Mark Weinstein joined Target this week as chief marketing and guest experience officer, reporting to chief executive Michael Fiddelke, and picking up guest experience, Roundel and Target+ besides. He arrives from Hilton, where he ran marketing for 28 brands and the Honors loyalty programme. Target has concluded that people think of it often enough and walk in too rarely.

The job was written the other way round. Target announced an external search in February for a chief guest experience and marketing officer, alongside two internal promotions, a departure and a retirement. Seven months later the nouns had swapped places and the remit had grown by two profit lines. Guest experience was not demoted; it was given a budget.

The quarterly numbers explain the appointment better than the announcement does. Second-quarter comparable sales rose 3.8 percent on a 3.6 percent increase in traffic, while the average transaction moved 0.2 percent. The visits are new. The baskets are last year’s. Store comparable sales grew 2.7 percent against 8.7 percent digital, the latter led by more than 25 percent growth in same-day delivery. Target’s fastest-growing service is the trip its customer stopped making, and the new officer’s title now names that trip.

A company that spent three years watching comparable sales fall did not go outside for someone to make it famous.

Target had already found the answer and filed it. Cara Sylvester, then chief guest experience officer, said in March 2025 that paid Circle 360 members spent eight times more and shopped six times more often than non-members. The company moved Sylvester into merchandising and then spent seven months looking outside for someone to act on her finding. Knowing which customer comes back is cheap; building the machinery that brings her back is the expensive part.

The trade covered the appointment as a marketing seat refilled after chief operating officer Lisa Roath was reassigned from the CMO post early last year, leaving the post empty for roughly a year and a half. The recovery arrived in that gap, unassisted. What Target lacked was an owner for the second visit.

Hospitality loyalty runs on a booking that is dated and priced weeks ahead. A Target run is decided in a car park. Tiers and recognition at the desk assume a customer who schedules her purchases, and Target’s customer does not.

The first test comes next month. Target and Amazon stage rival October deal events again, the fixture where discount does the work of loyalty and neither retailer learns much about the other’s shopper. The quarter Weinstein is judged on starts when the discounting stops.

Honors carries more than 260 million members, and its purpose was never to introduce a hotel to anybody. Weinstein’s brief also includes Roundel, which sells advertising against the traffic he has been hired to produce. One executive now makes the audience and sells it. Alignment and a conflict look identical from the outside; only the compensation plan tells them apart, and that is not a public document.