Peter Land has been with DICK’S Sporting Goods since mid-2020, where he currently serves as their Chief Communications and Sustainability Officer. He is also an adjunct professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, a position he has held since 1998. 

Prior to joining the team at DICK’S, Peter specialized in corporate reputation and consumer marketing as a partner in New York strategic communications agency Finsbury Glover Hering. Before that, he was senior veep of corporate communications for AOL, and, earlier, he held that same title at PepsiCo.

In this conversation with Lippe Taylor CEO Paul Dyer, Peter discusses the importance of skills acquisition, how marketing and comms functions are merging, the value of cultivating great ideas, and much much more.

Here are some key takeaways from this conversation with Peter Land:

Build personal relationships and networks in person. 

Emailing back and forth with people you meet online is no way to make viable connections. According to Peter, you need to interact face-to-face if possible because that’s how deep, meaningful, personal relationships are forged. He also makes the point that personal relationships are “massively important in communications. It's important across the board, but especially in our discipline [earned-creative comms].” Having a solid network allows you to do things like “say to your work colleagues … ‘I think your idea could get us some airtime at [one of the big morning shows]—a friend of mine is a producer there; let me ask them if they think so too.’”

Find opportunities to repurpose.

To illustrate the point, Peter cites the example of a campaign his brand conducted last year called “Inside Moves.” The centerpiece was a 60-second commercial featuring eight of DICK’S Sporting Goods' top executives (all of whom are female), with company CEO Lauren Hobart voicing over the story of how the brand is driving the entire industry to boost women’s and girls’ athletics. But while the content of the commercial started with a great idea, it wasn’t the only bit of ingenious thinking—Peter explains that he and his team additionally came up with a strategy of weaving the commercial’s message into profiles of the women execs for dissemination via social channels and then repurposing those personality snapshots for internal use as employee-relations/team-building tools. 

Let your brand value shine by solving problems.

Peter tells of seeing just before the 2021 NCAA Final Four women's basketball tournament a viral video revealing how poorly equipped the women’s weight room was at the event venue, the Alamo Dome in San Antonio, Texas. That sparked a publicity gambit in which the DICK’S Sporting Goods stores in San Antonio pitched in to deliver to the Alamo Dome sufficient weight equipment to put the women’s weight room on par with the much-better outfitted men’s room. “It was an incredible moment that let the NCAA know we’re here for the women's basketball community,” Peter says. “[This] completely energized our San Antonio teammates and got us coverage in USA Today and on NBC’s “Today” show. It also became an intense social media story that grew and grew and grew.”

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Produced by Simpler Media