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After more than a year and a half of unprecedented disruption, consumers have turned to the people and products they find comfort in; their families, their friends, their (often new) pets … and their chocolate. Lots (and lots) of chocolate.
For The Hershey Company, this moment has proven to be an opportunity to reinvent how it connects and engages with consumers. As holidays, and how we celebrate them, are transformed, the company revisited the way it markets to consumers and leaned heavily on data, analytics and social listening to guide its path forward, all the while breaking down internal silos to maximize these insights under Jill Baskin’s leadership.
A career marketer who spent nearly two decades at Leo Burnett, Baskin moved over to consumer goods with Kraft Foods and then Mondelez International. As a result, she’s etched quite a few notches on her belt of accomplishments, but it’s turning around the Hershey brand that she’s most proud of.
When Baskin first arrived at the company in September 2017, she was charged with modernizing the company’s namesake brand and reviving Hershey’s core, the classic milk chocolate bar. Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar was losing both annual sales and share. By implementing a strategic brand foundation and doubling down on strong creative through the development of a new campaign, “Heartwarming the World” and the creation of an in-house agency, she spearheaded a turnaround that’s not only increased sales and brand health but also revitalized the overall brand to drive influence and inspiration throughout the entire organization.
Baskin
Jill
Chief Marketing Officer
The Hershey Company
“What's been so exciting about it is that it’s not just doing well in marketing — which of course is my number one concern — but it's how the entire company has adopted it,” Baskin says. The brand culture has infiltrated the company, with marketing messaging used in internal meetings and its visual identity shining throughout the headquarters. Her work has created a foundational level of marketing excitement that’s been propelled by agile marketing strategies.
Technology, naturally, is helping drive this progress. While the technology process is owned by Hershey Company Chief Digital Officer Doug Straton, the company is making moves to integrate it throughout the entire organization. As part of this, Hershey has heavily invested in its analytics, to develop closed-loop technologies to understand the impact of its marketing efforts down to a specific store.
Doing so has enabled Baskin and team to rapidly test changing media plans and messaging to understand not only performance but also break down silos to more effectively share data with necessary stakeholders. For example, they were able to identify a halo around its Hershey brand advertising — a question the company sought to answer for years —and thus significantly decreased spending without affecting performance in order to reinvest it elsewhere. This type of information and ability to make quick, collaborative decisions is unlocked by the media analytics team.
Put Data to Work
As the pandemic accelerated last fall, how to best handle Halloween — and just how consumers would respond — was firmly top of mind for the industry. While towns individually grappled with trick-or-treating and celebration guidance and regulations, it was apparent early on that historical data wouldn’t be very helpful for CGs to forecast demand.
Thanks to Hershey’s Intelligence Engine, the company gleaned real-time insights to understand consumer sentiments around holidays in general, as well as their specific appetites for Halloween. And while many in the industry told them they were crazy, Baskin says, the data pointed to the company selling more chocolate in 2020 than the year before.
It was not only the data from its insights group, but also the support and confidence from the
c-suite and the sales team, that drove the decision to go all-in for Halloween.
The CGT CMO of the Year award is bestowed upon an executive who has made the greatest demonstrable impact on his or her organization through the implementation and successful use of new marketing strategies, technologies and/or processes. This year we’re delighted to honor not one but two CMOs: The Hershey Company’s Jill Baskin and e.l.f. Beauty’s Kory Marchisotto.
While the reasons for their accolades differ — Baskin is recognized for Hershey's use of technology, data and analytics to market to and engage with consumers, while Marchisotto is recognized for excellence in consumer engagement, including the use of social media and social commerce — the two executives share more than one thing in common, especially when it comes to leveraging technology for marketing success. Perhaps most important is their shared fervent priority to place the consumer at the forefront of every strategy, every campaign and every KPI.
Read on to learn more about this year’s CGT CMO of the Year winners!
What is one social channel or piece of technology you cannot live without?
“My phone. I’m sure everyone says that.”
What’s something your colleagues
might not know about you?
“I want to learn to paint.”
What is your favorite Hershey product?
Twizzlers
Your favorite
non-Hershey product?
Costco Parmesan cheese
Since marketing has a lot to do with finding the right mix, what is your favorite cocktail?
Cucumber vodka martini
Hershey’s Brand Revitalization
“Yes, you can ask the questions, but it's also really important to have the right people reviewing the data and gleaning the insights.”
JILL BASKIN
The Heartwarming
the World campaign
has contributed to a 4.8% increase in Hershey’s portfolio sales and year-over-year increases in creative effectiveness since its inception.
"We felt confident in the data, which we had been collecting each week beginning the day we were sent home," notes Baskin. “And, in fact, it turned out to be our best Halloween ever.”
As for what’s next, Hershey has something pretty big up its marketing sleeves — we can’t reveal it just yet — but look for the marketing team to unveil a major new initiative this year ...
Though Kory Marchisotto may have once dreamed of a career in finance, an early opportunity from an LVMH business leader was enough to convert her into a beauty believer for life. With more than two decades of experience now under her belt, she points to the litany of leaders, mentors, icons and brands as the inspiration that’s shaped her career.
A longtime admirer of e.l.f. Beauty for its ability to democratize beauty, create community and disrupt digitally, she joined the company in February 2019. As its first CMO, she took on the role of the Uniter, assembling a team of a “superheroes,” as she terms them, to explore, experiment and execute on big ideas together.
Her initial priority was playing the role of the consumer in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their end-to-end customer journey in order to ensure they provided a complete connected experience.
‘We had these incredible teams doing incredible work, but they weren't united around a shared common mission,” Marchisotto says. “It's critical to understand what’s happening within your organization, get everybody to rally around the consumer, have everybody aligned to one mission, and bring all those pieces together so everybody feels they’re together on the command deck. Where we are today is a very different place than when I started, and the critical part to our success was breaking down those silos and uniting everybody around a common cause.”
Marchisotto
Kory
Chief Marketing Officer
e.l.f. Beauty
In leading, Marchisotto’s guiding framework is hinged upon on the three C’s of Curiosity, Courage and Conviction — in that order — to simultaneously push herself out of her comfort zone while remaining humble enough to be perpetually learning, unlearning and relearning.
“You must have the curiosity, as that's the rocket fuel that feeds you. You've got to have the courage to be able to turn that into ideas, and then you have to have the conviction to drive those ideas into action.”
e.l.f. like other consumer goods companies, has required serious courage in order to overcome roadblocks during the last 18 months. When the pandemic squashed their planned “Mouth Off” lip campaign, the company knew it would have to quickly pivot, and it leaned on its consumers to guide their paths. What they heard from their community was a need for the brand to keep serving as a positive impact on their lives, providing both some much needed normalcy and silver linings.
SOCIAL SUPERHERO
e.l.f. BEAUTY'S
ENGAGEMENT EXCELLENCE
Marchisotto made an early mark in experimentation success with a bet on TikTok in 2019, back when the platform was still in the exploratory phase. e.l.f. and agency partner Movers + Shakers went in with a blank slate, and together they developed the Eyes.Lip.Face. campaign that not only dramatically propelled the e.l.f. brand, but also the agency and even the emerging music artists who partnered with them. Today, videos tagged #eyeslipface on TikTok have more than 8 billion views.
The TikTok success was just a hint of what Marchisotto and team have been capable of when engaging consumers through technology and social media, with more recent achievements including diving into Triller and dipping toes into NFTs. Experimenting in the metaverse has enabled the company to not only see what might be possible, but also engage a completely new consumer base that was previously unfamiliar with their brand.
“e.l.f. was born to disrupt. It’s in our DNA, and it runs deep in our roots,” Marchisotto says. “Technology always was, and is, fundamental to everything we do. I like to see this as an endless digital transformation journey. We're always looking around the bend. We're always anticipating what's next.”
Helping drive this is Ekta Chopra, e.l.f. chief digital officer, whom Marchisotto cites as the true digital visionary on the command deck of the company’s tech rocket ship. Beyond leveraging tech to enhance and augment its existing functions, their team is always aligned to a business objective.
“No matter what you're doing — innovating, utilizing technology — you always have to go back to the fundamental starting point, which is what consumer problem are you trying to solve? Or how is this going to allow me to better serve my consumer? It never really starts with technology. The starting point is always the consumer.”
What is one social channel or piece
of technology you cannot live without?
Podcasts, specifically Pivot, Crooked Media and The Daily.
What’s something your colleagues
might not know about you?
“I had a near-death experience with
an elephant.”
What is your favorite
e.l.f. Beauty product?
16HR Camo concealer
Your favorite non-e.l.f.
Beauty product?
Virtue hair products
Since marketing has a lot to do with finding the right mix, what is your favorite cocktail?
Spicy mezcal margarita: “It's bright. It's layered. It's complex. And, most importantly, it's smoky and sassy. And I'm a very sassy kind of gal.”
Kory Marchisotto
