Mondelēz RGM and Marketing Strategies Get AI Brain Boost
Mondelēz International's embrace of technology includes dialing up its “analytical rigor” and investing in tools to optimize promotions and pricing, improve sales productivity, and elevate in-store execution. At the core is artificial intelligence.
While the company is leaning on four key pillars to accelerate its growth in 2024 and beyond, focusing on RGM, channel expansion, digital transformation, and elevated marketing, its investment in digital, with AI a major influence, touches on enterprise-wide efforts.
Their digital strategy hinges upon three key streams: "First is consumer engagement to enable us to better personalize our brand engagement with consumers. Second is customer engagement, which is a multiyear digital sales transformation to drive best-in-class revenue management and sales execution,” said Luca Zaramella, CFO, during the Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) investors conference last week. “And third, end-to-end executional excellence, which is focused on driving efficiency and effectiveness in all aspects of our company operations.”
AI Insights Fueling RGM Practices
First, looking at RGM, AI is helping support the company’s approach to sales by leveraging second-party data to drive improved business decisions and sales execution. These insights include POS promotions, distributor data, and loyalty card data.
“AI also provides better insights to drive sales execution and excellence through guided selling for personalized recommendations, suggested order to make the order-taking simpler, recommended action to drive upselling, and sales performance tracking through data, analytics and insights,” said Zaramella.
Taking a holistic RGM approach, she said, which can include smart pricing and optimized assortment and modeling for promotional strategies, can better enable sales, working alongside other pillars to create value.
Gustavo Valle, the company’s president of North America, emphasized that RGM is not just a broad “downsizing” short-term solution, but a targeted and strategic approach to create “the right pack for the right consumer at the right time.”
“This will help us proactively engage with our customers as category captains,” he said.
Marketing Gets AI Brain Boost
The technology has permeated marketing efforts as well. Mondelēz expects genAI, in particular, to drive value in sales and marketing by expediting the creation of creative content to improve quality through increased personalization.
“In the end, our approach to AI in marketing should deliver significantly higher marketing ROIs for a fraction of the cost of traditional creation,” she said. “We are also building capabilities with AI models to act as brains and transform and adjust our marketing more broadly across various dimensions.”
The brains she referenced use large language models in order to generate and optimize assets, with audience brains focusing on messaging and content to anticipate a reaction. Meanwhile, brand brains align with the brand’s purpose and design standards — whether through text, images, or video at scale.
Performance brains, she added, “understand content and recommend changes to improve effectiveness. And channel brains understand variations across channels to optimize assets. We already have pilots in place with brands such as Milka and expect to roll out further pilots later this year.”
Valle said the company has also invested in technology-powered pilots in other markets across the globe.
“[They] are very promising and we are excited about the opportunity to apply those learnings in the United States,” said Valle.
