Meet the Marketer: Xavier Gonzalez

Xavier, please tell us: What do you love about what you do, day to day?

I love the combination of creativity and commercial impact, the fast pace of FMCG (if you fail, you fail quickly and learn fast). Every day presents a different challenge; whether it’s understanding consumer needs, launching innovations, developing media plans or working with partners like Woolworths to grow the category. It’s very rewarding to see ideas turn into meaningful outcomes for customers and our brands.

What excites you the most about the opportunities for brands in Retail Media?

Retail Media’s ability to connect and influence consumers with the right message at every point of their journey, right up to the point of decision in store is vital to our brand’s overall media mix. What really excites me is the increasing number of brands becoming more confident to show their personality, be more personalised and as a result more relevant for their audience than ever before.

What learnings have you gained from using Retail Media through the years?

• Be clear on your strategy – Make sure to have all stakeholder alignments up front

• Consistent collaboration delivers the best execution – Make Cartology part of your ‘village’ of partners, with regular village meetings to ensure everyone is building towards the same objectives.

• Continuous learning can only happen with measurement – Be clear on ROI benchmarks to make smarter investment decisions going forward. 

What changes are you seeing in customer behaviour and how are your marketing tactics and objectives changing in response?

Working within the highly competitive yoghurt category, means it’s never been harder to build loyalty and grab attention. The average consumer these days considers up to eight brands while still at ‘point of shelf’! So we focus on cutting through the noise by using more relevant messages, the right touchpoints and by creating meaningful brand experiences for our target audiences.

What new technologies, such as AI or automation, are you most excited about? How do you plan to leverage them?

The short answer – everything! Our marketers are upskilling constantly in new technologies that can help give us a competitive advantage or make their day-to-day more efficient. Within AI powered tools I’m excited by what I’m seeing in the areas of research, media optimisation, creative and performance tracking. 

How do your brand and trade marketing teams collaborate to build effective, full-funnel Retail Media strategies?

1. Strategic briefing and alignment – key objectives, priorities and challenges

2. Review of previous cycle activities – what worked and what didn’t

3. Collaborative planning and execution – integrated into a broader partner village to ensure retail media is optimised and consistent within media plans.

How do you define and measure success in Retail Media, and how do you align on KPIs between your brand and commercial teams?

It starts with being very clear on the strategy with brand, consumer and customer objectives. Then we work with our internal teams and Cartology to define what success looks like across key touchpoints and therefore what performance metrics are best suited. 

I tend to look at ROI through sales uplift and whether we are recruiting new consumers into our brands (trial/repeat increase in particular) as well as the usual media efficiency metrics for certain channels (reach, engagement, conversion).