For more than three decades, Michelle Payne-Harthill has built her career at the intersection of entrepreneurship, brand strategy, consumer engagement, retail activation, and sales growth. As the Founder and CEO of Harthill Marketing Services (HMS), Michelle has distinguished herself as a strategic marketing leader with an exceptional understanding of the consumer packaged goods industry and the complex relationships among brands, retailers, consumers, distributors, brokers, and sales organizations. Her career reflects an entrepreneurial mindset grounded in action: identify the opportunity, understand the consumer and customer, develop a differentiated strategy, and execute with the discipline required to generate measurable business results. This philosophy has enabled her to advise globally recognized organizations while also helping emerging and growth-stage companies navigate competitive markets.
Michelle’s professional foundation was established early in her career through hands-on responsibility for major consumer brands and retail programs. As Marketing Promotions Manager with Kragie-Newell, she developed and coordinated sales promotions for McDonald’s restaurants across Missouri and Illinois, connecting regional initiatives to broader annual marketing plans. Her work incorporated consumer incentives, sports sponsorships, advertising campaigns, and promotional programs associated with nationally recognized entertainment properties and product launches. She subsequently joined LaSalle Group as an Account Manager, where her responsibilities included key accounts involving Anheuser-Busch Specialty Channels, ConAgra Frozen Foods and the military channel, and Purina’s dog and cat division. There, Michelle developed advertising and in-store promotional campaigns, managed marketing budgets, coordinated creative teams and vendors, presented concepts to clients and retailers, and built experience connecting marketing investment directly to return on investment.
In 1999, Michelle made the defining entrepreneurial decision of her career by founding Harthill Marketing Services. She recognized an underserved opportunity within the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) retail environment: consumer brands needed sophisticated, channel-specific marketing programs capable of generating awareness while ultimately moving products from shelves into consumers’ baskets. Michelle transformed that insight into a specialized agency model. Within the company’s early years, HMS established relationships with prominent consumer organizations and brands, including ConAgra businesses and PepsiCo brands such as Gatorade, Quaker, and Tropicana, while also providing project work for organizations and brands including Kellanova, WK Kellogg Co, Kraft Heinz, Tyson Foods, Palermo’s Pizza, White Castle, Mars, Nestlé, and others.
Over more than 25 years of entrepreneurial leadership, Michelle has developed Harthill Marketing Services around a highly collaborative, full-service philosophy. Rather than approaching marketing as a collection of isolated tactics, she views marketing and sales as interconnected disciplines that must work toward the same commercial objective. Her agency has developed thousands of shopper marketing executions supporting hundreds of food, beverage, and consumer brands, with programs tailored to individual client objectives rather than relying on repetitive, one-size-fits-all solutions. From strategic planning and annual promotional calendars to digital initiatives, contests and sweepstakes, gift-with-purchase programs, in-store displays, printed materials, advertising, media buying, public relations, social media, and consumer engagement, Michelle has consistently focused her organization on programs designed to build brands while driving unit sales.
A particularly distinctive dimension of Michelle’s experience is her extensive involvement with military commissary and exchange retail environments. Working with CPG organizations whose products are sold through these channels, she has managed marketing budgets, developed annual strategic promotional calendars, presented programs for Defense Commissary Agency approval, and overseen execution across multiple supporting elements. This experience has given her a nuanced understanding of how brand strategy must translate through retailers, sales representatives, distributors, brokers, and individual stores before it can influence a consumer purchase. Her ability to move fluidly between high-level strategy and practical execution provides her with a valuable perspective for organizations seeking not merely to create compelling marketing concepts, but to ensure those concepts produce commercial impact in the marketplace.
Michelle’s expertise extends beyond established global brands. Her experience makes her particularly well suited to advising emerging and middle-market consumer packaged goods companies that need to build brand awareness, develop distribution opportunities, strengthen their go-to-market strategies, and compete against larger organizations with greater resources. She understands the challenges founders face because she has spent decades as a founder herself. She brings expertise in brand development and positioning, integrated marketing, shopper marketing, retail activation, strategic partnerships, consumer insights, business development, budget management, public relations, digital engagement, sales strategy, and organizational leadership. More recently, her work has also included national brand-building and sales initiatives for innovative health and wellness products, broadening the consumer categories to which she can apply her experience.
At the heart of Michelle’s leadership philosophy is a commitment to partnership. She has built Harthill Marketing Services around the belief that an agency should become an extension of the client’s team rather than operate as a detached third-party vendor. Understanding a client’s business, objectives, constraints, consumers, and retail environment allows her teams to develop ideas that are both creative and commercially relevant. Her “one stop shop” approach reflects an entrepreneurial willingness to solve problems rather than place artificial boundaries around responsibility. When confronted with something new, her instinct is to determine how it can be accomplished, assemble the appropriate capabilities, and deliver for the client. That combination of resourcefulness, accountability, and service has helped sustain long-term relationships throughout her career.
Her leadership and entrepreneurial achievements have also earned external recognition. Michelle was named among the Top 50 Women in Business in 2019 and was included by Enterprise League among “100 trailblazing female entrepreneurs to keep your eyes on in 2021.” Harthill Marketing Services received recognition as Best Full Service Shopper Marketing Agency in the 2016 Wealth & Finance Business Awards. In 2022, Michelle’s personal and professional journey was featured in Heroes, Legends & Leaders: The Power of the Human Spirit, where her story appeared alongside those of other individuals recognized for inspirational experiences and leadership. These honors reflect not only longevity in business, but the resilience, adaptability, and entrepreneurial drive required to build and sustain an organization through changing consumer behaviors, retail environments, technologies, and competitive landscapes.
Michelle has complemented her corporate leadership with meaningful involvement in professional, educational, and philanthropic organizations. She has served in multiple leadership capacities with the Southern California region of the Network of Executive Women, including responsibilities spanning membership, strategic alliances, operations, partnerships, sponsorship opportunities, events, and cross-functional coordination. As a mentor in the California State University, Fullerton entrepreneurship program, she has shared practical entrepreneurial experience with developing business leaders. Her community involvement has also included fundraising work with the Fisher House Foundation, supporting initiatives benefiting military patients and families, and marketing efforts connected with City of Hope fundraising activities. In addition, her affiliation with the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council reflects her longstanding participation in the broader community of women-owned businesses and entrepreneurs.
Michelle earned her Bachelor of Arts in Business, Management, Marketing, and related support services from Webster University, but much of her distinctive business education has come from decades spent making consequential decisions as an owner and chief executive. Building a company from the ground up has required her to understand far more than marketing alone. She has had to cultivate client relationships, win new business, manage budgets, hire and lead teams, negotiate, solve operational problems, adapt to market changes, communicate across organizations, and maintain the trust of major corporate partners. That ownership perspective gives Michelle an understanding of accountability that is particularly relevant in an advisory or boardroom setting: strategy must ultimately be executable, investments must have a business rationale, and leaders must remain responsible for outcomes.
As a prospective board and advisory leader, Michelle offers an unusual combination of entrepreneurial ownership and deep enterprise-level consumer marketing experience. She understands the perspective of the founder building a company as well as the expectations of globally recognized brands operating at scale. Her strongest alignment is with consumer packaged goods organizations—including food, beverage, wellness, and other consumer product businesses—as well as companies seeking expertise in shopper marketing, retail strategy, consumer engagement, brand development, or go-to-market execution. For startups and middle-market CPG companies in particular, she can provide insight into avoiding costly mistakes, establishing credible brand positioning, developing retail relationships, allocating marketing resources effectively, and building programs that connect consumer awareness with actual sales performance.
Ultimately, Michelle’s career has been defined by her ability to turn relationships into partnerships, ideas into executable programs, and marketing objectives into commercial opportunities. She brings the curiosity of an entrepreneur, the discipline of an experienced chief executive, and the consumer orientation of a lifelong marketer. Her approach is grounded in listening closely, understanding the business behind the assignment, and then mobilizing people and resources around a solution. After decades of helping organizations strengthen their brands and compete more effectively, she is positioned to bring that accumulated knowledge into boardrooms where growth, consumer relevance, strategic positioning, and disciplined execution are critical priorities.
Character:
Michelle demonstrates character through an enduring commitment to clients, colleagues, community organizations, and the partnerships she has cultivated throughout her career. Her entrepreneurial journey reflects resilience, resourcefulness, accountability, and a willingness to take ownership of challenges rather than retreat from them.
Knowledge:
She brings extensive knowledge of consumer packaged goods, shopper marketing, retail activation, brand development, consumer engagement, sales strategy, and military commissary retail gained through decades of direct experience. Her understanding encompasses both strategic planning and the practical realities of translating a marketing concept into an executable program that drives consumer response and sales.
Strategic:
Michelle approaches growth by connecting business objectives, consumer behavior, retail dynamics, brand positioning, marketing investment, and sales execution into an integrated strategy. Her experience advising major brands while building her own company enables her to evaluate opportunities from both an enterprise and entrepreneurial perspective.
Communication:
Spending her career communicating ideas across clients, retailers, sales teams, distributors, brokers, creative professionals, community organizations, and other stakeholders. Her relationship-driven leadership style allows her to translate complex objectives into clear strategies, establish alignment among diverse participants, and build the trust required for long-term collaboration.
