195: Megan Kwon: How One of Canada’s largest retailers orchestrates messaging, and structures martech

What’s up folks, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Megan Kwon, Director, Digital Customer Communications at Loblaw Digital.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:26) - In This Episode
• (04:11) - Building a Career Around Conversations That Scale
• (06:25) - Customer Journey Pods and Martech Team Structures
• (09:08) - Martech Team Structures
• (11:23) - Customer Journey Martech Pods
• (12:54) - How to Assign Martech Tool Ownership and Drive Real Adoption
• (14:54) - Martech Training and Onboarding
• (17:30) - How To Integrate New Martech Into Daily Habits
• (19:59) - Why Change Champions Work in Martech Transformation
• (24:11) - Change Champion Example
• (28:25) - How To Manage Transactional Messaging Across Multiple Brands
• (32:35) - Frequency and Recency Capping
• (35:59) - Why Shared Ownership Improves Transactional Messaging
• (41:50) - Why Human Governance Still Matters in AI Messaging
• (47:11) - Why Curiosity Matters in Adapting to AI
• (53:08) - Creating Sustainable Energy in Marketing Leadership

Summary: Megan leads digital customer communications at Loblaw Digital, turning enterprise-scale messaging into something that feels personal. She built her teams around the customer journey, giving each pod full creative and data ownership. The people driving results also own the tools, learning by building and celebrating small wins. Her “change champions” make new ideas stick, and her view on AI is grounded; use it to go faster, not think for you. Curiosity, she says, is what keeps marketing human.

About Megan

Megan Kwon runs digital customer communications at Loblaw Digital, the team behind how millions of Canadians hear from brands like Loblaws, Shoppers Drug Mart, and President’s Choice. She’s part strategist, part systems thinker, and fully obsessed with how data can make marketing feel more human, not less.

Before returning to Loblaw, Megan helped reshape how people discover and trust local marketplaces at Kijiji, and before that, she built growth engines in the fintech world at NorthOne. Her career has been a study in scale; from scrappy e-commerce tests to national lifecycle programs that touch nearly every Canadian household. What sets her apart is the way she leads: with deep curiosity, radical ownership, and a bias for collaboration. She believes numbers tell stories, and that the best marketing teams build movements around insight, empathy, and accountability.

Building a Career Around Conversations That Scale

Running digital messaging at Loblaw means coordinating communication at a scale that few marketers ever experience. Megan oversees the systems that deliver millions of emails and texts across brands Canadians interact with daily, including Loblaws, Shoppers Drug Mart, and President’s Choice. Her team manages both marketing and transactional messages, making sure each one aligns with a specific stage in the customer journey. The workload is immense. Each division has its own priorities, and every campaign needs to fit within a shared infrastructure that still feels personal to the customer.

“We work with a lot of different business divisions across the entire organization. Our job is to make sure their strategies and programs come to life through the customer lifecycle.”

Megan’s team operates more like a connective tissue than a broadcast engine. They bridge the gaps between marketing, product, and data teams, translating disconnected strategies into a unified experience. That work involves building systems capable of:

Managing multiple brand voices while keeping messaging consistent
Triggering real-time communications that respond to customer behavior
Integrating old and new technologies without breaking operational flow

Every campaign becomes part of a continuous conversation with the customer. Each message is one step in a long dialogue, not a one-off announcement.

Megan’s perspective comes from experience earned in very different industries. She began her career at Loblaw during the early days of online grocery, a time when digital operations were experimental and resourceful. She later worked across fintech, marketplaces, and paid media before returning to Loblaw. That journey helped her understand every layer of the customer funnel, from acquisition through retention. It also taught her how to combine growth marketing tactics with enterprise-level communication systems, that way she can scale personalization without losing humanity.

Most large organizations still treat messaging as a collection of isolated programs. Megan treats it as an ecosystem. Her work shows that when lifecycle and acquisition efforts operate within a shared framework, communication becomes more coherent and far more effective. Alignment between data, channels, and teams reduces noise and builds trust with customers who engage across multiple brands.

Key takeaway: Building a unified messaging ecosystem starts with structure, not volume. Create systems that connect channels, data, and brand voices into one coordinated experience. Treat messaging as a relationship that continues long after the first conversion. That way you can make enterprise-scale communication feel personal, intentional, and consistent across every touchpoint.

Customer Journey Pods and Martech Team Structures

Running digital communications at Loblaw means managing one of the largest customer ecosystems in the country. The team sends millions of messages across grocery, pharmacy, and e-commerce brands every week. Each interaction has to feel personal, relevant, and timely, even when it comes from a massive organization. Megan explains that the only way to handle that kind of scale is to treat data as the operating system and collaboration as the backbone.

Her team relies on analytics to shape every message. Real-time signals from dozens of digital properties guide what customers see, when they see it, and how those experiences evolve. It is a constant feedback loop between behavior and communication. “We lean a lot into the data that we gather,” Megan says. “That pretty much drives almost everything that we do.” The systems are only half the story, though. The other half is how her team stays connected across offices, divisions, and projects. They share knowledge in Coda, manage progress in Jira, and rely on Slack to keep conversations fluid. Even their emojis have purpose, creating a shared language that makes collaboration faster and more human.

“Everything that we do, we share that knowledge back and forth so that we can continue to learn off each other,” Megan said.

The team structure used to follow the company’s business units. Each division had its own specialists who acted like small internal agencies. It worked for speed, but it made collaboration harder. Megan reorganized everything around the customer journey instead. Her teams now work in “pods” that align with stages such as onboarding, discovery, shopping, and post-purchase. Each pod has both data and creative ownership over its domain. That way, a single team can experiment, learn, and apply what works across multiple brands.

Megan also built intentional overlap between pods to keep ideas moving. For example, the loyalty and early engagement pod owns both new-member activation and retention. That connection helps them understand the full customer arc, from first purchase to repeat visits. The result is a flexible structure that shares expertise fluidly without losing focus. Large enterprises tend to slow down under their own weight, but this model keeps Loblaw’s marketing engine fast, synchronized, and grounded in customer behavior.

The work Megan’s team does might look complex from the out...