• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, April 20, 2023

Dick’s Sporting Goods says chief marketing officer Ed Plummer is retiring, making way for PepsiCo’s Emily Silver.

Plummer has been with Dick’s for 13 years, and was CMO for the last four.

Silver is a 16-year veteran of PepsiCo, most recently serving as a senior vice president.

She joins Dick’s as it is enjoying a rare moment among retailers. Sales have been strong, it’s optimistic about the coming months, and it’s in expansion mode, experimenting with new concepts, digital initiatives and store formats.

Its marketing muscle is also in high gear. Last month, it launched the "Sports Change Lives" campaign, its first major brand awareness in more than a decade. (Arts & Letters Creative Co. is the agency.) The Pittsburgh-based company also announced a new retail partnership program with the NCAA. And it rolled out an extensive grants effort, all tied to its 75^th anniversary.

Those include a new "75for75 Sports Matter Grant Program," which gives 75 $75,000 grants to youth sports programs nationwide, with the goal of handing out $5.6 million by the end of this year.

It’s also renewing a $1.5 million partnership between the Dick’s Foundation and Good Sports, aiming to give $75,000 worth of kids’ sports equipment to 20 of the most under-sourced communities.

And it kicked off a new $1.5M partnership called the Game On-Community Places to Play Initiative, working with the Local Initiatives Support Corp. to build and renovate up to 20 multi-use sports spaces.

In recent years, Dick’s has tried to hire and highlight women executives on its team, including the work of Lauren Hobart, chief executive officer -- one of the few women CEOs in the retail industry.

In 2021, it launched a marketing campaign highlighting Hobart, as well as seven other high-level women.