When the Detroit Pistons opened the NBA season with a heart-pounding 21-point comeback victory on national television, the energy in Motown shifted instantly.
But for Raj Register, the franchise’s newly appointed Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, the moment hit on a much deeper, almost spiritual level. Being in the city that raised her to lead marketing operations for the team she grew up cheering was, as she puts it, “God engineering.”
“For my season opener to be against the same team where I went to my very first game – in the Silverdome against the Boston Celtics – it was God engineering,” Register said in an exclusive interview with Michigan Chronicle.
“You know, those are moments that you can’t really make up. And to have a chance to work on a brand that I believe in and a city that I love… I would say it’s something that is priceless.”
Born and raised in Detroit, Register’s path to the executive suite at 313 Presents and the Pistons wasn’t conventional.
She graduated from Martin Luther King High School before pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering at Michigan Tech and a master’s in engineering management from Wayne State.
Then she stepped into Ford Motor Company’s engineering track. It was during a rotational program at Ford that a brief stint in marketing changed the course of her professional journey.
She took the advice of an early mentor, going on to master business operations and build technical credibility before diving headfirst into the field of marketing. Register spent a decade navigating product development, engineering across global nameplates, and completing international assignments in Istanbul and Cologne. While in Germany, she earned her MBA from Duke University, paving her entry into Ford’s prestigious marketing leadership pipeline.
Her career after that reads something like a masterclass in strategic brand stewardship: leading Global Brand, Growth Audience Marketing Communications, Dealer Operations, Battery Electric Vehicle Marketing at Ford; serve as CMO for Sysco North America – the largest broadline food distributor on the continent; step in as CMO running six North American brands at Stellantis.
But despite her executive background in corporate boardrooms and multi-billion-dollar supply chains, Register remains grounded in continuous growth.
“First and foremost, I’m always going to be a student of the business,” Register said. “So I’m always reaching for better and seeking to understand how I can continue to grow make an impact wherever I am. I also leave places better than I found them and create better rooms than I found them.”
Stepping into an executive role in professional sports brings a unique intersection of analytical precision and creative storytelling. Where traditional corporate environments often default strictly to hard metrics, sports marketing demands the kind of emotional resonance that connects directly with the spirit of the fanbase. Navigating that intersection is where Register thrives, relying on an ambidextrous approach that balances empirical data with sheer creative intuition, and being from the city gives her an edge up in understanding the culture of the people and the culture the team has built.
“One thing that I’ve been successful at is being able to understand how data works, but then also understanding how art works,” Register explained. “And I believe that you can’t do one without the other all the time… customers or fans don’t necessarily care about what’s behind the data. They care about how you make them feel.”
She said there are times when you need to let data educate you to make the best-informed decision, but then other times there’s intuition where you know that you make a decision based on what feels right: a gut feel.
She notes that taking measured risks and failing fast allows space for innovation, but scale requires discipline. “In those cases, I like to test and learn. That’s the engineer part of me of like, hey, we took a bet and did it work? And if it did work, then that’s when I want to bring the data in and ask how do we scale this? It’s not ‘shoot from the hip,’ it’s ‘okay, I’m being very thoughtful and strategic about how I’m putting things forward.”
As she embarks on her listening tour and establishes her 100-day roadmap, Register is focused on taking in the full scope of operations while prioritizing culture, alignment, and long-term momentum.
“I told the team yesterday that I’m drinking from the ocean,” she said as she chuckled. “And that’s a good thing because I’m taking it all in. But at the end, it’s time to start executing, creating those things that we can do really, really well, do them diligently and let that set the stage, even culture wise, for how we work.”
Equally critical to her mission is understanding the human element behind the brand – both within the front office and across the community.
With a young, talented Pistons squad building fresh energy on the hardwood, the challenge shifts to translating on-court excitement into sustainable, multi-generational brand equity. She said her goal isn’t to manufacture a glossy, generic corporate narrative for international markets, but rather to lean deeply into what makes Detroit unapologetically original.
“When people speak about a global brand, it’s like the shiny thing. I think there’s something super unique about Detroit and that we double down on our culture, our authenticity, and extend olive branches for people to join Detroit as we are. And from there, start to understand and continue growing the global platform,” she said.
She added, “I would never dilute the city. But when people cheer on Detroit… That’ll be like the code that I’m looking to crack – figuring out how we still remain Detroit while also creating these olive branches and these extensions where whether you’re from here or not, you’re cheering for us.”
For Detroiters, seeing a Black woman with local roots, world-class credentials, and an unwavering love for the city helm marketing for one of our most storied franchises is a point of pride. And for her, it’s a point of pride to represent her home team as it presents itself to the world.