Christina Clarke, MBA ’01
Director of Marketing, Cheetos
Frisco, Texas

Crunch
time

By Lori K. Baker
Photos by Richard Maack

Christina Clarke figures she may be the only daughter in America whose mother admonished her “to live it up” a little more. “Who tells their child that?” asks Clarke, who confesses she tends to be serious and goal-oriented. These traits led to career success, including landing in one of the most fun jobs in America—director of marketing for the Cheetos® brand within Frito-Lay.

Clarke says “there’s never a dull moment” within the so-called “Orange Underground” movement, which promotes Cheetos icon Chester Cheetah® and the bright orange snack in a sleek ad campaign launched in 2008 geared toward adults.

The more worldly, grown-up Chester wears sunglasses, speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent and entices us to be mischievous. In one of the most recent Cheetos commercials called “Party,” Chester gets the party started as two construction workers take a break to dance and eat Cheetos while excluding another construction worker (see the video here).

“It’s a very fun brand, and I’ve got a very fun team,” says Clarke, who credits her MBA from the University of Phoenix for helping her land what she calls “the best job in the world.”

Beyond the brand

But if you think the world of snack marketing is all fun and games, remember Chester Cheetah’s sage observation, “It ain’t easy being cheesy.” It also isn’t easy to build the educational and professional credentials necessary to lead a big-name national brand’s marketing efforts, but Clarke was up for the challenge.

After earning her MBA in 2001, she moved to Dallas, where she sprinted along a career fast track as a field merchandising and communication leader for Pizza Hut and account director for the ad agency Euro RSCG before joining Frito-Lay as an associate marketing manager. In her first two years she landed two big promotions: marketing manager, and then director of marketing, a title she holds today. She’s now in charge of brand strategy, communications, partnerships, advertising and sales/profit performance for Cheetos.

She credits her success to plain old hard work and perseverance, and the belief you can become who you want to be, even if, like Clarke, you happen to come from a blue-collar background, where previously the only college graduate was an uncle. Clarke worked her way through Arizona State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in marketing. “I’ll be honest, there are very few episodes of Friends I have ever seen because I was too busy working and going to school.” But one of the payoffs of her self-funded college plan was meeting her husband while they both worked as managers at Taco Bell.

A class act

At age 24, while juggling a full-time job and family responsibilities as a wife and mother of a 7-month-old baby boy, Clarke decided it was time to take the next bold step toward her dreams: enrolling in the MBA program at the University of Phoenix. “I started thinking, ‘If I’m going to do it, I need to do it now because there’s never really going to be a better time.’ I couldn’t really say, ‘I’ll do it when my son is older,’ because it would have even been harder. So my husband told me, ‘Let’s get this done. Twenty-one months. We can do it.’”

“It’s a very fun brand, and I’ve got a very fun team.”

Christina Clarke, MBA ’01

So she dove headfirst into the University of Phoenix MBA program in October 1999, only to discover three months later that she was pregnant with their second child. “That was a shocker,” Clarke says. “But I powered through it. I only missed one class, and it was because I was in labor.”

While attending UOPX, she met professors who were more than instructors—they were mentors. “I had the most diverse group of professors who not only loved the content of the classes they were teaching, but loved it enough to want to mentor and develop others as part of their teaching profession,” she says. “They were doing it because they really wanted to empower business leaders who were coming up behind them.

Winning fans and influencing people

In what’s certainly not the final chapter in her success story, it’s fitting that Clarke, her husband Jeff and two sons (now 13 and 12) live in Prosper, Texas. Looking back over her career, she says, “I have been fortunate to be a part of amazing organizations since I graduated—Yum Brands, Euro RSCG and Frito-Lay.”

She’s also active in her community as the North Central Texas Region co-chair of the Network of Executive Women and as a volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America.

With both sons ready to pursue their Eagle Scout ranks, she says she’s never missed a summer camp and recently even became a certified climbing instructor so she could lead a troop on a rappelling expedition.

It’s all part of her zest for life, where the lines between work and play often blur—just like they do for Chester Cheetah.

Lori K. Baker is an award-winning journalist who specializes in human-interest profiles, business and health. Her articles have appeared in dozens of national and regional publications, including Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, Wild Blue Yonder, Arizona Highways, Vim & Vigor and Johns Hopkins Health.

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