This interview is with Nakul Goyal, Chief Marketing Officer, CARFAX.
For Connectively readers, can you introduce yourself and your remit today as Chief Marketing Officer at CARFAX within S&P Global?
I’m Nakul Goyal, Chief Marketing Officer at CARFAX, part of Mobility Global (MBGL). I lead marketing across both our consumer and B2B businesses, spanning growth, demand generation, product marketing, SEO, paid media, CRM, analytics, and experimentation.
At the end of the day, my remit is simple: drive sustainable growth, build a brand people trust, and ensure marketing delivers measurable business impact.
What experience most shaped your marketing philosophy as you moved from internet growth roles like Tripadvisor and SEO leadership to leading a 70-person growth and marketing organization at CARFAX?
My years at TripAdvisor probably shaped my marketing philosophy the most. We constantly tested, learned, and measured what actually moved the business. It taught me early on that opinions are useful, but data and outcomes are better.
I carried that mindset to CARFAX. The scope is much broader today, but the philosophy hasn’t really changed: start with the customer, experiment constantly, measure the impact, and scale what works.
As my teams have gotten larger, I’ve also learned that my job is less about having the answer and more about creating the context for the team to find the answer. If people understand the why, know what outcome we’re trying to drive, and have the freedom to experiment, they’ll usually surprise you with a better solution than the one you started with.
That combination of customer, experimentation, and measurable impact has probably shaped how I lead more than anything else.
Starting from that philosophy, when you kick off a new go-to-market in your Consumer, Dealer, or Service lines, what is the first diagnostic you run to focus the strategy?
The first question I ask is pretty simple: What problem are we trying to solve, for whom, and what outcome are we trying to drive?
It sounds obvious, but teams can jump pretty quickly into channels, campaigns, and tactics. I want us to spend time on the problem first. Who is the customer? What are they trying to accomplish? What is getting in their way today? What would have to change for us to call this successful?
Whether it’s Consumer, Dealer, or Service, that context helps us make better choices about everything that follows: audience, message, product experience, channels, and measurement.
Get the problem and the outcome right first. The tactics come after.
Building on your first diagnostic, what lightweight model do you rely on to size demand and set initial targets when market data is incomplete?
When the data is incomplete, I’d rather be directionally right and learn quickly than create false precision.
We usually triangulate from what we do know:
- market size
- our own customer and behavioral data
- search demand
- conversion rates
- historical performance
From there, we build a range rather than pretending there’s one perfect number.
The important part is making the assumptions clear. What has to be true for this opportunity to be as big as we think it is? Then we set an initial target, get into the market, and use real customer behavior to validate or challenge those assumptions.
I think of the first forecast as a hypothesis, not a commitment carved in stone. As the signal improves, the forecast should improve too.
Staying with customer understanding, what research method most consistently reveals the “question behind the question” in car shoppers’ behavior at CARFAX?
For me, the best insights usually come from combining what customers tell us with what they actually do. Either one alone can be misleading.
We look at behavioral data – what people search for, where they engage, where they drop off – and pair it with direct customer feedback and research. The interesting part is often where those two don’t match.
A customer might ask for a feature, but the real question is: What problem are they trying to solve?
Especially when you’re buying a used car, there are a lot of questions underneath. Finding those underlying questions is where some of the best opportunities come from.
Translating insight into positioning, what single move most strengthened CARFAX’s brand promise in this trust-sensitive used-car category?
I think the biggest move has been staying incredibly consistent about what CARFAX stands for: helping people make more confident decisions by giving them information they can trust.
Buying a used car is a high-consideration purchase with a lot of uncertainty. Our job isn’t to eliminate every risk or tell someone which car to buy. It’s to give them better information so they can make that decision with their eyes wide open.
The temptation in marketing is always to find the next message. Sometimes the stronger move is consistency. Trust is built over time, not through a campaign. For CARFAX, continuing to earn that trust is the brand promise.
Turning to search, with AI Overviews and answer engines reshaping discovery on Google and Bing, what change to your content or site architecture most improved your odds of being cited as the answer?
If we continue to think and focus on how we help the customer, nothing changes.
That means creating content around the actual questions people have, answering them clearly and early, and structuring the site so both people and machines can easily understand the topic, the relationships between pages, and why CARFAX is a credible source.
AI search has changed the output, but I don’t think it changes the fundamentals as much as people think.
- Be useful.
- Be clear.
- Be authoritative.
If you consistently create the best answer for the customer, you give yourself a much better chance of being the answer an AI chooses, too.
Shifting to social media, what repeatable playbook helps you convert brand trust into measurable demand on platforms like X, YouTube, and LinkedIn?
I don’t think there’s a single playbook that works across every platform. The audience and intent on YouTube can be very different from those on LinkedIn or X.
The principle is consistent: earn attention by being useful, then give people a reason to take the next step.
We start with the customer problem, create content that fits how people actually use each platform, and connect it to a measurable action.
That might be shopping for a car, checking a CARFAX report, or, for our B2B audiences, learning more about how we can help their business.
The mistake is treating engagement as the outcome. Likes, views, and shares are useful signals, but ultimately I want to understand whether that attention is creating incremental demand and business impact.
To close the loop on performance, which leading indicator do you rely on most when deciding how to shift spend between brand and direct response across paid search, social, and CRM?
I don’t think there’s one metric that should make that decision for you. If you optimize everything for short-term ROAS or CAC, you can make the numbers look great while slowly hurting future demand.
I tend to look at the incremental return at the margin. If I put the next dollar here, what do I expect to get back? That means looking across signals like customer acquisition, conversion, search demand, engagement, and downstream revenue rather than optimizing each channel in isolation.
Brand and direct response also aren’t competing teams in my mind. Brand creates demand. Performance captures demand. The job is finding the right balance and constantly testing where the next dollar can have the greatest impact.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Marketing is changing incredibly fast, especially with AI, but I think the fundamentals still matter.
Stay curious. Stay close to the customer. Keep experimenting. Measure the impact.
Tools and channels will keep changing. Our job as marketers is to keep learning, challenge what worked yesterday, and focus on creating real value for the customer and the business.
That’s what makes marketing fun. There’s always something new to learn.