Courtney Ettus: Building Brands at Visa, Beats by Dre, Crexi, and More

Welcome to this episode of The Tori Nook Talk Show! In this episode, Tori sits down with Courtney Ettus, a marketing executive with nearly three decades of brand building behind her and now CMO at Resimplifi, a commercial real estate data platform.

Her career spans Kenneth Cole, Visa, Bank of America, Beats by Dre, Luxottica, Emirates and Slack, a CMO run at Greenfly, and six and a half years scaling Crexi from roughly 30 people to more than 350. She also curates one of the CREi Summit lists and speaks regularly for GlobeSt's Women of Influence community.

Courtney grew up outside Chicago, put herself through the University of Michigan, and took a sales job at a local shoe store. When she noticed her sorority friends were cabbing to the mall for dress shoes, she told the owners the store should carry them. At nineteen she was handed a $250,000 open-to-buy and sent to the Las Vegas footwear show, where she met Kenneth Cole and sold out every run she ordered.

They discuss brand differentiation, asking for what you want, negotiating as the only woman in the room, taking equity instead of hours, and where AI actually helps a broker.

🎯 Topics covered:

• Buying dress shoes at nineteen with no experience
• A decade in nineties corporate fashion
• Why someone should buy your black pants
• Starting a media agency job 13 weeks pregnant
• Running Visa, Beats by Dre and Luxottica
• Becoming a CMO in her forties
• Scaling Crexi from 30 people to 350
• Democratizing commercial real estate
• What makes a brand people actually like
• Taking equity in companies she believes in
• Why CRE tech has outpaced its users
• AI as a starting point, not an ending
• Finding your slog before buying software
• How a majority-women room changes the conversation