The consumer goods sector is “operating in the dark” when it comes to marketing measurement, says Melanie Huet, President, Brand Management & Innovation at Newell Brands, but gen AI is “helping to shine a light on how the right data can enhance understanding”.

 

Newell Brands, a global consumer products company with over 60 brands, including household names such as Sharpie®, Crock-Pot®, and Yankee Candle®, recorded over $8.1 billion in sales in 2023. However, it has limited visibility into customer data compared to the retailers who sell its products.

 

“If you have first-party data, you’re in pretty good shape, but if you don't, you’re struggling,” says Huet. 

 

This is challenging from a marketing effectiveness perspective. As Huet notes, while consumer goods companies may know that a marketing campaign is delivering sales, it can sometimes be hard to say which elements of the campaign are working and which are not to deliver those sales.

 

In common with many other marketers, Huet has been looking at how gen AI might help to overcome this challenge.

 

“I read a survey recently that asked brand people where they’re going to apply Gen AI,” she says. “All the answers were around content and creative, which is the obvious answer. But what we need to do is put gen AI into analytics and innovation, because that's where we need the most help.”

 

 

One of the areas in which Newell Brands has invested time and money is building digital personas to replace focus groups.

 

Huet says the company tested a number of tools before settling on ChatGPT. Once her team has worked with it to create a detailed persona, it asks it questions about products and packaging. “Our testing has revealed that we're getting great responses. We’ve validated some of the responses with humans and they're pretty spot on,” says Huet.

 

She claims gen AI has cut the time, money, and resources previously required. “What previously would have taken 25 people two to three weeks to do now takes two people three hours,” says Huet.

 

Another area in which gen AI is helping to make marketing more efficient is innovation lead times. 

 

“In the past, when we had a concept, we'd start with a hand drawn image that would be given to a designer to put together, which took many days,” says Huet.

 

“Now, thanks to techniques like prompt engineering and tools like Midjourney, we can create a number of photo realistic 3D images from a rough sketch in a matter of minutes.” 

 

Huet estimates this has reduced the time spent at the beginning of the innovation process by about 10X.

 

Looking forward, she is hopeful that gen AI will evolve so it can generate meaningful insights from the data that Newell Brands has about its consumers and the wider market.

 

 

The first step on this journey was building an insights tool that enables employees to leverage what Huet describes as “a big vault consisting of all our legacy systems where we have files just stacked up that are impossible to access and mine”.

 

A gen AI-based chatbot answers questions such as ‘tell me about people who drink coffee’ or ‘tell me about the preferences of low-income consumers’ by synthesizing the data in this vault.

 

“That's huge for us because before we had to have hands on keyboards – it was such an overwhelming task that it didn't get done,” says Huet.

 

While the tool does have more advanced gen AI capabilities, Huet admits that it’s not being utilised yet to answer questions such as: ‘Based on the information we have, do you think we should go do X?’

 

“We're not quite at that point,” says Huet. “The problem is that we can't always trust the answer it gives.”

 

This is where the ability to fuse human intelligence with artificial intelligence becomes critical to better marketing investment decisions.

 

 

“You need a group of disruptive thinkers to challenge the norms,” says Huet. “The digital personas work we’re doing is led by a group of people who just think differently and want to challenge themselves using AI tools.”

 

You also need people who can flex and be agile to keep up with the fast-changing technology landscape, she adds. 

 

Further, Newell Brands’ foray into AI has helped to dispel a myth often associated with the technology. 

 

“People ask me if we’re cutting head count,” says Huet. “When it comes to insights, I've actually had to increase staffing. We’re generating more value out of the data we already have, and we have more people in the company using the insights we’ve generated. But now we need more insights, and we need more people to do the strategic work around these insights.”

 

Given all the work that Huet has done to date, she has one piece of advice offer.

 

“Just jump in, get going, and find a way to get those gen AI test cases running in your company,” she says.

 

“The role of the CMO is threatened and we need to start being able to function differently.  We need to be future thinkers, and we need to bring data and analytics to the table to justify that the work that we do and the money we spend has a return on investment. That's why data and measurement is so important.”