Mars lead CMO Gülen Bengi talks leading with curiosity and community when brand building with AI

Lead CMO Gülen Bengi shares how Mars co-creates brand experiences with communities. "To remain iconic, we must always remain in motion," she said.

Transcript

00:00AI is going to be an important element of the future of work.

00:05For that, we need to understand, are you going to be a shaper or a user?

00:16As many of us in this festival and many of us in the business life,

00:20we have enough experience, scale, reach and influence power to be the shapers.

00:27So my ask is, lead with curiosity, understand the potential of AI,

00:33but not just steer it towards productivity.

00:37Yes, productivity is incredibly important and we need to make sure that we steer it towards growth.

00:44We need to make it responsible and we need to ensure that it is human insight at the center

00:51and working for the brand building of the future.

00:54Our pedigree brand in Brazil made this personalization and community co-creation at its best.

01:01Pedigree stands for ending dog homelessness and the global insight is if a dog doesn't have a pedigree,

01:09it has 90% less likelihood of being adopted.

01:13So our Brazil team saw that in Brazil there's this breed, street dog breed, that is not recognized as a breed.

01:21It's a mutt called Caramello.

01:23Everybody loves them but they do not adopt them.

01:26So what they did is they worked with an influencer who does have a Caramello

01:31as she tried to put her dog in a dog show knowing that she will be rejected and this created an amazing community engagement.

01:39Meanwhile, our team worked with the diagnostic team to do the necessary steps to make Caramello recognized as a pedigree

01:48and even put it on top of the pedigree bags.

01:52And with that we saw tremendous traction from the community.

01:56Almost 200% increase in adoption of Caramello's and more than 20% increase in the pedigree sales.

02:04So this is the power of community creation and deep human insights.

02:09This year, the last 12 months has been a year of transformation for us when we rewrote the growth playbook

02:17and codified the Mars way of building iconic brands and experiences.

02:22And what I mean by that, we still keep the brilliant fundamentals.

02:26Our brands know what they stand for.

02:28They are differentiated.

02:30They're consistent over time.

02:32And we're changing the way we engage with our communities, our pet parents.

02:37We are moving from messaging to two-way engagements, building relationships that have no dead ends.

02:44And when I say no dead ends, it's one engagement leading to another or to the buy button.

02:50We are co-creating our brand experiences with our fans and communities, inviting them into our brand world.

02:57Because we know that this is the only way to achieve personalization at scale authentically.

03:04And it is like giving your baby, which is our iconic brands, over to the millions of people.

03:11But we trust our communities to take very good care of our brands.

03:15And we know that to remain iconic, we must always remain in motion.

03:20So, thank you very much, guys.

03:23Hm, my friends.