CPG is a category with a lot of competition. Danone North America CMO Linda Bethea sees culture as a key way for Danone brands to break through.
The company recently identified that International Delight – one of the largest brands in the coffee creamer space – had an opportunity to recruit younger consumers, who tend to not like the taste of plain coffee. “We wanted to be the brand of coffee creamer for that Zillennial audience and so first we shifted our media very significantly towards digital and social only, whereas previously we had a very heavy linear TV buy,” said Bethea. “We had to fuel the right content to put on those channels. So we shifted away from more traditional :30 and :15 second ads to more social content.”
The campaign included a reality TV parody piloted on TikTok called Kremhouse, which brought International Delight flavors to life as characters in a reality TV show.
“That was so successful in driving viewership and engagement with the younger consumer that we just greenlit Season 3 and we’re going to be launching International Delight Halloween costumes this fall as part of our new licensing capability,” continued Bethea. “So really finding ways to connect with that audience where they are, where it’s a relevant message and through other touch points beyond the bottle.”
With more than four years on the marketing leadership team at Danone, Bethea was promoted to chief marketing officer North America as part of the company’s broader reorganization and global strategy update led by CEO Antoine de Saint-Affrique.
“My vision in this role is to continue the marketing excellence that we’ve been focused on over the past few years, continue to elevate the quality of our creative and continue to improve our marketing effectiveness and efficiency,” says Bethea.
Prior to joining Danone, Bethea held senior marketing roles at Diageo, PepsiCo and FritoLay. Brand Innovators caught up with Bethea from her New York office to discuss gut health, sources of inspiration and hacking the Super Bowl. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Brand Innovators is hosting at Marketing Innovation Summit at Danone on September 25th.
Can you talk about some of the creative work you are doing at your brands right now?
One of the brands we’re really focused on right now is Activa, which is one of our largest global yogurt brands and is really focused on repositioning activity grounded in the space of gut health. Gut health right now is a big buzzword in the health and wellness industry and Activa was definitely a pioneer in that space. We’re really thinking about how we elevate activity and really solidify the role of activity in a consumer’s life as a proactive wellness brand for gut health. We’re looking at redesigning our packaging, launching a new global marketing campaign and really stepping up our investment on digital and social media to connect with a younger consumer.
Another example on the other end of the portfolio would be STōK Cold Brew, which is a smaller brand in the portfolio, but it’s been growing like wildfire over the past few years. We did a very unorthodox partnership with Wrexham AFC that we’re now heading into a multi-year of that journey, which continues to bear fruit.
Last year we did our first STōK Super Bowl ad with Anthony Hopkins where we just continue to disrupt these more traditional marketing moments with our unorthodox approach. STōK is all about cold brew, bold flavor, bold moves. Looking forward, we are continuing that journey and delivering more bold moves for STōK in the future.
How are you thinking about culture when you’re building brands?
Culture is absolutely key, particularly in today’s world. If you think about consumers being bombarded by a million different brands on a million different screens, with a million different messages at once, how do you break through? It used to be that you needed just really good creative that was going to capture somebody’s attention but now it’s much more than that. You have to find a way to drive authentic relevance in someone’s life. The younger generation is taking all of their cues from social media. That’s where culture is being built.
We need to make sure that we’re inserting our brands into that cultural touchpoint in a way that makes sense for the brand. We just built a new in-house social team that’s going to be very focused on social listening, identifying what are those trends that make sense for each brand, and doing much more real-time marketing so we can insert our brands into culture at the right place.
Where do you get inspiration when you’re working on building these brands?
Great inspiration can come from anywhere. We really focus on driving that external inspiration. We have a weekly creative inspiration email that gets sent out to the entire team. Anyone can contribute to it. But what did you see out in the world that inspired you this week? And we share it with the entire team. We also do quarterly in-person creative work sessions where we either go on a culture trek out into the world.
We went to Stone Barn here in New York and learned how they grow their food and develop their menus as a way to get some culinary inspiration. Our team out in Denver went to the Meow Wolf pop up and got some creative inspiration that way. We also will do internal brainstorms. We’ll identify a key problem or opportunity. For example, what brands should we be collaborating with across our yogurt portfolio? And we’ll do just two to three hours of brainstorming around that as a way to drive that inspiration.
How are you working with your retail partners?
Very closely. We have shifted a significant portion of our media spend to retail media and that’s really bearing fruit for us. The data and the measurement that you can get through those partnerships is very helpful to help us identify who are the audiences we should be targeting and what are the right messages to deliver to them. We’ve seen upwards of 30% of new to brand buyers through those placements and partnerships. The ROI on that in a lot of cases is outpacing our more traditional media spend.
How are you thinking about audience?
With a wide portfolio of brands, we truly have a brand for everyone. So it’s on a brand-by-brand basis where we identify who that bullseye target consumer is. Everybody’s talking about connecting with the Zillennial audience. If you take a step back and look at what’s the fastest growing segment of the population right now, it’s the older consumer. Many brands aren’t talking to them. People are living longer, they’re living better, and they have different health and wellness concerns as they age. Our mission at Danone is to deliver health through food to as many people as possible.
How are you measuring the ROI?
At Danone, we believe you should measure what you treasure. We set very specific KPIs for every piece of marketing material that we do. Of course, we do your traditional marketing mix analysis, although we’ve really been partnering with our vendors to make that more holistic and more actionable. Historically, marketing mix analysis really focused more on traditional media and an annual read, which is helpful in some ways and not so much in others. As we’re shifting more of our spend towards retail media, social, digital shopper, we need to make sure that the models that exist to measure that are inclusive and actionable. We also look beyond the ROI. What are the other KPIs that matter, are we driving that engagement? Are we shifting perceptions of our brand? We are really getting specific about the objective of each piece of marketing.
What trends do you expect to see in CPG during the back end of 2024?
If you look at all of the creative work that won at Cannes, we’ve seen a huge shift in the industry from purpose to humor. People are feeling a need for a sense of levity right now with everything going on in the world. You’ll continue to see that through the balance of the year and in 2025. Brands leaning into more lighthearted fun executions for their brands. Obviously purpose is still important, but you don’t always have to bring that to life in a serious way.
We’ll continue to see the role of AI accelerate within marketing, seeing how that changes both the creative output, but also the role of the people making the work. I don’t think AI will replace jobs, but I do think it will shift the skills required to produce great quality creative.
Will we see any of your brands at the Super Bowl?
I will say that we have a fantastic track record of hacking the Super Bowl and finding ways to disrupt and stand out and generate significant earned buzz with our brands around those key tent poles. I would expect us to continue to do so going forward.
