General Mills CMO Doug Martin

DOUG MARTIN: Who is this person that I am trying to get to change a behavior? Do I really understand them? Am I doing something that has a shot of attracting them? And will it motivate them to change a behavior? And so if you can't have a pretty simple conversation and pretty simple words about whether those three things are true, then the AI technology tools you layer on over the top are only going to marginally make something better that isn't really great.

GREG STUART: Doug Martin, welcome to Building Better CMOs.

DOUG: Greg, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

GREG: Yeah, I'm very excited about this one. I think you're an icon in the business at this point.

GREG: I mean, you've been over at General Mills now for almost 20 years, right?

DOUG: Twenty years, yeah. I actually started the day that my nephew was born, so I know exactly how long I've been here. And today was his first day interning for a senator. So I've been here long enough to intern for a senator.

GREG: To transition to a new generation, I think.

DOUG: Exactly.

GREG: My goodness. I heard the secretary general of the UN, somebody asked him one time how'd he end up the secretary general of the UN. He said, "Well, I didn't die. That was first." So other than that, it's unusual for somebody to stick around in a company that long nowadays.

DOUG: Yeah, it totally feels like a throwback. I will say at General Mills, we tend to have long tenures here. And so I worked for the first, whatever, 17 years in brand management. So through the P&L ownership function, and then transitioned over to CMO about three years ago.

GREG: Yeah. And from what I could tell, too, you seem to have a real variety of different jobs. Like you were president of the, was it called the milk division? Was that what it was called?

DOUG: We called it the dairy operating unit.

GREG: Dairy? Sorry.

DOUG: We didn't have any milk. It was just yogurt, but we like to call it dairy.

GREG: Got it. So it seems like they've done a good job of rotating around. It's funny, I actually spent a lot of time in the early part of my career, maybe for those listeners out there, sort of jumping around. I was in the agency business, I would go from agency to agency. I look back now, and I've been here for a little over a dozen years. There's a lot of virtue to stick around and figure out how to perfect something.

DOUG: Yeah, there's both. We have kind of a leadership development philosophy here that the best predictor of how you're going to perform in a current environment or with a current problem is if you've faced it before. And so we rotate people through a lot of experiences, particularly early in their career so they have some of that experience. I will say I've had the benefit of — we have a lot of divisions, a lot of different brands — I've spent big chunks of time in single operating units doing different jobs. So I spent seven years in a row in dairy. I spent five years in a row in grain snacks doing different jobs. And that was where I was like, okay, I'm still growing. I'm learning something, but I don't have to re-understand what a granola bar is. I know the competition. I know what we're trying to achieve. And so that was really helpful.

GREG: Yeah, no, it's funny. MMA was a turnaround for me, and somebody asked me, what did you do to turn around? I go, I've done it before. I mean, that really was the answer. I knew the moves. I knew what had to come before this and what had to go next. I just executed against that and, hence, we got lucky in the turnaround.

GREG: Listen, go back to the brand question, though. There's so many brands. We should probably have a scroll here during the entire podcast. So you want to rattle off some of the brands, just so everybody knows? Besides Cheerios. It's crazy.

DOUG: Sure. So obviously cereal like Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, things like that. And then we also have soup, Progresso soup, Old El Paso, the Pillsbury refrigerated dough business, which is a business people know and love, the Nature Valley granola bar and granola business. We got Gushers and fruit snacks, we have Totino's Pizza Rolls, we have Chex Mix. We really have a variety. So you add it all up, and we're in well over 90 percent of American households.

GREG: Yeah. You have my pantry upstairs. That's exactly what you have. No, it's really crazy. And you left off one of my favorites, Trix. I don't think I heard you specifically call out Trix.

DOUG: One of the big secrets on that is that they are not only for kids. We will allow adults to enjoy Trix. We just say that they're only for kids in the advertising.

GREG: So you don't have to show ID or nothing?

DOUG: Yeah, no. And we will, I mean, if you have a rabbit who likes Trix, we're not going to come to your house and get in your business. You know what I mean? It's up to you.

GREG: That's good. I love it. I love it. Okay, so what's a really good question around that? I mean, Cheerios is astonishing, and I saw the reposition. I kind of noticed that from a distance, the reposition to heart health, I think is where you went with that, right?

DOUG: Yeah. And Cheerios, first of all, oats are inherently... It's funny, you go back in the Wayback Machine and Cheerios were launched as Cheerioats, and the original position was like, this is a more convenient way to get oatmeal and housewives don't have to cook in the morning. That's what this was.

GREG: Wow, that's so crazy. That was the original?

DOUG: That was it. And then over time, it sort of got, it became its own thing and people had lost that connection. And so we wanted to bring back, this is about oats and oats are heart healthy. And so it's a balance of reminding people that Cheerios are heart healthy and they're great for your heart, and also that they're pretty tasty and the whole family likes them. So it's a balance there.

GREG: And who's done more to bring families together, or maybe moms and kids, I would say, than Betty Crocker, right?

DOUG: Exactly.

GREG: Who didn't grow up learning to bake cakes with Betty Crocker, right?

DOUG: We have an archive of letters. So she originally was a radio personality, and she would help women, especially during the Great Depression, stretch their food dollar. There's a letter that we received from J. Edgar Hoover thanking Ms. Crocker for her contributions to American housewives. Apparently, the head of the FBI did not know that she was a fictional character. She's not real. I'm willing to break that information on your podcast.

GREG: First time said!

DOUG: Much beloved. Not real.

GREG: Right. That's very funny. I love it. I love it. And you guys are in everything, too. So there's not just cereals, there's not just sort of the baking products. I mean, there's frozen foods with Totino's, but then also there's pet food?

DOUG: Yeah, absolutely.

GREG: And ice cream.

DOUG: Yeah. So those are a couple of big ones. So ice cream, we have the Haagen-Dazs brand everywhere except the United States.

GREG: Oh, is that how that works?

DOUG: Yeah, exactly. So that's one of those stories of there was a divestiture and a purchase, and there was something written into a clause and we couldn't get it. But anyways, we have it outside the United States, a billion-dollar brand outside the United States. Super high-end, super premium ice cream. And then also about seven years ago, we got into the pet food business with the acquisition of Blue Buffalo, which is a really cool brand that basically a family started because their dog was sick and they wanted to give him the right stuff. And then they were super passionate about it and thought everybody should know about this brand. And so they really leaned into the marketing and grew that brand like crazy. And so that's now one of the biggest brands in our portfolio.

GREG: What year did you guys buy that? Do you remember?

DOUG: We bought that about seven years ago.

GREG: Oh, okay.

DOUG: Okay. And we've doubled the size of the business since acquiring it seven years ago.

GREG: I was going to say, I mean you and I were talking earlier, I think everybody in New York City's bought a damn dog. It sort of feels like it. And they take them everywhere. It's really funny. I've been in New York a few decades at this point, but it felt to me like it went from nobody could bother to have a dog, complicated, to everybody's got a dog and it's their main mascot or friend.

DOUG: Totally. And I think Blue has really been on that trend of what we call the humanization of your relationship with your pet, right? You are a pet parent, you're not a dog owner. And you think about how behaviors have changed. Did you brush your dog's teeth when you were growing up? I'm going to give you the answer. It was no.

GREG: No. Absolutely not.

DOUG: Now, absolutely! And it's really important. It's good for their overall health, all that stuff. It's great stuff, but people really have very deep relationships with their pet. And different from human food, your pet food has to be complete. If it is the only thing your pet eats, it has to have everything that they need. And so it's a really important choice that can be either stressful for people or there's a lot to think about, and it's an important choice. And people care about making that choice.

GREG: Now, it's funny you say that. My daughter, my 25-year-old daughter who's starting her working career now, talks of her cat as if it was her son, right?

DOUG: Yeah, totally.

GREG: I never would've referred to my pets in that regard. They were just things that took up space at home, it felt like. I don't know what they were doing when I was younger.

DOUG: It's interesting. We are bringing the brand into China, and so we've done a lot of research on pet parenting in China. There are more cats and dogs in China, just from a space standpoint. And what we see is that curve of pets went from being in the backyard to being your son from 1970 to 2025 here, China just came up that curve so fast.

GREG: Really?

DOUG: They went from pets are kind of unusual to pets are my children overnight compared to the rest of the world. So it is a trend that's happening all over the world.

GREG: What's this crazy thing I saw you do with Progresso soup? You did soup drops? What?

DOUG: Yeah, absolutely. So that is one of my favorite. And Progresso, super well known, been around forever. There is, like there is for everything, a national cold and flu month. And the Progresso team had this fun idea of when you're sick, you have soup. What if we could give someone a cough drop that tasted like chicken noodle soup? And they actually pitched that idea to me and I said, well, that's a terrible idea.

GREG: You were pitched the idea first and you were like... I was going to ask you how did you ever get to where you thought that was a good idea? But go ahead, yeah. Keep going.

DOUG: They came back to me and they were like, "So we think you're wrong," which I love. And they had also done a couple of other things to really establish themselves in that space. Like really simple, they worked with Instacart and they did a little package where you could get NyQuil, Puffs, Kleenex, and Progresso soup, add to cart at the same time. It's like a little sickness...

GREG: Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. It kind of reinforces the concept.

DOUG: They spent a little bit of money on it and people were like, "Yes, that's a problem I have. I need that solution." So they said, "We've been working on this and this is relevant and we think we should do it." And I said, "Okay, great. Let's give it a shot." And I think what I underestimated was a couple of things. One was there are so many content-hungry machines out there. You think about all the late-night programing, all the people who have to come up with a five-minute monologue every single day. That was just different enough that we got on all of the late-night shows.

GREG: I saw Stephen Colbert did a funny bit on it.

DOUG: Jimmy Fallon, and they were all really funny. And so the idea is not for us to be in the lozenge business, but the association of Progresso soup with feeling better when you're sick went through the roof. We had the most searches for Progresso in the brand's history. These are not hugely expensive activations, but if you catch a moment in culture where people are receptive to or have a particular problem. I always say, we're trying to solve problems and deliver joy. And those problems can be big or small. And that one just hit it right on the head, and we just got tremendous response from that.

GREG: Can you give any economics to that, by the way?

DOUG: That one, I think we spent well under a million dollars. Right? We probably spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on that.

GREG: Wait, in activation and in product development even?

DOUG: Absolutely. We partnered with the lozenge company. We sold them. They sold out in an hour. It was really...

GREG: I went and looked to buy them. I was going to buy them and get them here. I couldn't find them on Amazon. And then I realized the site said it was sold out.

DOUG: Almost nothing. And then the amount of views and impressions were astronomical, in the billions.

GREG: The best deal. Best marketing idea ever?

DOUG: I mean, most cost effective, best marketing idea we've had in a long time. And you can't say a view equals 1 cent, but I guarantee you that it was the best investment we made last year.

GREG: Ah, that's so crazy. I love that. And I love the fact... You're right. I would think my reaction may have been similar. Like, "I don't know, guys. I'm not really sure that's the place." But it is a nice association to health, which is a reinforcement of what the soup brand's all about, and there's this certain comfortability to it. And it creates conversation.

DOUG: Absolutely. We talk all the time about... especially our brands, which have been around for a long time, everything you do is a contribution to a memory structure. What do people know about Progresso? They know your soup, good chicken noodle soup, they have white meat, tasty, all those kinds of things. But what's associated over there? What else is associated with chicken noodle soup? And it's like, well, I'm not feeling well. That is fully established, and there's a moment in time where people are that's in the zeitgeist. And if you can connect those dots and let the culture pull you along, it's just phenomenal.

GREG: Wow. I'd love to see your brainstorming for what comes next. General Mills is full of iconic brands. There's no question about it. So I bet you there's a whole bunch of discussions, what else can we do to top that?

DOUG: Well, what we do really well internally is see a brand do something successful and then say, I want to do that. We really, we talked about that team internally. We're very proud of that work. And so right now, I know there are other teams thinking, what does that look like for us? I'll give you an example. The Pillsbury team...

GREG: Another amazing brand. Amazing brand.

DOUG: It's almost a $2 billion brand. Everybody loves the Doughboy.

GREG: Everybody! Do you use the Doughboy in advertising anymore?

DOUG: We do. And we realize that we need to expand his role. There's obviously the poke and giggle, the "Hoo hoo!" But he needs to have more of a role. What was interesting was, again, Instacart did a Super Bowl commercial, reached out to us, "Can we leverage the Doughboy?" And they did some incredible just pre-roll from...

GREG: I remember what they did, the Super Bowl commercial was all these iconic in-store characters. Jolly Green Giant was there, everybody.

DOUG: What got an amazing reaction was they put the Doughboy in the star trailer of the Old Spice guy, the guy who came in on a horse, and had them interact. And the little Doughboy — he is like eight inches tall, he's the size of a can of dough — sitting on the Old Spice guy's couch talking to him. People just loved that. So we need to take him and put him into the real world more, and where are the spots that he could show up?

I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to say no to anything again, because I'm obviously wrong sometimes, but one of our big recipes there is the Crescent dog. You take the Crescents, you wrap it around hot dogs, it's an easy dinner. People love it. And so the team was like, "Well, there's also a National Wiener Dog Day, like Dachshund Day, should we show up there?" And I'm like, I don't know. Are people going to think we're eating, we want to eat dogs? This feels uncomfortable to me. I don't know. But maybe that's a great idea, too. I don't want anyone wrapping their dachshund.

GREG: Never underestimate consumers' ability to sort of get advice wrong. Exactly.

DOUG: Exactly.

GREG: That's a good one. So you've had a long career there with lots of people. I'm sure you're well enmeshed with the whole entire leadership team and have been for years. And I'm sure a lot of you have kind of grown up together. Just by the way, what's the best advice that you've... I love your point, by the way. I love when I get pointed out to be wrong, too. But what's the best advice that you've been given throughout your career? Do you have a sense of that or just examples?

DOUG: I mean, I have a million of those. I kind of go back to early in my career and think about what was advice that really put me on a different trajectory. And so I actually was working at the Gap. I was a buyer at the Gap.

GREG: Yeah, you were a merchandising guy originally, I think I saw, right?

DOUG: I was.

GREG: Yeah, it's a unique skill.

DOUG: And my kind of division president had come from Clorox. And I realized I was doing okay at that job, but I didn't know what was next in fashion, and I was not going to be the CEO of the Gap. And I was like, I think I should go to business school. And he told me, he's like, "You know what you need to do out of business school, you need to go work at a company that's going to invest in your learning and training." And that's a really obvious point when you make it. But at that point in my career, I hadn't thought about jobs that way. And so that really made me think about CPG and at that time, General Mills was very much what you would call kind of an academy organization where there's a lot of rigorous training. We're going to train you on how to be a brand builder. And I came here to get five years of that training so that I could leave and take it elsewhere. And then I think the company's done a really good job of continuing to say to me, "Hey, you could leave now, but here's what you'd miss on learning." And I love to learn, so that's why I'm here 20 years later.

GREG: Yeah, it's so funny, too. When you're early in your career, to jump for... I don't know what that would be today. I'm older than that, but to jump for a $10,000 or $20,000 salary increase, which was the most important thing to me at the time, and in retrospect, that would be the dumbest reason to make a decision. It would all be about what they're going to teach you, what are you going to do with it?

DOUG: Yeah. What is the brand builder or marketer that you're going to become coming out of that experience, and what are you set up to do then?

GREG: Was General Mills known to have a good executive management program or educational thing?

DOUG: Yeah, for sure.

GREG: Same as Procter & Gamble, I assume. Similar, sort of.

DOUG: Yeah. Procter, always sterling reputation in that regard. But I think General Mills was really well known for, like, we care about building brand builders and we have a very specific rotational program to have you build experience. That was super appealing to me.

GREG: Yeah. Where else did they put you? So you would've done in that training program, you would've done brand management. I'm sure they probably put you in operations, probably in the factory floor at some level, I assume. Maybe sales distribution, they do everything?

DOUG: No, the way that it works here is sort of different flavors of brand management. So as I started, you had to do three jobs for sure. One was an established brand, what does it take to build an established brand? One was innovation, solely focused on new products, which I really enjoyed and did that a lot in my career. And then the third was what we call strategic growth channels, but that's targeting specific customers. So that's great because then you really understand.

So in the innovation job, you really end up understanding operations, ITQ, this thing has to get made. And in that SGC job, that's when you start to understand sales. And you realize we're a consumer packaged good company, but we don't sell anything directly to a consumer. We sell it all through a customer. At that point, I'm two years into my career and I'm like, oh, light goes off. None of this matters if it doesn't work for the retailer, and so let me understand them a lot more deeply. So you get a lot of experience that way.

GREG: Boy, how dramatically the business has changed. I mean, I think for me, you're right. If I was buying Cheerios or other iconic brands here in your roster, I would either buy them through Amazon because they're totally shippable or Instacart, that kind of thing, right? Does it feel to you as if the whole grocery business is completely dramatically — or food intake, I don't know what we call it — but it's just unbelievably different?

DOUG: Absolutely. And you want to check yourself. The question is, am I just getting old or are things really changing faster than they ever have? And I think both the answers can be yes. I think it is both true than I'm older than I once was, and for sure, the pace of change in this business right now is greater than it's ever been at any point in my career.

GREG: So someday we don't go to grocery at all?

DOUG: I honestly don't see that in the foreseeable future. So people are moving towards online, obviously. I will tell you that the mode that is growing the fastest, the thing that's really working for people, is click and collect.

GREG: What's click and collect?

DOUG: Click and collect is let me make my basket online whenever it's convenient for me and decide exactly when I'm going to go pick it up at the store.

GREG: Oh, okay. So keeping a shopping list but within Instacart, for example.

DOUG: Or walmart.com, or any of those things.

GREG: Yeah, sorry, let me mention all the distribution points there. I'll stop mentioning just one. Sorry, Walmart's a member, too, so yes, Walmart. I don't know. Kroger is a member. We could do a Kroger. You and I should go on and on with this.

DOUG: Big fan! No, but the thing is I think there are two things that are true. Thing number one is the consumer, when offered more convenience, has never rejected that. And our retailers are doing a great job of offering more convenience. Thing number two that's also true is they're not all going to be planned purchases. And we do a lot of work on what kind of shopping trip is this? Is this a fill-up trip, is this a fill-in trip? And people will always be going into grocery stores. I think the grocery store is going to be a critical environment for people physically to be in and grab stuff. And a percentage or two, 5 percent, is going to continue to move towards the online purchase modality. And they might actually show up in person to grab it, but I think we will have both.

GREG: Okay. Okay. Fair enough. So you heard it here.

GREG: So listen, let's get to the big thing here for Building Better CMOs, which is this sort of idea that, listen first off, marketing has changed pretty dramatically. The environment and consumer habits have changed unbelievably. I mean, if you had told me that we would have a short video on our phones like TikTok or YouTube Shorts, I don't think I could have conceptualized that 15 years ago for sure at the beginning of the cellphone. I wouldn't have thought that was an outcome. But you've also got, I think that some of what concerns me, what the MMA works on is some of the foundation of marketing is less than fully understood. So again, I was telling you here before we started that I'm probably upwards of now 48 some odd episodes of Building Better CMOs. And what's funny is that I always ask the same question, what do you think we should fix? What do you think marketing can do better? And that there's virtually been none of them the same. And you have a very unique perspective on what you think marketers need to most think about and orient and where we can use room for improvement. So talk about that a little bit.

DOUG: Yeah. So, true, things are changing incredibly rapidly and one of the things I talk about is that the pace of technology change is orders of magnitude faster than the pace at which our brains actually change.

GREG: That's true.

DOUG: The way a person makes a decision is the same today as it was a hundred years ago. It's just we have crazy tools to get to those people and offer them new information. And so the thing that I think we have to continue to focus on is the fact that, at the end of the day, if anything that we are working on in marketing is not going to connect with a real person and get that real person to change a behavior in their life, then it's not worth doing. And I think we are at a place where obviously the AI conversation is important. Obviously, we have to take advantage of these tools. This conversation is so big that I call it, it's a mainstream, gen pop, general conversation. It's not a marketing conversation. Everybody's aware of this.

But it's so salient that I think it can cause you to take your eye off the ball of who is this person that I am trying to get to change the behavior? Do I really understand them? Am I doing something that has a shot of attracting them? And will it motivate them to change a behavior? And so if you can't have a pretty simple conversation and pretty simple words about whether those three things are true, then the AI technology tools you layer on over the top are only going to marginally make something better that isn't really great. And so that's where I think we need to continue to focus. It's always an insufficient answer, but the truth is you have to do both. You have to do both. It is art and it is science, it is brand and it is performance. And it's easy to get distracted by one or the other.

GREG: Tell me if I get this wrong, but it's not neglecting the very classic brand management, which is to really have insights and totally understand your consumer and their reasons.

DOUG: That's a hundred percent right. And if you start from a place of, "I actually understand this consumer better than the competition," then all those tools are going to optimize your work and have you light-years ahead. But if you start from a place of ignorance about the consumer, you're not going to get where you're trying to go.

GREG: Do you have an example — if you can, even both sides of that — do you have an example of where you've seen a unique, powerful insight that was developed from really understanding that was then able to be executed? I guess I don't need to over qualify that. And do you also have a sense in your long history of where maybe we just kind of got it wrong?

DOUG: I'll tell you a great example: We've just gone through our plans process and our Annie's team — we also have the Annie's brand, which is really fun, right?

GREG: Yeah. Mac and cheese.

DOUG: Mac and cheese, crushing it with mac and cheese. But, you know, kid crackers and fruit snacks.

GREG: Oh yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on there. Yeah, it's a whole brand.

DOUG: And so every brand in that zone has an insight that I think you could boil down to mom tested, kid approved or whatever. That's the old Kix positioning that we had.

And the Annie's team looked at their work for the past few years and thought, we are saying those things, but we are not showing that payoff of the mom and the kid together having that emotional payoff of just enjoy in the day. We're saying the kid wants it, we're saying mom's happy about it. And the work that they're doing right now that's actually bringing mom and kid together and allowing you as the viewer to see that emotional payoff is so much more powerful. And it's sort of probably the same overall insight, but realizing that you need to carry it all the way through to the emotional connection, because that's how we make 95 percent of our choices. Ninety-five percent of our choices are emotional choices, seven seconds in a grocery store aisle. What do I feel without even maybe consciously thinking about it when I think about Annie's? And if what I could feel is something to do with that, I think that brand's going to be set up for tremendous success.

GREG: Wow, that's so great, Doug.

GREG: It's funny, I worked on Bounty paper towels many years ago for P&G, and they've sort of transitioned that. So I'm doing this from the outside. I want to be careful if P&G wants to tell me I sort of got some of this wrong. But if you know the commercial, Quicker Picker Upper, everybody would understand that as a slogan. But what's happening in the commercial is that the kid spills and, listen, if you're a parent, you have more than once looked at your kid in anger and pissed off that we now have another to-do that we have to take care of, especially depending on the mess. But if you notice what happens, because Bounty cleans up the mess so far, it creates harmony in the household and the mother continues to have a non-shame-based relationship with the kid. That's a powerful, powerful insight that obviously consumers aren't processing at that sort of conscious level, but that's what's going on. Right?

DOUG: Exactly. And I will say, this is going to sound very obvious, but being on the lookout for moments in your marketing where you realize you could be causing someone to have a negative emotional reaction. I won't go into specifics, but there was a period of time where all the commercials, mom was the hero and dad, you could make fun of dad. It was easier to make fun of dad.

GREG: I've seen some of that. Yeah, I've seen some of that.

DOUG: Exactly. And I think being really, really clear that dad is dumb is not the direction you want to go into. You can make fun of dad if everybody's enjoying it. Listen, I make fun of myself, but you got to be really on the lookout for those moments where you're tipping in towards negativity, making fun of someone. That's not how you want to build your brand.

GREG: Yeah, that's the old Married... With Children show that was so popular. They did a lot.

DOUG: Exactly.

GREG: They made fun of him all the time. Right, exactly. And I think that's repeated itself.

DOUG: He likes to use the bathroom. We get it.

GREG: Exactly. Yeah.

GREG: Do you have another example? I love the Annie's one that they've got to refocus back on kid tested, mom approved with all the brands, give me another one.

DOUG: I'll give you another one that is right now top of mind. So we have the Old El Paso brand, and it's an interesting, basically that brand...

GREG: This is like a trip down every favorite brand that anybody has ever had. What a great opportunity.

DOUG: It is. And actually what's great about that example is that is a category that has changed wildly. Essentially, Old El Paso was, when it started, teaching people how to make a taco, right? You're like, you put meat in and then lettuce, and it's like tacos were new. And obviously that's not true anymore. Everyone gets it. And so what is Old El Paso in this moment, and how do you stay relevant in this moment? And so that brand, they did a bunch of consumer research and what they found was there's something about the Old El Paso flavor, that yellow packet of flavor. It's different from everything else, and it connects back to a bunch of positive memories. And a lot of stuff is going on in the world. Consumers are stressed about a lot of things, and something like Old El Paso can be a moment to reground in something that is super familiar and not a risk that everyone will love. So, again, a lot of taste exploration and bold flavor, all those things are important trends, but it's also important in that context to have the one that you love, that you know will be exactly what you remember. And that's what Old El Paso can be right now.

GREG: That's very funny. Yeah, I would say even within my own household, as the kids were growing up, the taco night, whatever that was, was sort of an event to be had, which is a variation of what you're saying there.

DOUG: Totally. The only time they get to participate in making exactly what they want, that customization and personalization. Before, we were talking personalization.

GREG: How do you do some of that research? Let me give you an example. I was just interviewing the head of Hyundai for India, the CMO of Hyundai India, oddly enough. And they do a lot. And I can't pronounce the word, I'm such a dope here, but entomology, is that the one where you go into the household? Is that the research you go in the household?

DOUG: Ethnography.

GREG: Ethnography, thank you. Okay, well close enough. Thank you. You said it.

So what was interesting, they said they were doing a lot of this going into households and talking to consumers. You know what they found that most of the time, the car purchase, you know who has the biggest influence in the house? Teenage daughter. Isn't that funny? I didn't know that.

And it's so funny because my wife and I, a number of years ago bought, when my daughters were teenagers, we actually bought a truck. I am the last person who would ever own a pickup truck. It's just not my thing. I live in New York City. It's just crazy. And we bought a pickup truck because my daughter wanted it. And then my wife was mad at me for a while and I go, "You saw her. She said that's what she wanted." I mean, it's sort of funny.

DOUG: You were there!

GREG: Exactly. But you really do pick up some very fascinating insights across brands, don't you sometimes? What are some of the methods you all would do to kind of go get that information, insight?

DOUG: You definitely want to get into homes. You want to see people make...

GREG: Especially for your products, right?

DOUG: Yeah, you want to see people make food, and then you want to see people interact over that food. I think one of the things that we are balancing is that you can also do a lot of that digitally now. You can give people diary tasks and have them film themselves on their iPhone, and that's really good, too. But it's not quite as good as being there yourself and knowing what taco night looks like and sounds like in the real world. So I think that's really important.

And I always feel like when you're working on a brand, I personally felt like I would do my best work once I had met that one consumer who I felt like embodied what that brand was all about. And if I could think back to, I was on Fiber One and we did a focus group in New Jersey. Our target's like 50-year-old men, and we're in New Jersey in a focus group talking about weight loss. Guys don't want to talk about weight loss. And there's this one dude who is, let me just say, not fit. And he's like, "You know what? I probably just need to get back to what I used to do in high school, a couple of pickup games of basketball, probably start doing pushups, then everything would be great." And I was like, this is the guy. And now I'm that guy. We all think if we just get back to what we did in high school when we were fit, we would be there.

GREG: There we go.

DOUG: So we actually took that concept of that one person. And we now talk about in our brand foundations, who is your consumer muse? Can you solidify in a form of a person who might be made up, might be a celebrity, might be an archetype, but can you as a brand team all be walking around with the same conception of who that person is, who's motivating and inspiring your work? If you guys have the same sense of who that person is, you will move faster, you will make better decisions, and you will make sometimes sharper decisions because you know exactly who it's for.

GREG: Hey Doug, how do you know sometimes that you got that right, though? You do get a lot of inputs from different brands. By the way, funny enough, MMA is going through a reposition right now, and I'm finding it very difficult to listen to others to find the center of my brand, I guess. How do you know you either found the consumer, which is part of your point there, how do you know you got it right? You can do a lot of research. You can't just test your way to that. How do you know, Doug? Or is this why you get paid the big bucks? You do that better than nothing?

DOUG: No, it turns out I don't think I'm better at knowing that than anyone else. But I do talk about the fact that this is really a three-step process. So you imagine you're at a big CPG company like this, really smart people, really rigorous processes. And we spend a lot of time on what is your brand strategy? That's a lot of us talking to ourselves. And then you put it on a document, you present it, everyone goes, "Wow, that's amazing. That's just right. That's how that brand's going to grow." Step one, do you have a strategy? Step two, you only know if you have a good strategy if good ideas come out of it. I have seen strategies that are a dead end for idea generation where you're like, that strategy leads to one idea and then it kind of doesn't go anywhere from there.

So good strategy leads to good ideas, leads to a lot of ideas. Step three is how do consumers react to those ideas in the real world? So you really don't know the answer to your question — did I have the right muse, did I have the right strategy — until you put stuff out in the world in a fairly significant way, and then people either take it and start to play with it themselves. You see a business trajectory change, you see all the places you could go from there. So it can be quite a long journey between we've done a lot of smart and thoughtful learning and strategizing internally to yep, this is it. We talk a lot about you want to get to a distinct and enduring brand and a distinct and enduring brand idea. You don't want to be changing it every six months. Cheerios is what it is, and you want it to be moving in a direction. But just like we talked about with Old El Paso, there are times when, well now the context has changed and so this idea has to evolve with it. Which parts do I bring with me and which parts do I leave behind?

GREG: But Doug, there's some risk, though, if you're waiting till the time... You go through the process of the agency, and I don't need to make it about traditional TV commercials, but a lot of production can be kind of expensive. And you start putting stuff out there and then you find out it didn't really work. I mean, ouch.

DOUG: Oh, that's a nightmare. Yeah, that's a terrible idea. I will say, obviously we need to interact with consumers the whole way.

GREG: There's steps along the way to make sure before... Okay, good.

DOUG: Absolutely, but I do think the one thing that we're trying to do more now is learn at the earliest and roughest stage of ideas and learn with the people that you're trying to grow with. So don't grab the 10 Cheerios users who love you the most and ask them. Let's talk to the people who maybe have left the category or maybe weren't as actively involved in it and say, "How do you react to this?" Because it is so much harder to get that new person than it is to get the person who already loves you. And a good idea needs to reach across, beyond the people who already love you.

GREG: So we were mentioning earlier around there's a lot of test, there's a lot of optimization in digital media. The nature of digital media seems to be around optimization. You think that's kind of a false lead that doesn't really get us where we need to be? I don't know. How do we understand how that fits? We've still got to do that, right? I mean, we still have to optimize.

DOUG: Absolutely.

GREG: But it's hard when you're CPG because you don't always have definitely sales. I'm not even sure optimizing against sales is always just a goal. How do you guys look at that within General Mills?

DOUG: We talk about this. There are several dilemmas in marketing where there's no one perfect answer. And I think that optimization question is actually speaking to an underlying dilemma question, which is, yes, of course we want to put stuff out in the world, we want to see what consumers react to, and we want to optimize towards what's working better. But before that, how deeply do we understand our own brand and what we are trying to be so that we can even ask the question, is this idea moving us in a direction that we are strategically trying to move? Right? I don't think we want to optimize blindly towards any outcome. We want to optimize towards the outcome that we feel best about building our overall brand kind of strength and brand direction. And so that's always a mix of let's see what the data says, but let's also have some conviction about who we are and who we've been over, it could be, 75 years.

GREG: I think what you're raising there is what are we optimizing towards? So let me go back. It is incredibly clear from a lot of the research I have done for a lot of years that clickthrough is a terrible indicator of anything to do with business performance whatsoever. In fact, my favorite study of all time is that somebody, I have to go look this up, I've quoted this a few times. They basically put white blank ads into webpages. There was no branding, there was no logo, there was nothing. It was just a white blank ad. And the clickthrough for white blank ads were exactly the same as the ads. I mean, that means that consumers aren't clicking for any reason, but just something else going on. And I know from having done a ton of research around multi-touch attribution, I'm very clear. So now that I've taken that one off the table for you. I just want to be sure. What is optimization? If you want to give me as a digital metric of some kind, a little hard for consumer packaged goods. You know what I'm getting at? Do you optimize towards brand, use surveys? What are you doing?

DOUG: First of all, yes, I hear you. And yes, it is a difficult question. And this is where I'm always jealous of people who own the commerce transaction at the end.

GREG: Totally.

DOUG: They have that nice closed loop. And so we have some proxies for that that we use. So I'll tell you one of the things that we do that's been very helpful, we have a partnership with Fetch. Fetch is a rewards app. So if you go onto Fetch and you get points for your purchases and things like that, so they have receipt scanning for millions of consumers.

So what we can do is take consumers who are exposed and then make them, sort of plus them up to larger groups and say, this is like the group that was exposed. This is like the group that wasn't exposed and get a better sense of whether or not we're optimizing towards sales. But it is not as tight as if you own gap.com, and you send out an email or whatever that is. Of course, we've done our own research on did they click on it and we found zero correlation, unsurprisingly to you. But wouldn't it be great if, because that number is actually really solid. We know exactly what it is. It just doesn't turn out to be that worthwhile.

GREG: It doesn't mean anything. In fact, it could be business in the wrong direction.

GREG: Let me be fair to you, too. So I have knowledge here that not everybody has. I'm going to throw something else in there, not to make this overly complicated. If we need to, we can always cut this out of here. But I had started to hear from brands about five, six years ago. It's really loud, the relationship of brand and performance marketing. If you talk to the brand people, they say the performance marketers are destroying the future customer equity of the business, whatever. And if you've talked to performance people, they say the brand people believe in rainbows and unicorns and they just make stuff up. So you've got this tension within an organization. We took a step back, we said, is that a cold fusion problem? We need new science. Or as we then discovered, no, it's a math problem.

Nobody had ever collected the data, really. Okay, so here's my data point. I have done some very intense brand as performance. Brand has to be performance, but it's long term. But nobody ever had a measurement technique to do that. I've never found anybody, I've asked that question to 200-plus CMOs. So we built a methodology. So here's the point: we actually figured out... And by the way, this is kind of an unanswerable question, just so you kind of see the outcome of where I'm going. So we now know that, at least for the limited number of brands we've done this research because it's hard to do, is that $100 in sales developed today, nine to 12 months later is $700 in sales. So Doug, what's interesting about that is that I wonder — and I don't know — I wonder if even getting a short-term dynamic on sales or in using receipts as you suggested, is that giving us a false lead to what the future...? I'd have to ask research people if that's sort of good. I wonder. I don't know. Listen, we're all trying to get better at this. I mean, that's my point here.

DOUG: A hundred percent. One of the ways that we talk about it to help people conceptualize is that performance marketing is much about capturing demand and brand marketing is about generating demand.

GREG: Building demand.

DOUG: And so you have to do both. But at the same point in time, use Pillsbury as an example. Pillsbury, the problem they're solving day in day out is, "Oh my god, it's four o'clock and I have to make dinner again. What do I do?" So at that moment when that parent goes into Google or whatever and is like, what should I make, it'd be great to remind her of Pillsbury. You should capture that demand because you've got a signal coming at you.

At the same point in time, what's more valuable clearly is for Pillsbury to be the first brand that comes to her mind when she's in the space of trying to answer that question. When she's moving into the demand space of, "It's dinnertime. I have a family of five, I don't have a lot of time." Have we primed the pump and is Pillsbury one of the first things that comes up there? So you have to do both. Obviously, being top of mind is incredibly valuable and no, we don't always have the best measurements for that. But we have started to talk about mental mind share and how we build that to kind of direct people in a direction where if we work on that, then we're pretty sure that we're going to be building some great long-term value.

GREG: Got it. Yeah. Isn't it kind of funny, Doug, after all these decades, we still don't know the answer to some very core questions of our business, it feels like, right?

DOUG: It is. And I also think the challenge is that there are so many things within broader context of managing a business that are more certain. If we throw out a million dollars of ingredients, we know exactly what the value of those were and we put plans in place to solve that. So just like that is sort of a perfect scenario in terms of knowledge. Then the short-term impact is much more clear than the long-term impact. And so as we become more and more uncertain, it can be harder to make decisions with the same level of conviction. And so I think the role as CMO, I mean I'm fortunate that this is a branded company. We all are here to build brands. So it's not like I'm trying to convince people that marketing is important.

GREG: Right. Better than most, many CMOs, right?

DOUG: Yeah, exactly. But at the same point in time, I think we could do a much better job of bringing more certainty to the value, the economic value of some of those longer-term actions.

GREG: It's funny, we had a board member say in a board meeting here just a couple months ago, she goes, "Marketing can't both be pointless and be the cause of the problem."

DOUG: I like that.

GREG: Isn't that funny? I thought that was great.

DOUG: Getting over a cough. That one got me. That's really good. You get one or the other.

GREG: You can't be both. I thought it was such an awe-inspiring moment for everybody in the board to come on.

DOUG: Yeah, that's leadership.

GREG: That's what I'm up against. Exactly. Hey, let's talk just a little bit here. We'll kind of wrap up here.

GREG: Let's talk a little bit about AI because you mentioned it earlier. So I don't know, it's going to change everything, right?

DOUG: I mean, I feel like it has to, right? And I feel like we'd be crazy to think that it won't. At the same time, as we go out there and learn from people on the cutting edge of AI, the other thing I will say is it doesn't seem to me — for companies like General Mills or anyone doing marketing — that the right large language model or a distinctive large language model is going to be the answer. So then these tools seem like they're transitioning to becoming more and more and more available and accessible to everyone. So then it really feels like the winning strategy is who is the best at incorporating it into their processes and who is moving faster because of it in a direction that you have conviction about? So we're spending a lot of time right now actually mapping all of our key marketing processes. Like today, if I'm trying to build a media flow for Cheerios, who talks to who and says what, and then who do they say something to? And then what happens? And then exactly how does that come out the other end?

Because I think what we're going to need to do is ask ourselves, with imperfect information, what do you think that flow looks like in three years? I think it's going to look very different. And if we're not starting from a provocative endpoint of like, well, if this is what it looks like, how should we act differently now to get there tomorrow? I think you will be caught flat-footed from an organizational chain standpoint. And so I do think very much it's going to be about the facility of our people to prompt and to work comfortably within AI and have processes that can move at the pace that AI can help them move.

GREG: Yeah, it's interesting. There are a couple of points you said there. So I actually put forward to the board not too long ago. I've said it a couple of times and nobody so far has threatened to fire me or anything, as CEO of the company.

DOUG: That's always good. You can get through a day without being threatened to fire.

GREG: Exactly. Well, that is the board's job is to fire the CEO they don't like. But it was funny, I said, it seems to me it is inevitable that, eventually, all ads will be created by AI and all ad placement will be by machines.

DOUG: It's just a matter of what your time frame is.

GREG: Yeah, a hundred percent agree, a hundred percent agree. So then you kind of go, okay, well, is that the likely future? And nobody has said, no, that's not what's going to happen. I'm like, I don't know. I think that is what's going to happen. It's funny, somebody else, I was listening to somebody the other day and they were saying, "Oh, AI just equalizes everybody to even." I go, "No, actually AI is set up to be individualistic to your brand." Now whether or not it's being creative is another step. That's where I don't know that we've gone to yet.

But it should be relevant. And we've done some tests against using LLMs for insight development rather than going to do focus groups and so on. So I don't know. That's kind of a funny proposition. I mean, for me, the question for a trade assistant like the MMA then is, well what are we doing now to prepare for that future? Okay, so how do we get better to be ready for that? But I don't know. Doug, do you agree?

DOUG: I will take a slight contrarian point of view.

GREG: Yeah, please go ahead.

DOUG: I do think if you cast your mind forward far enough, the production of all ads will be in AI. I do want to believe that the creative spark has to come from a human. And the reason is you can do all the right smart things, but we have brains that basically process for what is expected. And if you only do what is expected, you don't jog someone into a different behavior. And it feels to me like that critical element of a creative thinker coming up with a different divergent path to tell your message has to be critical. At least for as long as I'm planning to be in the workforce. After that, all bets are off, but that's what I believe.

GREG: I have gotten to that stage in life where I'm like, "Okay, is this an issue I'm going to have to deal with or not have to deal with at some point?"

DOUG: Yeah, listen, my knees now hurt when I sit on a plane for more than two hours, so this is not forever. But for now, human creators, for sure.

GREG: Yeah. It is interesting. I think that we are in a funny place, and it's interesting that we really don't know exactly what that world looks like yet. Do we really? You can kind of see glimmers of it, but nobody's really perfected it and as fast as it feels like it's coming, at the same time, I don't know if it is. I just can't tell yet.

DOUG: Yeah. I find myself personally pinging back and forth between the entire world is going to be completely different in five years, and maybe this isn't as big a deal as we think it is. You know what I mean? You experience both of those things in the course of a single day. When I get my automated email marketing that are like, "Doug, there's a truck driver job available in Minneapolis for $17 an hour," and I'm like, you know what? Maybe people are still important.

GREG: I got solicited for text messaging, a work at home. I think that's what it was. I don't know. I'm not sure what that was all about, what they had in mind for me, but whatever. Well, Doug, listen, this is too much fun. I'm super excited to talk to you. I mean, like I said, I feel like I knew how many iconic brands, but I feel like I've done more of an unbelievable sort of review of America's greatest brands ever. So what a lucky guy you are to get to sit in that position. So congratulations and, thank you very much for being on Building Better CMOs.

DOUG: I appreciate it, and I had a ton of fun, Greg. Thank you. It was fun.

GREG: Thanks again to Doug Martin from General Mills for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Doug. If you like this episode, you might want to also try my conversation with Zoe CMO, Bob Sherwin; Coca-Cola global CMO, Manolo Arroyo; and Cava's chief experience officer, Andy Rebhun. You can find those episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're hearing me now.

At MMA, we are working to make marketing matter more through conferences, research, and education. If you want to know more about MMA, visit mmaglobal.com. You can also email me directly, greg@mmaglobal.com. Now, don't forget, Building Better CMOs is now on YouTube, so just go to bettercmos.com/youtube to start watching. Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase, and a special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting for making this happen. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.