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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#760: Nestle's Daniel Damasio on successful marketing transformation that is both global and local
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Podcast Announcer
The Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
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When customers continually demand hyperlocal relevance, is the concept of a global brand an asset or a liability? Agility requires not just the ability to pivot, but the intelligence to know when and how to pivot based on real time customer understanding. This means moving beyond global assumptions and empowering local teams with the data to make smarter, faster decisions. Today we're here at Treasure Data's CDP World in Las Vegas and we're going to talk about one of the biggest challenges facing any multinational company. How to maintain brand consistency and operational efficiency on a global scale while delivering the locally relevant personalized experiences that actually build relationships with customers. It's a classic battle between standardization and personalization, and the key to winning often lies in how you unify and activate your data. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Daniel dimasio, Senior CRM Analyst at Nestle. Daniel, welcome to the show.
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Daniel Damasio
Thank you for having me, Greg.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Nestle?
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Daniel Damasio
All right, so as I said, I'm Daniel Damasio. Thank you for having me again. I I've been at Nestle since 2023 and as a Customer Relationship Management Senior Analyst, my role obviously creates strategies to engage our customers in our brand's life cycle. Strategies, communications to of course create value not only for the company as a whole, but also to create value for the people who matter, which are our customers. So in terms of strategy, we deploy and create campaigns that obviously try to communicate everything that we have at Nestle to the customers. In terms of newsletters in terms of new products, in terms of what is Nestle doing as a company in whole? So all that passes through our team. So, yeah, it's my job at Nestle to make sure that we bring all that to the attention of our customers. So basically that's it.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, that's. And that's a lot, that's a lot of communication there. So I'm sure most, if not all of our listeners are familiar with the Nestle brand through, you know, products on the shelves and other interactions, but they may not appreciate some of the complexity behind the curtain. Can you kind of talk about where. I know you talked about your role, but what areas do you work in within Nestle and, you know, products and things like that? And you know, what are maybe some of the unique challenges when you're managing kind of a house of distinct brands for across so many markets?
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Daniel Damasio
Right, That's a great question, because when we look at Nestle, we see a big group and also a lot of unique brands such as KitKat, Purina. So it goes from dog food to coffee to chocolates, a lot of things. So in order for that to happen, we need to make sure that every single brand has its own unique strategy, but also at the same time providing value to the company as a whole, as a Nestle. So we, we have to make sure that everything stands together, even though they have their own particularities. So in terms of customer relationship management, which is my perspective of the company, we have to make sure that the communications, of course, need to have a specific type of purpose when it comes to showing to our customers what we have, but also being at the end of the communication to make sure that this strategy is put in place and transforms this perspective into something that they can feel as customers. Right. So this is exactly what we try to do as a team here at Nestle.
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Podcast Co-host or Guest Moderator
Yeah, makes sense.
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Greg Kilstrom
And yeah, I mean, it's a lot of brands and it's a lot of nuance there, I would imagine. And so I know you and your team weren't, not necessarily there at the beginning of the unification process of customer data, but there's still a lot of important components that continue to happen along the way. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about again, originally there was a business case made to do this, but I would imagine there's still continual resource investment and other things that need to get done. How do you look at making the business case to keep this unified data and all of these things in place and continuing to grow?
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Daniel Damasio
Right, That's a Good question as well. I mean, of course the digitalization of a company that is traditional, such as Nestle, which has been around for more than 100 years, is always about consistency. Consistency is the key to success in this type of purpose. So even though we've already made a business case start implementing this every day is a challenge. So we have to keep up with, with the updates that the customers bring in as an input, we have to output it in terms of being able to keep up with the changes that the environment requires us to do. And of course, every year, every three, five years, the company changes sometimes its direction. So we have to obviously make sure that we are in line with everything that they are planning to do. So it's not only because we have like a CDP involved salesforce, any other platform that we use to make sure that our communication happens, we have to make sure that we always are aligned with a strategy that is on place globally. So this is what we're trying to do every single day. So I would argue that the business case is always there. We are always trying to defend. It's not just one final exam at the end of the semester that, okay, it's done one and done. No, it's always every quarter, every half a year, every year. We have to defend that the digitalization happening and we make sure that we are providing enough value to everybody involved in the system.
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Podcast Co-host or Guest Moderator
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
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Greg Kilstrom
And so you gave a talk here at CDP World yesterday and one of the things that you talked about in that was the concept of the intelligent cdp. And so I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about how do you define intelligent cdp? And yeah, just maybe start there.
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Daniel Damasio
Okay, well, bringing to context, I don't know if everybody is familiar with the context of what a CDP is, but it's basically a consumer data platform. So in that regard, an intelligent cdp, perhaps a lot of people would say that requires artificial intelligence to make it work. But in my mind, an intelligence CDP requires a lot of people involved to make sure that everybody's thinking about the system and everybody is doing an intelligent work of using a tool to make it happen. So we talk a lot about strategy, we talk a lot about operational efficiency, operational put into place. But everything that happens needs to happen because we are thinking about this. So of course there are better tools to make it happen. So AI, so Creative Studio, a lot of the things that Treasured data, for example, brings to us. But at the same time we need to make sure that everybody is skilled enough to use it. Everybody needs to Understand what is a strategy, what is the vision, what is the purpose. So that for me is the intelligent cdp. You know, it's the brain behind the power.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So it's, I mean, it's human intelligence and it's artificial intelligence kind of working.
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Daniel Damasio
Together, bringing everything together.
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Podcast Co-host or Guest Moderator
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
And so, you know, kind of to that point as well, you know, with technology being an important part, but not the only part of this, how do you work with, so you work in markets like Brazil and Mexico. How do you empower your local teams in those markets to use these tools and use the insights from them without, you know, disrupting the kind of the bigger picture view as well? You know, how do you, how do you balance that kind of centralized governance with some local autonomy?
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Daniel Damasio
This is a funny question because this is actually the exact perspective that we brought together yesterday in our, in our panel in the Nestle, because we were talking with Nestle Mexico as well as Nestle Brazil, that me and Marcus representing Nestle Brazil. So, yeah, we've already discussed this yesterday, which is funny, but for our listeners here, I'm going to try to explicit all that again. So as I already said in the beginning, Nestle is a big company with a lot of brands, and that similarly happens when we talk about markets. So Mexico is a market, Brazil is a market, Asia is a market. So everything we put together at Nestle is to make sure that these markets has their own strategy but also serve as a global instance. So at Nestle, we have a kind of like a saying, a motto, which is together we make Nestle. So even though everybody has their own part in the system, we always act together as one big hive mind. Kind of like that. So in terms of digitalization, in terms of strategy, Mexico has their own local strategy because of course, the market and the social, cultural aspect of it is very different from what we believe. It's the correct way for Brazilians to act. At the same time, North America has their own differences. So when that happens, yes, we need a global strategy to make sure that everybody is coming together as Nestle. But at the same time, we have to make sure that we are bringing this personalization to every single country and every single aspect of the globe. So, yes, this is the kind of thing we do. So when we put this into perspective, we have to make sure that everybody's on the same page. So we in Mexico, for example, and we in the United States, we in Europe, we always are catching up on each other, sharing information to make sure that what we are doing is something that is working or is not working and what can we learn from their mistakes or what they're learning from our mistakes to make sure that everybody is evolving together. So this is what we're trying to do in a digital market, so to speak, because everything evolves quite rapidly in this world. So it's very agile, right? You would say. So in this regard we have to always make sure that everybody is sharing what they can. This is what we try to do on a day to day basis, basically.
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Greg Kilstrom
And so I want to talk about measurement and how you measure success there. And certainly it sounds like there's a lot of internal discussion about what's working and what's not as well. But there's also kind of different levels of measurement. So you know, there might be contact acquisition conversion rates. How do you kind of tie those things to maybe some larger, larger business objectives like customer lifetime value, long term brand equity, you know, how do you, how do you kind of balance the two of, you know, making sure that you're hitting the, the numbers, so to speak, but also contributing business value?
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Daniel Damasio
Yes. No, this is great. When we look at its strategy, sometimes we have to think about two aspects of it, of course, generating value, generating, generating revenue. But at the same time we have to understand that it's not only about generating the income, it's about sometimes having less costs, having less investments. So it's always about this balance. Right. So in terms of objectives, we always tend to think about operational efficiency, everything that comes together to generate these two types of results. So our KPIs, so to speak, always try to represent that. It's not always about opening rates, click rates, it's always about how does this correlates to more efficiency in these two aspects together. So everything that we do, we always try to make sure that we are not only looking at customer engagement, we are looking at it in the way that we can see the customer evolving through the lifetime value, for example, or other types of metrics that we have in place to make sure that, oh, this is a loyal customer. What are we trying to do to make sure that the churned customers do not stay churned? How do we reactivate them and how do we make sure that the media team, for example, is providing more valuable customers to our active ecosystem at Nestle. So it's always about maintaining balance and yeah, generating more with less. It's always about this type of billion dollar question, basically.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, and I guess maybe along those lines too, you know, just, just wondering if you have, if you were Advising another, another global brand, let's say, on, you know, either what, what has worked or. Or what hasn't worked. Just, you know, what, what would be some advice on, you know, how to do this or a lesson learned from, from your experience here?
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Daniel Damasio
Right. This is also something that we've already talked about yesterday, and I don't think we've completely covered it up because it's always a complex answer. You know, there's not always a silver lining. Just say, well, be happy. No, it's not that simple. Yeah, exactly. But if I might say so myself, I would give the advice that you need two things, and these two things derive into a third one, which is you need vision and you need purpose. Vision is the objective at hand. You know, oh, my God, we need to do this to reach that point in like five years. And the purpose is to understand that as a customer relationship management or as a company, what you're trying to do is to provide more value to who matters, which are the customers. So everybody is trying to make sure that their customers are happy. This is what the purpose for me of every brand should be. So when we clump these two factors together, we need to make sure that we are consistent. So we are trying to create value. Yes, we have to create a habit to the customers, but we also have to make sure that the value that we're trying to provide is true. Right. So everything that we're trying to do as a, as a team, as a. As a brand, as a company, is to make sure that every day we make sure that our customers are happy, and we try to push that to our team every day. So what are the actions that we are putting in place to make sure that everything is happening? So this is the kind of advice that I would give to every other brand that is wanting to put into place a CDP put into place. This digitalization is to have a vision, you know, but always take the first step. The first step is always very important, like the most important. If you not start the journey, you will not end it.
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Podcast Co-host or Guest Moderator
Yeah, no, great advice.
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Greg Kilstrom
And so, you know, you. So you have treasure data, you have the unified profiles, you have, you have a lot of things in place and able to do things. What's next, you know, what's the next frontier to kind of build on what you have?
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Daniel Damasio
Okay, this is also a very difficult question.
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Greg Kilstrom
Sure, sure.
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Daniel Damasio
In terms.
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Greg Kilstrom
Because it could go a lot of ways.
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Daniel Damasio
Yeah, we can go a lot of ways. Yeah. But honestly, I would say, and I don't know if I can say about it as Nestle as a whole.
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Greg Kilstrom
Sure, sure, yeah.
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Daniel Damasio
But as a team, as a CRM team, I would argue that the vision for the future is to always, yes, we have that purpose in our mind. So having that in perspective, our next step is always to make sure that the customers are engaging and are understanding what the value proposition of Nestle and its brands are. So if in order for us to do that, if we have to, you know, use AI to make that happen, we will. We are always on this testing type of mentality, this growth mentality that allows us to reach a plateau and break it. Reach a plateau and break it. So this is always what we're trying to do. The next step is always to adopt new technologies, adopt new, new certain perspectives. We are at trying to learn from our mistakes and learn from what we do. Right. So the next step is perhaps using more of AI, using more tools at our disposal. You know, bringing everything together all at once and creating unity.
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Podcast Co-host or Guest Moderator
Okay, Love it.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, it sounds like a very agile approach, so I love it, love it. Well, as we, as we wrap up here, a couple last questions for you. You know, this last day of CDP World here in Las Vegas, what's been a highlight of, of the conference for you so far?
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Daniel Damasio
This is an easy question but also difficult to answer because everything has been wonderful. This is my first edition that I could come.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, same here.
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Daniel Damasio
That's nice. But speaking for myself, everything has been wonderful. I've made a presentation, a panel yesterday, which of course for me personally was a highlight in terms of that because I've never had this opportunity so to be transparent as what Nestle is doing for everybody. So this was a very nice thing to do. But at the same time, personally I love to learn. So having the opportunity to understand what is new in business, this state of the art type of technology which treasure data allows us to understand because I think there are a top notch company helps us as Nestle and as a team to make sure that we are on the right track. So this for me is a highlight because looking at the keynotes, looking at the presentations that everybody, every other brand is doing humbles us in a way that, oh my God, we have a lot to learn. So this is kind of the mentality that always keeps me on edge, you know. So this is a highlight for me for sure.
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Podcast Co-host or Guest Moderator
Love it, love it.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well, Daniel, thanks so much for joining. Last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Daniel Damasio
Oh, wow. I think that one of the things that we do to make sure that we are agile is always reaching out to other teams. That always helps us to understand what is new, what everybody's doing to make sure that what is going on at our sprints, because we try to operate in the agile systems instead of the more traditional approach to projects, for example. So every week we have a lot of meetings with other teams to make sure that, oh, you know, doing this, okay, how can we implement this on our sprints? How can we do this in a more efficient manner? So we are always trying to connect because personally for me, business is always to connect. This type of approach always helps us to make sure that everybody is together in a strategy, in an operational. So I think that is certainly one of the things that makes us agile in our day to day. And the second is always taking the first step. So look, have the vision, have the purpose in mind, but always try to make sure that you have an MVP of everything. Do this type of approach that every day there is a quick win, even though the quick wins are small victories. Oh, did you manage to implement this little feature? Great. Consider this a part of a large ecosystem. So if we break down these big projects into very small pieces, you can stay agile because there's like a dopamine type of reward involved, you know, so everybody's happy that you're doing it and you can see the effort going into good results. So that is also making sure that you're putting everything, the wheel into motion, basically. So that's an everyday effort.
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Podcast Co-host or Guest Moderator
Love it. Love it.
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Daniel Damasio
Thanks again Greg. It's been a great pleasure into telling people, telling your listeners that our journey at Nestle has been very fun and it has provided great results. So thank you very much for the opportunity to share that with everybody.
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Podcast Co-host or Guest Moderator
Yeah, thank you.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well, again I'd like to thank Daniel Damasio, senior CRM Analyst at Nestle, for joining the show. You can learn more about Daniel and Nestle by following the links in the show notes.
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Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.google greggkillstrom.com that's G R E G K-I H L S T R O M.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Podcast Announcer
The Agile Brand.
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Sponsor Representative
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