Melanie Huet, president of brand management and Innovation at Newell Brands shares three ways the company is using generative artificial intelligence in its marketing efforts including for an insights analysis tool, consumer personas for market research and for innovation speed. The ROI and employee adoption from its efforts are real. Newell Brands is the global parent company of CPG brands Sharpie, Rubbermaid, Yankee Candle, Graco and more. Below is an excerpt of the piece; Visit Chief Marketer to read the full article.
Chief Marketer: How did the process of implementing genAI at Newell Brands begin?
Melanie Huet, president of brand management and innovation at Newell Brands: About a year and a half ago, our CEO identified it in our corporate strategy. He said, you know what? AI is a trend that’s here to stay. We all agreed with him, and we saw it as a potential leapfrog opportunity for Newell, because in many areas, especially for technical things like IT programs, we’re behind. And so we had an opportunity, we thought, to leapfrog all the way up into the front—and AI could be the accelerator of that leapfrog. That was really exciting for us.
Specifically for my remit, around brand and innovation, he said, go out there and learn some things and let’s see what we can start testing, learning or piloting. And one of the first things I looked at was our insights team, because insights for us was a place where, like a lot of companies, we had a significant amount of custom research but it was essentially locked away. My vision was that we could easily share it.
But to specifically answer your question, the way that we started to approach AI was this: I formed a small team. We started identifying problems and use cases. We started finding AI solutions in the marketplace on our own and then rapidly testing the use cases. We have well over a hundred different areas running right now.
CM: Your brands have seen marked success in three areas: an AI-based insights tool, consumer personas and AI for innovation speed. Can you take me through those successes?
MH: The insights tool was the one I was just mentioning. Our custom research was essentially locked away in this workflow tool and archived. It was to the point of, if you didn’t know the file name—which could be something really unique, like “Sharpie S 12.15, version 5 Final”—you could not unearth the file. Therefore our filing system was completely useless. That meant that any turnover on the team was extremely difficult. My insights people had to do a lot of manual work unearthing presentations. You actually had to know the name of the insights person to call to get the information. So essentially our usage of our information was extremely low. There were high barriers there.
So, myself and the IT team got together and we briefed a vision: we want to make Newell insights easily accessible, globally around the world. It has to unlock beyond the United States. We looked at traditional methods and traditional IT suppliers, and then we went to AI. We found a supplier named Stravito, which has a really amazing tool designed for this where you simply put your files in one location—and it has a Google-like interface. It summarizes the key [insight] of each piece. You can do really fun searches, like “tell me about coffee,” or “tell me about Gen Z.” “Tell me about my brand.” “Tell me what we did last month.” “Tell me about segmentation.” And boom, it loads, plus it sends you automated emails and other summaries. The result has been that our usage of insights has skyrocketed.
People always ask me, did I lay off any employees? I did not. I ended up adding four employees because our insights team now is in such high demand—because the information is so readily available—that now they’re being tapped for more strategic thinking and strategic partnership. And we’re sharing it around the world. We now are housing reports in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Japanese as well.
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