My Best Marketing Tips #9: Mondelez / Emanuel Gävert / Global Brand Lead, Toblerone
My Best Marketing Tips #9: Mondelez / Emanuel Gävert / Global Brand Lead, Toblerone
Emanuel Gävert is the Global Brand Lead for Toblerone at Mondelez, representing a brand that is an icon for difference, “a triangle in a world of squares” when it comes to chocolate and more. He sees his role as being not just a driving force for creating value for shareholders and selling more chocolate, but as standing up for “the edges that define us” as people, creating a strong brand voice with values and a positive impact in the world.
As far as Emanuel is concerned, we’re currently trapped in a pattern of mindless consumption and need to start shifting our focus towards mindful consumption instead. He believes that brands who have a big impact on consumers can and should change their business model to be a force for good, influencing customers’ behaviours and also changing their end-to-end processes and production chain.
What would be your best marketing tip?
Since working in consumer goods, I’ve tried to test a new approach to making new products by actually creating the product at small scale, trying it with customers, and then scaling it up. So, the tip there is: “Make a little, sell a little, learn a lot.”
How have you put this marketing tip to good use?
Traditionally, brands would test their products on a small sample of consumers, then launch them in the market. The issue with that is that you wouldn’t get a real grasp of what people think of your product, because there’s nothing like voting with your dollar and seeing what people buy.
So, when I was in the SnackFutures arm of Mondelez, I started looking at the cacao fruit we used for making chocolate, realising that part of its waste would be transformed into pig feed, but that millions of tons of the fruit would be wasted. We upcycled it into food products, but didn’t test it on a sample. Instead, we launched it in 50 shops in Los Angeles in 2019. It worked well, we took the learnings from “selling a little” and then eventually scaled it up.
It’s a counter conventional innovation process, but it’s worked.
What marketing tips does the industry need most right now?
Business needs to start doing the “heavy lifting” in creating products that are sustainable, but also good for people. My view is that we’re in resource-constrained environment and need to start building “doing good” into the business model, rather than just rely on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). We have to start making sure that, when customers get our products, they are also genuine and without harm to the world around us.
To put this in perspective, I think we’re guided too much by a mindless consumption pattern and, in business, by selling more and creating more value for shareholders. Don’t just sell more stuff. Look at the end-to-end supply chain and at your business model and see where you can make small changes that will create positive impacts on the world today. Then, look at where you’d like to be eventually and draw a clear roadmap to get there. The idea is to build “doing good” into your business model, into your brand’s DNA
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