How change creates growth at Mondelez

Lucy Aitken, Warc's Case Study Editor, interviewed Dana Anderson, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Mondelēz International, and chair of the judging panel for the 2017 Warc Innovation Awards, to find out how mission-critical innovation is to business growth.

What do you see as innovation?

My favourite things are all around transitioning into new ways of working. That can be uncomfortable but the pay-off is so rewarding and innovation is so often a part of that. I don't have bad feelings about change - it's a necessary part of moving forward. It's important to brand communication because people need to be engaged; they want to interact with you differently.

The pace of change in our marketplace, in terms of channels and what people are turned on by, requires us to think ahead in a fearless manner. So not only do we experience mobile and social media but, as marketers, we need to learn how to do it and to do it well. Sometimes that involves turning your own view of the world upside down. In the past year, we've spent a lot of time here embracing Ehrenberg Bass and Byron Sharp's Laws of Growth and that's undoing everything we learned in school and looking at marketing through a new lens. We changed our strategic tools, media guidelines, how we do comms planning and how we brief agencies. That has created a new thing of its own: our Freedom to Create presentation has been delivered to agencies and town halls everywhere so everyone knows what we are looking for. Change can mean more work but it makes you feel like you are on the fresh end of things, and that can be enlivening for a group.

Read the full article on Warc.