPal has sought to branch out beyond its best-known offering of a checkout button that enables shoppers to easily pay for goods and services on retailers’ websites. The company is now involved in business lines as diverse as cross-border remittances, mobile money transfers, making and selling credit-card readers, and lending money to small and medium-size enterprises. Its portfolio includes Venmo, the mobile person-to-person payment service; iZettle, which makes payment hardware; and Braintree, which enables tech companies like Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc. to accept mobile payments.
That’s part of the reason it brought back the CMO role, according to Chief Executive Dan Schulman, who said marketing had been divided among brands and regions.
“It’s a much more complex set of messaging to very specific segments of the market, both on the consumer and the merchant side,” Mr. Schulman said. “So the sophistication required from a marketing and messaging perspective has gone up exponentially for us.”
Payments and so-called fintech more broadly are also the focus of strong interest among both established financial institutions and startups. PayPal’s former parent, eBay Inc., plans to replace PayPal with Adyen BV as its primary payments processor next year, though eBay users still will be able to use PayPal there.
Mr. Schulman said PayPal is creating products that allow it to work with many players in the digitization of money. “The real war is a little less between companies, and it’s more a war on cash,” he said.
