Marketing veteran Linda Bethea joined Danone as Head of Marketing in January, back when 2020 seemed like a business-as-usual year.
But fairly quickly the world shut down and Danone, like everyone else, had to adjust its plans to adapt to the ever-changing world. Ever since it has been about being agile and staying focused on consumer sentiment.
“It has definitely not been what I expected,” says Bethea, “It’s been simultaneously the most challenging and rewarding year of my career so far. When I joined, I really wanted to focus on transforming our marketing, and really think about how we take our purpose-led brand and insert it into culture in a meaningful way. I started in January, I got up to speed on the business and brand, and then COVID began and we hit a full-stop.”
This meant shifting brand strategy, media-planning and advertising production to account for a world when consumers were facing layoffs, lockdowns and homeschooling in their lives. And many people were shopping for groceries in new ways like cutting down visits to the store and were ordering household staples online for the first time ever.
“Everything had to pivot,” Bethea says. “At that point, it was a matter of really working collaboratively across my leadership team to figure out how we could pivot quickly while also keeping our team focused and engaged throughout the rest of the year.”
Bethea joined Danone from Diageo, where she served as vice president of marketing for three years. She also spent more than a decade at Pepsi-Co and Frito Lay where she has held senior marketing roles and worked across a variety of brands. This experience prepared her for leadership required this year.
Bethea will share her leadership strategies during our livecast on December 3. For more insights from Bethea, tune into Brand Innovators’ C-Suite & Marketing Leadership event on Thursday, Dec. 3, where she’ll be speaking about agility, leadership and purpose.
We caught up with Bethea before the session to learn a bit more about her year at Danone, brand pivoting, social justice movements and what she expects to see in 2021. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You started at Danone in 2020, before the world took a U-turn. What key objectives and brand pillars got you through this year?
I think our focus on building brands with purpose has been our North Star. Danone is the largest B Corp. in North America, which means we are all about performance with purpose and using business as a force for good. I think that really served us well during the pandemic because we could really lean into some of our brands and put those at the forefront of our effort. For example, Too Good is one of our yogurt brands, which is all about reducing food waste. So we were really able to lean into that and think about food waste, not just in the traditional sense, but all of the heightened food insecurity that existed as a result of the pandemic.
With schools closed, a lot of children were no longer receiving free breakfast and lunch. With the massive number of layoffs and business closures, a lot of people lost their jobs and their income. Food insecurity in our country was at an all time high. We were able to partner with food banks in our local communities. For example, Feeding Westchester here in New York, and we shipped our marketing and media dollars to donations to support those local food banks and the people in those communities. Again, it just really goes back to what our brand stands for and ensures that we are living up to our brand values and having an impact on our community.
Sustainability and social justice movements have been key to consumers this year. How has Danone been taking a stand?
I think that’s at the top of everyone’s minds right now. For us, it’s about doing it in an authentic way and staying true to our brand purpose. One of the things that we are doing here at Danone is we created a multicultural marketing counsel that’s really taking a hard look at the agencies and vendors we work with to ensure that we’re working with a diverse group of agencies and vendors. We have been taking a hard look at our own advertising and marketing communications to make sure that we are thinking through our casting from a diverse lens, making sure that we are representing a diverse consumer point of view in our product development, and in everything else we do. That has definitely been at the forefront of our minds as we’ve gone through this year.
Sustainability is also a big part of your One Planet, One Health mission across brands. Can you share an example of how this is playing out at the brand level?
Absolutely. Our corporate mission is around One Planet, One Health, so we have a number of initiatives around improving health through food, while also making positive changes to impact the environment in a positive way. Earlier this year, right before COVID hit, we made a big announcement as part of our Horizon Organic Milk about becoming carbon positive by 2025. We had a whole campaign set to launch behind that, a big PR tour, and obviously a lot of that went on hold, but we absolutely remain committed to all of our sustainability objectives.
This year has definitely been all about pivoting, planning and re-planning. We are absolutely still committed to that [Horizon Organic Milk campaign], we had to pivot our messaging a little bit so that we didn’t come across to consumers as tone-deaf. We want to speak to consumers about what matters to them at that moment. But, as we head into 2021, we are looking to create new campaigns that really get back to the heart of our brands and what they stand for and what commitments they’ve made to the world.
What experiences from Diaego, Pepsi and FritoLay have you brought to your role at Danone?
I’ve been lucky to work for wonderful companies, I’ve had wonderful mentors and teams, and I’ve learned a lot throughout my career. I think that one of the most important things is leveraging consumer data and insights to make decisions. Now more than ever, it’s important that we listen to customers and put them first because their world has been turned upside down. If we were to keep going on, business-as-usual, marketing messages as usual, it’s going to fall on deaf ears. We really need to dig deeper than we ever have to truly listen and understand what matters to consumers during this tumultuous time.
That’s a core part of my training and something I was able to bring to Danone. The other thing is around how you really stand up, show up, and break through the clutter. Now more than ever, consumers are bombarded with a gazillion different marketing messages on multiple devices. People are watching TV, while sitting there with their laptop and their phone next to them. It’s a multi-screen environment.
It’s about creating content that engages consumers on a deeper level. That’s a huge evolution we’ve seen in marketing over the years, from one-way communication to two-way communication, to true engagement. You need to make sure that you are building a strong creative team that can put out content that breaks through the clutter and engages the consumer.
In what ways are you using social listening to understand consumer sentiment?
We are always trying to keep our finger on the pulse of consumer sentiment through social listening. When COVID started, we actually commissioned a custom A&U study (Attitudes & Usage), with Danone consumers to truly understand what our specific category and brand consumers were thinking: What were their specific shifts in attitude? What were their specific shifts in behavior as a result of what was going on in the world.
Online grocery shopping took off this year, do you expect this trend to continue?
I think that’s going to be the biggest lasting shift that we have seen, from traditional retail to e-grocery. One of the statistics floating around earlier in the pandemic was that 41% of e-grocery shoppers last spring had never purchased e-groceries before. Now that people see how convenient it is, it will drive a lasting shift in behavior.
Especially with people working from home more, it’s very easy to place an InstaCart order on your phone while you’re sitting at a Webex. For us, I think that means, we need to make sure we have the right product assortment on the digital shelf. It’s as important, if not more important, than that actual shelf line-up in a traditional retail store. Along with that, it’s about having the right shelf-search strategy and content strategy to make sure that we are capturing those online shoppers and getting in those baskets. Curation also plays a significant role.
What does 2021 look like for Danone and CPG in general?
Unfortunately, I think the beginning of the year is going to be a lot more of the same. The biggest shift we’ve made as marketers is from an annual planning process where everything is set in stone, to a more real-time planning process which has strategic brand foundations but flexibility to pivot as things happen in the world, whether it’s the pandemic, the political environment, social justice movements. We’ve built in some flexibility into our plans which will enable us to pivot as needed in 2021. I wish I had a crystal ball, unfortunately I don’t, so all we can do is plan and plan again.
