What changes will you make to the typical customer journey to accomplish your goals?
Everything’s on the table. My vision is to reimagine how we do marketing—and not just for CPG but across categories. As someone coming in from outside the CPG category, [I don’t want to] bring [just] tech thinking here, but to actually consider the best thinking from tech, CPG and other categories that we can leverage to build the next modern marketing organization.
If you just look at the trends in the category, shopping and marketing are no longer linear processes. In a very traditional, physical retail category like grocery, it’s still happening offline and online. Many people will say [consumers] don’t actually shop in the store, but shop before you get to the store and you buy in the store.
What influences a customer’s decision making and their loyalty to a certain brand? We have to think about the funnel holistically and in a very integrated way for all those reasons, and maybe even challenge the idea of brand vs. shopper marketing or upper funnel vs. lower funnel.
Earlier you mentioned retail media. How do you think Chobani’s strategy might fit into the retail media ecosystem?
Being able to connect the consumer experience from our social media channels to the ads we buy off those networks, to the experiences [consumers] have on those networks, is going to be really important to get right and to maximize ROI.
Frankly, [retail media networks] should hopefully let us do some really innovative things in ways that are truly more personalized to the consumer. Retail hasn’t been able to do these things historically because it has been so physical and offline. … Using data in effective ways off of the retail media networks, as well as on [those platforms], will ideally help all of us be more successful.
I also wonder what kind of innovation we can drive if we know what other brands people are buying in other categories. Maybe [there’s even an opportunity] for partnerships with other brands in the CPG space—not just the retailers.
You built in-house creative teams at Google and at Uber. How are you thinking about Chobani’s partnership strategy?
Chobani has, for the longest time, done the majority of our work through our in-house creative studio. That said, I think the model is a hybrid model.
We need to have the right balance between in-house creativity and brand leadership, and outside agency partnerships. I actually hesitate to use the word “agencies” or “creative partnerships.” It’s a range of everyone from the traditional agencies to artists and other creatives that can spark great ideas, to lots of freelancers and producers and operating partners who can help bring things to life. We need to, first of all, change the definition of partnership.
