Liz Caselli-Mechael, global head of digital and content at Nestlé, is looking forward to reconnecting with industry colleagues after moving from the US to Switzerland during the pandemic taken on a global role with the organization. She will be speaking at the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit at Cannes next week.
What are you looking forward to about Cannes 2022?
In such a big company, it can be easy to spend your full time job trying to navigate within the company. But I think you really miss something if you don’t carve out the opportunity to connect with others across different industries and refresh your perspective and bring in something a little bit different from the outside in.
How do you feel about getting back to face-to-face conferences now you’re in a new country in a new role?
We’ve been in our own contained spaces for so long. It’s the first time in a while that I’m pushing myself to be a little brave and to take the opportunity to connect with people that I admire, this is the chance to connect with someone who you really want to learn from.
So, I’m pushing myself to be a bit brave and put myself out there. I feel a lot of gratitude for folks who have carved out the time and been proactive, to be so welcoming because it can be intimidating to come in as a novice.
In which areas are you hoping to find new insight?
We have some topics that stay very high on the agenda, such as, how do you bring purpose through in a way that’s credible for your consumers? How do you engage in a way that’s community-oriented, but non-intrusive? How do you really add value for your users in a digital content space, especially with a real objective of building reputation?
What’s the one big question you want to ask industry colleagues when you meet at Cannes?
I think mine will probably be what’s the biggest, fundamental thing you’ve changed in your digital communications over the past two years? Because, there are certainly lots of things about consumer behavior that have changed, but lots has maybe changed less than we would have liked, or the change felt bigger than it was in practice.
It’s not just COVID, not just hybrid (working), that have really started to shift mindsets in how consumers interact with brands and with content in the past few years. I would be really interested to see which of those are coming to the top for people and which are most effecting changes they are implementing.
What’s the digital content strategic thinking breakthrough you are looking to sound out with colleagues at Cannes?
When you look at what’s changed for people, the question then becomes, what does that actually change about how they interact with us as a brand and what they want from us as a brand?
There have been a ton of changes, some conceptual, some very tangible. But then my question is, what do those changes mean for our relationship with our consumers and users? Because in some cases, I think it can be a little bit of a red herring, we may deliver slightly differently on different platforms based on user type, but really tangibly, what is it that needs to fundamentally change in the relationship we have to our consumers and our users?
