Key takeaways:
- Mark Weinstein has joined Target as Chief Marketing and Guest Experience Officer, reporting directly to CEO Michael Fiddelke.
- Weinstein spent his most recent years at Hilton, where he oversaw marketing for all 28 of the hotel company’s brands, along with Hilton Honors and its luxury portfolio.
- The hire comes as Target works through a broader turnaround, one that includes a Chief AI Officer hire, a reworked grocery and merchandising strategy, and a Q2 earnings report that showed some categories still lagging behind others.
Mark Weinstein is joining Target as Chief Marketing and Guest Experience Officer, effective immediately. The Minneapolis-based retailer said in a press release that Weinstein will report to CEO Michael Fiddelke and take on a role the company describes as central to its growth strategy: shaping how consumers experience and connect with the Target brand.
Weinstein previously served as Global Chief Marketing Officer at Hilton, overseeing all 28 of the hospitality company’s brands and Hilton Honors, its loyalty program. He also led Hilton’s luxury brands division. According to Target’s announcement, his career has centered on building brands and platforms designed to strengthen consumer loyalty and drive long-term growth.
“As we continue writing the next chapter at Target, deepening how we know and engage our guests will be critical to our success,” Fiddelke said in a statement. “Mark has a proven ability to understand what consumers value and turn those insights into brand connections that feel relevant and personal, His leadership will help us elevate the guest experience across every interaction with Target, deepening existing relationships, welcoming new guests and driving continued growth.”
At Target, in addition to traditional marketing duties, Weinstein will oversee Roundel, Target’s retail media network, and Target+, the company’s third-party marketplace.
“Target is an iconic brand with the rare ability to be both deeply familiar and continually surprising,” Weinstein said in a statement. “I’m excited to join Michael and the team as Target charts its next chapter and build on that incredible foundation in fresh, distinct and more connected ways. We have an enormous opportunity to bring the brand to life across every interaction with consumers, creating experiences that feel unmistakably Target while giving people new reasons to engage with, choose and prefer us.”
Target’s Turnaround Progress
Weinstein’s hire lands in the middle of a broader transformation effort at Target, one that’s shown mixed results depending on the category.
The company’s second-quarter earnings, reported in August, offered some encouraging signs. Net sales rose 5.3% year over year to $26.5 billion, with comparable sales growing 3.8% on a 3.6% increase in traffic. Digital comparable sales climbed 8.7%, driven largely by same-day delivery growth of more than 25%.
Some of that strength came from a merchandising overhaul that EVP, Chief Merchandising Officer Cara Sylvester detailed on the earnings call. Target completed what it called its largest food transition in more than a decade, reworking nearly half of its center-store grocery assortment. Snack sales ran more than 15% ahead of last year following the change. The company’s hardlines division, branded internally as Fun 101, posted double-digit growth, with Lego sales up more than 30% and a Pokémon collaboration that Target said brought in thousands of new shoppers.
Other categories told a different story. Apparel and home furnishings were essentially flat in the quarter, a result Fiddelke acknowledged directly. “Flattish growth in apparel and home isn’t what we strive for over time,” he said on the call, attributing part of the drag to longer product lead times that slow the pace of change. The company said further updates to those categories, including changes to bedding and kids’ home, are planned for later in 2026 and into 2027.
Target raised its full-year net sales growth guidance to around 5%, up from a prior estimate of around 4%. But a chunk of the second quarter’s earnings strength, $994 million in pretax tariff refunds, won’t repeat indefinitely, and the company’s updated earnings-per-share guidance excludes any future refunds of that kind. New
Target named Chandhu Nair as its first Chief AI Officer in August to lead efforts around artificial intelligence in digital commerce and guest personalization, an area the company says is already paying off. Target reported that digital traffic sourced from external AI platforms like OpenAI and Google is growing more than three and a half times the industry rate compared with a year earlier.
