Connecting with the Consumer in a Distracted Age

Q: You have been recognized in the industry for an approach you call “collaborativity.” Would you explain collaborativity?

Collaborativity is a concept I created a handful of years ago that I now use regularly with the team. Collaborativity is a way of codifying the creative process in a way that leans into the notion that creativity is quite iterative and collaborative in nature. Yet when you look at the creative industry, the second you have a client-agency dynamic, there’s a sales orientation, a formality, and an immediate (and often unnecessary) power hierarchy. Agencies pitch ideas, clients buy ideas. It’s transactional. It feels more linear than the creative process actually should be.

On top of that, ideas and executions are regularly packaged together as one and the same in creative reviews. Because of this, too often a client buys a good execution with no idea behind it or they throw out a potentially brilliant idea because there may be something they don’t love in the execution.

Collaborativity addresses both of those issues. We bring agencies, brand teams, and cross-functional partners all together as “co-conspirators” where we have the equivalent of a “round zero”—where everyone comes together to collaborate, brainstorm, and work in service of the brand. We start with simple insights and truths with one-line ideas that we can build and riff from in the room—it becomes quite infectious. When done well, it undoes the hierarchy and gets rid of the pressure to sell something and brings diverse perspectives together to build ideas.

This was something I started to put into practice informally when I was over at PepsiCo. It netted out with some great work we wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise, including the Cannes-winning “Better with Pepsi” campaign, among many others. So since coming into Kraft Heinz, I’ve found a way to institute this as a best practice.

We regularly bring together co-conspirators to work with a very narrow brief, and we build ideas together. We focus on generating ideas that are derived from smart insights, be it a cultural truth, a consumer truth, or a product truth. We go through rapid fire, maybe 20 different ideas—what it is, what it isn’t, what’s the insight. We talk about them and say, “You know what? That’s powerful. That’s a really big idea. Let’s go play that out.” And if we like it, we can ask the team to come back and double-click on the execution.

Q: I’ve also heard you talk about a concept called “Marketing That Happens.” Can you explain what that is as well?

Sure. If you go back in history to the dawn of the marketing industry, it was created in a way that operates a bit like a game. Brands over here, target consumers over there, and paid media is the way you would send your message to them. You would develop your creative idea, package it into a commercial, and send it over to the consumer you bought media against so that they would receive your message. Almost like you are folding it into a paper airplane and sending it over to your consumer so that it would get right to them as that family was sitting in their living room watching a TV show.

That may have worked at one time—and that concept is still generally how many avenues in marketing work, buying ads in social media against a target or otherwise. And while there is still a big benefit to paid media, we can no longer assume that because the message was delivered that the consumer understood or engaged with it.

Lots of paid media today has low engagement, and that is simply because the world around us has changed and consumers are distracted and disengaged. Consumers are multitasking when they get our messages. The TV is on, but nobody is watching when commercials come on—they’re on their phone scrolling. When someone sees YouTube pre-roll, they hit skip. When someone sees an email come into their inbox from a brand, it goes directly into the spam box.

Because of this, a lot of marketing now operates just like junk mail. It technically gets delivered to me in my home or in my feed, but never really gets read. Just because your message was delivered doesn’t mean it was received.

Consumers are overwhelmed a bit with the paradox of information available to them today. We’re in this environment where you have every song available on your phone yet there’s never anything to listen to. You have every show available on your TV, and there’s nothing to watch. You have every food available for delivery, and there’s nothing to eat.

So as brands are trying to reach these consumers with messages—when they have access to everything and often don’t pay attention to all the inbound messages—it’s hard to cut through.

Marketing That Happens is essentially the hack. It’s how you get people to engage. It involves taking your brand beyond the walls of paid media to leverage the power of earned media, organic social media, and creativity to create something interesting enough and relevant enough to talk about. Marketing That Happens is about a creative standard of higher engagement. It’s about people self-selecting and “opting in” to your brand’s content—and seeking it out themselves—because it’s interesting to them, given its context, cultural relevance, and the uniqueness of the core creative idea.

Think about it: you know the things from brands that “happen.” When there’s something that’s interesting to you, you will text it to a friend or family member. When there is a moment happening in culture, you will receive a push notification on your phone about an article it’s mentioned in. You talk about it at work and with your friends. You’ve read about it organically in your feeds, and it’s often even a trending topic. You come across it on multiple platforms. It’s not about the message coming at you; it’s about you seeing the content that is interesting to you because it’s relevant to something that you care about, irrespective of the fact that it came from a brand. That’s the core idea of Marketing That Happens.

Q: Would you share some examples?

For Mother’s Day, we did a 14-karat gold Kraft Mac & Cheese macaroni necklace that we sold for $25, collaborating with Ring Concierge. We’re not in the jewelry business at Kraft Heinz, but it was a fun way to drive a discussion about our Kraft Mac & Cheese brand, tapping into the cultural truth of kids making macaroni necklaces for their moms on Mother’s Day.

Another one is the Oscar Mayer Wienie 500, where the day before the Indy 500 we raced six regionally themed Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The race was broadcast live on Fox, had people taking bets on Draft Kings, and organically made SportsCenter. The Wienie 500 trended higher on X than the Indy 500 itself, while generating 6 billion earned media impressions for the brand.

There was also our partnership with Heinz and DJ Mustard that drove a whole conversation about our mustard business around the Super Bowl and the Grammys, tapping into Kendrick Lamar’s hit-making producer, Mustard, in a highly relevant way just as the iconic line “Mustaaaaaard” from one of his songs was trending.

During March Madness, when we learned that the great-grandfather of Brigham Young University forward Richie Saunders invented the tater tot, we hacked that moment, with Ore-Ida as a brand driving a conversation around tater tots throughout the tournament, generating more conversation than all the other NCAA partners combined.

For the lunar eclipse, we released a glow-in-the-dark Capri Sun pouch called “Moon Punch.” We also partnered with Ja Morant to create Kool-Aid-themed Nike sneakers, given his love for the product, and now the Nike Ja 2s are some of the coolest shoes that kids are wearing today. We have tons of examples of Marketing That Happens.

And the best part is most of these examples are things we built relatively cost-effectively for not a lot of ad spend. It’s finding ways for your brand to cut through the clutter today outside the walls of paid media, because it’s doing something relevant and interesting. That’s the core of the idea of Marketing That Happens.

Q: As a CMO, how do you balance building long-term brand equity against marketing that delivers short-term return on investment?

Great question and one that is very topical in our industry today. People don’t talk enough about the difference between product marketing and brand building; they are fundamentally two very different concepts. When you have a brand that is working well and effectively spinning a flywheel of deep emotional connections to the brand, you can drive higher pricing power and higher purchase frequency, ultimately driving greater returns. Think about it. You pay more for a brand name, and you are more loyal to brands that you love.

But to build that brand love, it requires discipline and spending on the brand—not just to solely drive short-term sales but supporting it over time. This is often hard because you need to wrestle with priorities—near and long term—and also take into consideration the state of the business and the brand.

This is especially true in CPG, where there is often a paradigm of push, push, push to get short-term sales and drive transactions, especially given how effectively it can be done today via digital and lower-funnel marketing. It’s a very data-driven approach, and it does deliver conversion to sales. The issue is, however, that once you turn it on, it’s difficult to turn off, because you need to beat those numbers next year, and those same sales are still subject to someone coming in and undercutting price, as the consumer may not be as loyal.

Brand building, however, is a different muscle. It should be seen as an investment rather than a cost to the business. It requires a long-term view of both your business and your brand. What you’re trying to build over time is a deeper brand connection with consumers. It’s not about the “push”; you are creating “pull”—actual demand for the product that often stems beyond the tangible attributes of the product itself. It taps into the emotional attributes of the brand, which over time can help convert brand awareness into true brand preference. Creating that connection, doing it well, takes a commitment over time.

I like to talk to my team about how brand building is a bit like pointillism—the art technique where a complex image on a painting is actually made up of thousands of little dots that the artist strategically put there on the canvas. The viewer sees a complete image, but it’s simply a collection of tiny dots. Well, as you think about brand building, every brand interaction is essentially just a dot we are placing in a consumer’s brain. Every time they see your brand in a commercial, in a grocery store, in a restaurant; every time they hear about your brand from a friend or read about it in an article or scroll past it in their feed—every single one of those interactions is placing a dot in their memory structure. And over time, those dots cluster together to form a clear picture of the brand and how that person perceives it.

That is why brand architecture is so important. It’s about having a consistent visual identity and a consistent value chain of what the brand stands for, what the brand believes in. If that’s reinforced effectively over time, the dots will form a much clearer and consistent picture—a true brand identity. That allows people to easily understand on a subconscious level how they identify with the brand. How they like this brand. How they ultimately prefer this brand. Creating positive associations and interactions consistently—that’s where you get brand value, and it’s why brand names drive higher pricing premiums and deeper loyalty with consumers.

Q: What has your time at Yale SOM meant to you?

I loved my time at SOM. I learned a lot and had a ton of fun along the way. The exposure to all the different business levers provided a real breadth of experience. While I didn’t use half that stuff right out of school, I’ve noticed that as I’ve moved into more senior roles, that strong foundational knowledge was there for me and helped provide great perspective across the enterprise. So when today I’m talking with supply chain, with finance, with HR about organizational dynamics, and everything in between, it all clicks.

But in my mind, the experience was so much more than just the classes. My time in New Haven was also a chance to explore, to learn about different businesses and how things really work. It was an all-access pass to the world of business. I’d use Fridays that we had no classes to go into Manhattan to meet with people in different companies, to learn what they did, how things worked, etc. I even did a trip to Japan with some friends where we set up meetings with people in companies like Nissan and Sony, learning about cultural nuances and how they run their supply chains and different businesses. I regularly went to hear lots of speakers, which is one of the best things that Yale has to offer. I remember when Indra Nooyi came back to campus to speak. I went up to her afterwards to introduce myself, which is how I first even ended up getting considered for an internship at PepsiCo—a place where I interned while in school and went on to spend more than 18 years of my career.

I’ve also continued many of the relationships I built during my time at Yale SOM. Many have become great friendships over time as our careers continue to develop. That’s all part of the network that Yale provides, which is a great resource of SOM. And it’s why I try to give back through the Yale Center for Customer Insights board and going back regularly to speak to students and recruit on campus.