Jess (00:00)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Dig In podcast. I am seriously excited today. I am going to try my best not to fangirl out, but I am joined today by Nick Graham, former head of insights and analytics for Mondelez and PepsiCo. We're going to hear what he's up to now, but I have been looking forward to this so, much. I appreciate you being here, Nick. Thank you. Thank you.

Nick (00:19)
Thank you Jess. Well I'll try not to fangirl in return as well but it's really I also been super excited and looking forward to this so good to see you again.

Jess (00:23)
Deal.

Awesome, yes, great to see you. So I'm gonna get going with an impromptu question. You don't know that this one's coming at you. This just gets us going a little bit. But I'm very curious to hear your answer. What's one ingredient any self-respecting mixologist cannot live without?

Nick (00:44)
Yes, you have been doing your homework, so you know that I love bit of mixology in my spare time. Although, I will say, since I moved to Portugal, I have swapped out some of the cocktail making for wine drinking since I am in

the land of, well, one of the lands of wine, I should say.

I love some Quantro. Quantro is super versatile. I often use it in a few different cocktails. And there's quite a few sort of like little fortified wines and stuff as well. It can be kind of good mixer, good ingredients. So I mean, I could spend a whole podcast talking about

So probably that will be my first

Jess (01:19)
Yeah, we can unpack

Nick (01:21)
And if anybody wants more information, I'm happy to follow up and do a whole separate session on it.

Jess (01:26)
Yeah, I think an ethnographic deep dive on your bar and your cocktail cart would be good. Well, OK, I will

Nick (01:30)
For sure, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Jess (01:35)
part aside for today's conversation. Let's turn it back to you. Tell us about your background and what you're up to now.

Nick (01:41)
Sure. as you teed up, I spent the last decade or so in corporate insights analytics jobs. I started in PepsiCo where I led insights and analytics for our global beverage category team and then for our US insights team. And then most recently I led the global insights and analytics function for Mondelez so the makers of

Cadbury and Oreo and all those good things for the last three or four years where I helped to kickstart the transformation of the function. And then that was all going very swimmingly. And then in summer of 24, I made a big, bold, scary transformational decision of my own. And that was to move back to Europe. So I've been in the States for...

15 plus years or so along with my husband and we decided it was was time to get back closer to friends and family. So we moved to Portugal, which is where we are now, enjoying the sunshine

a nice living in

now, you know, I sort of swapped out the corporate side of my life and I have my own freelance consulting business where I help.

Companies like Pepsi, Mondelez others work out how to solve kind of tricky transformation behavior change challenges that they're dealing with. A lot of it obviously around transforming insights and analytics and some of the associated functions, but also like how to transform behavior change out in the market as well. So where they're dealing with particularly challenging shifting consumer or shopper behavior that they're looking to drive. yeah, leveraging.

All my experience but from a different seat now.

Jess (03:15)
How fun for you though. I love that you get to go to the other side. I don't know which one's the dark side, client side or the more consulting side, but probably depends on the day. Well, let's dig into that because there's one of the stories from your background that's particularly telling in terms of this idea of transformation. And Nick, we've talked about it. Our listeners really do crave inspiration

Nick (03:19)
It depends on the day, depends on the day exactly.

Jess (03:36)
leaders. And I think one of the best ways to inspire is to tell us a story.

And at the time that this story took place, it was at PepsiCo when the company was really looking at how to rebuild the global brand equity capability for the Pepsi brand itself, which is kind of a big deal.

So set the stage for us. What was the organizational context at the time? How did you kind of know that you had to rebuild this capability?

Nick (03:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, so we're going to take a trip back in time to 2015. almost exactly 10 years ago, probably a little under. So at the time I was running insights and analytics for our global beverages category. And because I think I was so frustrated with how things were operating, not just at PepsiCo Insights, but sort of within the industry, I had also started to dabble in

some sort of more transformative initiative. So I was working on moving to a more or more

testing approach. And so I was sort of like helping in my spare time, not that I had any spare time, but I was sort of like a freelancer for the global insights capabilities team as well. So kind of set that as context as to how I ended up running this task force on brand equity. So that was my context. At the same time, from a business perspective,

I think there

big factor, was

people remember the days when zero-based budgeting was like the big thing, like everybody was going through zero-based budgeting, and Pepsi was no exception from that perspective. we were, know, forensically being challenged and rightly challenged, right, on a lot of our spending and whether we could do it more efficiently. you know, unsurprisingly, one of the biggest individual line items in our budget was brand equity tracking.

And so

the global insights leadership team and the business leadership team, there was suddenly this big spotlight on brand equity tracking. People were spending millions of dollars every year on brand equity. For what? What's the purpose? Because most of

global business leaders, including our insights leaders, only really saw it sort of show up as a scorecard once or twice a year. They would see like,

Here's our brand equity scores up, down, up, down, blah, blah. It's not that they didn't believe in the concept of equity, but again, with that kind of context of the zero-based budgeting, suddenly they're like, well, is this good value for money? Are we really getting return from this? Are we really using this to its utmost? So there was this huge push from the center to...

Not only rethink equity, actually and this was what the scariest thing was to turn it off until we could prove the value of it, right? That was how Like such what the big situation we were in so from the center very Clear in one respect clear that we needed to investigate this we needed to challenge it and we were going to switch it off Until we could prove the value and prove what we were going to do with it however on the other side

the local teams did not feel like that at all, right? So you had this very, sort of clear push from the center, but the local teams didn't feel like that in the slightest. You for them, particularly in beverages, which was obviously my background,

beverages, a little bit unlike snacks to a certain extent, where Pepsi goes a lot more dominant in snacks, right? There was obviously a lot of smaller competitors, but it tended to be the big player. Obviously in beverages, we were often competing with Coca-Cola.

And so there was this bigger sense of a brand battle that we were fighting. so equity, even more, it wasn't just like conceptually important. It was like felt very, very important to people every single day. And for a lot of our, both our big markets and our small markets, but particularly for the small markets, equity tracking was really one of the few tracking studies that they ran every year. And so it provided this huge amount of information. Now, as we will discuss.

it's not necessarily always being used, but it gave people the feeling

had all of this sort of input coming in regularly. And so when you take the fact that from a local perspective, you had lots of beverages markets where equity felt very, very critical, and particularly in din with retailers, right? able to say we have the most loved brand or whatever it might be in the marketplace, or a much more loved brand that our share might suggest.

And then we think about some of the small markets for whom this was an incredible source of information, data, insight. You suddenly have this huge yawning gap between a central team that felt convicted that something needed to change and a local team that were like, why are we changing anything? And why have you suddenly turned off my equity study that I rely on and that I have all the historical data

Jess (08:12)
good.

Nick (08:18)
at this point, this is where I come back into the story, I guess. So as I said, I...

been leading a number of digitization transformation initiatives. And I don't know if I, I can't actually remember if I offered to run this task force, if I was sort of voluntold. It's a little blurry in my memory because I then spent 18 months working on it. And so it all sort of in the midst of time now. Either way, what I do remember is I was very passionate about.

the concept of equity. And I felt also that it was an important part of our understanding as a business, And the key drivers, it should be a key driver of how we make decisions as an organization. So I think I probably partly offered and then probably partly got sort of like sucked into the leadership role. And so I offered to run a task force to try and work out like, how do we move forward, right? How do we solve this seemingly kind of complex and untractable problem?

Jess (09:01)
Right, right.

Nick (09:13)
And I think the big thing that became clear to me very, quickly was first and

to find out what even do we mean by equity because we weren't even really clear on that. So if you think about it almost as sort of like the pyramid, even the definition of what we were talking about, we needed to be clear on. From a business outcome, from a global perspective and below, we needed to work out

what actually do we want to do with this information? so before we start, immediately, and this will talk probably I guess about my general learnings about transformation, immediately people go to solutions, right, because they're impatient to see change happen. So I would daily get emails from business leaders across the organization say, I've seen this, have you seen this? Let's look at this vendor, let's do this, let's do this, let's just go to here. And I'm like,

time out everybody before we do anything, we need to agree what we're talking about and we need to agree what we're going to use it for as an organization. And then just as importantly, sort of in the third layer, is we need to bring the markets along with us and they need to feel on board, need to feel ownership, they need to feel engaged with and part of this journey that we're going on. So essentially, we sort of split it down into those three parts, which I called sort of

conviction, clarity and co-ownership. So the conviction was all about we went and we talked to some internal stakeholders, but we also talked to lot of industry experts, we talked to Aaron Berg Bass, but we also talked to a lot of our agency partners and some of their thought leaders as well and just started to work out what do we as PepsiCo actually believe equity is? Like what is this thing that we're trying to measure in the first place? The second layer, clarity,

we went out and did a ton of stakeholder discussions. And again, I say all of this, it all sounds logical, but I pushed to make sure that we did this before anything else because again, from our leadership team, everyone was just like, we just want solutions, we just want answers. And I'm like, well, no, no. And it's always been a big, I guess, bugbear of mine is that we jump into action before we really know what we're trying to do. It's the sort of ready.

Jess (11:14)
Right.

Yeah.

Nick (11:24)
ready fire aim mentality and I'm like well we need to know what

aiming at before we start firing.

Jess (11:27)
No, mean, yeah.

Yeah, and come back to that problem and the gap and make sure people actually understand there is a gap, why that matters. And that conviction is such an important part of that journey. And I'm sure you had differing interactions across the markets. Like you said, some of the markets were just probably like, what happened to my track or turn it back on, where others might have been a little bit more forward looking. So what were some really specific challenges that you had?

Nick (11:31)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Well, I think

from the conviction standpoint, was the challenge. The biggest challenge was just proliferation of options and pathways that we could go down because equity is no big surprise to anybody. Nobody agrees really what equity is, right? It is a moving target. And so the biggest challenge is more we had to define from that what we wanted to do. The two biggest challenges really were

Clarity on what the business wanted. And this I think was most revealing for me was because from global leaders right the way down into our market teams, no one really knew what they wanted it for. And as you sort of said, I think, and as I talked about before, a lot of the markets were using it and felt good that they had it, but didn't really know what it was for. And in many cases it becomes sort of quite a bloated.

survey, right, because people were doing a survey, so we'll throw this and we'll throw this in, we'll throw this in. So I think the biggest challenge we faced, or the first big challenge really that we faced, was getting to clarity on, and again,

is there wasn't a single answer. What we clearly identified pretty quickly was there wasn't a single thing that people wanted. People wanted essentially

a strategic planning tool that was very deep, very rich, really about understanding the brand. But they also wanted something that was real time, that could tie between or connect in-market activity to equity to what they were seeing in the marketplace. Some people wanted to also use it to understand consumer behavior. So basically what we quickly realized is we needed to help the business understand that there were two or three different jobs that we were trying to do with this tool.

What we push to see if we could find a single solution, but the likelihood is very early on, we set expectations that potentially this would

multiple solutions in order to be able to answer really what the business needed. But I think it was revealing in those stakeholder interviews, it was revealing because I think what we pushed really hard on as a team is, don't tell me what you like about it, what you don't.

tell me what you want to use it for. And that was the big focus was to make it outcome driven as opposed to

methodology, whatever theoretical. was like, how, what decision would you want to take off of this? And then that was often the revealing question is that either people had six answers that were completely contradictory or they had no answer at all as to what they wanted to use it for. So I think that for me was an ultimately drove a big part of how we

answered the problem. And then I'd say I think the other big challenge was making the markets feel like they were part of the solution. So, the typical approach, not just Pepsi, but lots of big corporates is this is a central team, maybe there'll be input, there will be input from the markets, sure, but there's a central team, a task force, and they drive the thinking. And there's

You get speed and efficiency from that and sort of like, you know, drive to results. But what you sometimes don't really get then is a feeling that the markets feel like they've co-built it, that they co-owned it. And because this was such a political topic, right, particularly for some of the markets, what we did instead is created more of an iterative squad team. So we identified some champions in the markets.

Jess (15:22)
Sure.

Nick (15:30)
We made them part of a squad team. So we met twice a week. We had sprints. We really made sort of like the best of Agile working. Even though I led it, I drove it forward. Everybody in the team had a role. Everybody knew like, you're going to be focusing on the clarity part. You're going to be focusing on conviction part. You own the conversations that happen locally. So try to make it feel truly like a collaborative effort.

So that when we came out of it, wasn't a global solution being sold to the markets. It was a local solution being sold by both global and local people back into the local teams. And I think to me, while that definitely took a hell of a lot more work, right? Than it would have been if we just, if three of us in the center had just done it, I think it made a much bigger impact in terms

the sustainability of what we ultimately delivered in terms of a transformation because you had champions locally, had conviction locally, you had commitment locally, and it meant that it didn't just rely on two or three people and people really did feel that the solution that we developed was something that they had built, not that had been sort of imposed upon them.

Jess (16:43)
Yeah.

Sure. And I can imagine that when you had those advocates that were, you know, having those local conversations, that decisions that were made based upon that revised equity framework were probably applauded and they were proud to report that back to the global center, right? Here's what we were able to achieve in market because of this new work. So hopefully you saw a lot of that champion just happening by word of mouth, too.

Nick (17:08)
Yeah, and I think what was really nice was when, so ultimately what we built is we built a much more streamlined focused strategic planning version of equity, something that was much more stripped back. was focused on answering the sort of strategic planning, like where is my brand going? How is my brand perceived in order to be able to shape up communication strategy, innovation strategy, et cetera. But it was very purpose intended to do the sort of longer term strategic planning piece.

And then in parallel, what we did is kicked off a whole series of tests and learns to work out how to do the bit that honestly, many of us are still struggling with, which is the sort of connection between the thing that happened in the market, know, innovation, advertising, whatever it might be equity. And then what happens as a result, purchase behavior, short term, long term. So because we knew that

was no single global solution to that. And we also knew that.

that would require the obviously connections of datasets, we decided to hive that off into a separate stream to allow the markets to test and learn their way to find the right solution and that would work for them. All of this to say, think what I was most, what I was most proud of, to be honest, through that whole process is when we launched the sort of strategic planning module, one of the things that was really clear to us was that first wave of

results was going to be really critical to build trust, build confidence that we'd built a good solution. And as we know, data is data, but it's what the story you tell with the data, how you use the data that makes the biggest difference. So what I was really proud of is that the local teams, the local champions that worked on this, locally, they not only helped, say they were in Brazil,

champion from Brazil, she didn't just focus on making sure that the Brazil results were really good and really push the agency partner to make sure that they were excellent and useful. She then proactively worked with Argentina, with Mexico to make sure that they were also doing it. So what I, we never really even explicitly asked people to do that, but what I loved was the fact that we'd created this spirit where people were so proud of what they'd

build that not only were they helping their local teams, that they're actually going out to try and make sure, no, no, no, I want this to be a success in Argentina. I want this to be accessed in Chile. So pushing to actually help mentor and develop other people within the organization to be able to, and other agency partners to be able to apply these learnings and to make sure that it was a success. think to me, I mean, it was by no means perfect because it took much longer than it probably should have taken.

probably a lot more debate and back and forth, but I felt proud of the stickiness of what we had developed as a result of that and the sort collective buy-in that we had to what we built.

Jess (20:03)
Yeah. Well, the real question is, are you happy that you did volunteer for it? Because that's what I'm going to lean towards. I think that you did. I think you raised your hand.

Nick (20:10)
Yeah, yeah, of course I am. I mean, I remember at the time saying to my husband, what the hell have I signed up for? Because, you know, on top of a day job, I basically did another day job for 18 months plus, trying to find, build this solution with the team and landed into the market. But

I have done things differently? For sure. Knowing now what I know.

went to knowing what we came up with etc etc but I'm certainly very proud that I played that leadership role, that coach role to help us get to where we got to and you know probably was one of the most maybe I didn't realize this at the time but it probably one of the most transformative experiences for me as a leader understanding what it takes to actually help transformation happen.

really happen. Because I think it's very easy, and I've seen this a lot through my corporate career in particular, it's very easy to sort of talk generically about transformation, right? You know, put a process on a piece of paper and set hard metrics of productivity or whatever it might be. Actually making it happen though, I think that's what this experience probably taught me more than anything else, is just

Ultimately, it is about people. know that sounds really trite, but it is. It is about people. It's about any transformation internally within an organization, externally in the marketplace is about understanding behavior that you want to change and understanding, working out how you're going to motivate a group of people who, you cannot control them. So you have to try to influence them and shape them.

Jess (21:48)
Yeah.

Nick (21:49)
and encourage them, inspire them, whatever the right thing is to move in the direction that you want to move in. And I think what I realized through this is people throw the word around a lot, I've had transformation, I have changed, but I feel like very few people realize how difficult it is and how complex it is and how much it relies on the people part and how, to be totally honest, how little

we think about the people bit or we think about transformation. And I think that's often, again, thinking some of the examples I've seen in my career, that's often why transformation fails or sort of doesn't stick is because actually no one's really thought about the people at the end of it. The people are gonna have to live with that transformation.

Jess (22:33)
Yeah. Well, tell us more about that because you have, mean, I kind of joke that I feel like the word transformation is synonymous with Nick Graham because you just you do it everywhere you go. But there's so much more to it. So what are some of those characteristics of the people that have, you know, most fueled the successful transformations that you've been a part of? Like, what are some some things that we should be on the lookout for these you know, superheroes?

Nick (22:57)
Yeah, absolutely. And there are loads of them in all the organizations that I've worked with and worked for. I think fundamentally, as I said, it comes back, it comes down to understanding that transformation is about lots of things, but first and foremost, it's about people. And if you don't start with understanding where people are today, where you would like to get them to, and what that looks like.

So it's like, need to understand your start point, you also need to understand tangibly what does the future look like? Again, often people say like, a people's work life will be transformed. I'm like, okay, but what does that look like? Tangibly, what do you want the end point to look like for them? Like, how will they spend their day differently? You know, this process that takes all this time, how will it look in future? How will the interaction work? A lot of that stuff doesn't really get talked about, particularly for example, when you're building

new operating relationships, it's fine, this team over here will now do this work. How is it going to operate? How is it going to work? is it going to operate? then I think the greatest, while some people can do a great job of that, think what the really great transformers do is they then understand how to create that bridge for people. How am I going to get and enable people to get from A to B over time?

Yes, there are lots of triggers and context changes you can make to help people. I think often good transformers are great at the first part of the behavior change wheel. So they're very good at thinking about how do I make people aware of this? How do I make it sort of like conscious that change needs to happen? How do I sort of inspire them of the need for change? I think the really great transformers are good at the sort of the closing bit of the behavior change wheel, which means

What enablers do I need to be able to make this happen? What rewards do I need to put in place in order to be able to happen? So it's the hard graft of how do I actually enable this change to happen, facilitate this change and make it rewarding and sticky for people over time. That's the bit that I think great transformers do. But again, I think it starts with

clear human view of the from to, and then

a transformer who can really think about, again, the full behavior change wheel of how to facilitate enable that behavior. Because essentially that's what it is. And so all of that to say, think one of the things that, again, one of the things I think good transformers do is that they recognize that process is process tools, AI, digitization, whatever the buzzword happens to be at the time, is a great enabler, but isn't the only thing.

I think what great transformers realize is that none of that will ever be the answer. There's never a silver bullet in those things, but you can make it work for you, but it should be in service of the bigger problem, the behavior change problem that you're trying to create. So what I see often is, you know, now more than ever, people coming with,

because it's going to be transformative. And my first question is always,

What's the problem? What's the human problem we're trying to solve for here? You want to create more time. You want to create better insight. want like, what's the from to? And then let's work out is AI the answer? Because AI is not without lots of challenges and lots of problems in setup. So there is no magic bullet that's going to come along and solve all of this. So let's even work out, is that the right solution or is there actually a much easier, much more simple solution

you can apply that will still deliver?

the change that you're looking for.

Jess (26:33)
Yeah. Well, again, you're going back to this idea of kind of marinating in that problem and really understanding all the implications of the problem so that you can not rush to the solution. And our industry does feel a little bit in that mad dash kind of scenario right now, doesn't it? It feels like a lot of companies are just saying, I need to just check a box and say that AI is part of my process, for example.

Nick (26:38)
Yeah.

Totally.

yeah, no, I agree. I think what I see, I'm working on a number of projects at the moment, which are about building AI driven capability. what is very clear to me, so both on the corporate side and on the agency partner side, what is very clear to me is yes, AI could be transformative in lots of parts of our way, so working, but it requires a lot of hard work to set it up.

to be what we want it to be, right? It requires incredibly clean and structured data. It requires incredible training for the models, particularly GEN.AI models to be able to generate the quality of content, whatever that is, creative insights, whatever it might be. So it's not a fast and cheap and easy solution, quite the opposite. is a time consuming, it's a big investment to make this thing work. And what I see time and again is again, people coming with

I want to introduce AI because I believe it will change things, but not thinking through, what the change problem is. But then also, again, at the end of it, it's still going to be human insights leaders, human marketeers, human finance people, human decision makers are still going to be big parts of this. what role are they going to play? How will AI change decision making for them?

How will you influence and inspire them who will still be making the decision? Like all of that still needs to be taken into account. Even if you can take out this bit of the process and make it more efficient, there's a whole other bit of process around this and a whole other set of people that are still will be going to work every day and still doing great work. And you need to think about how this is going to interact and fit with all of that.

Jess (28:43)
Yeah, and I'm thinking about that behavior change wheel and the sort of back half of it has this enablement piece, but then there's got to be some amount of monitoring that once something is put into practice, is it working? Is it meeting the objectives? Is it solving the problem? If you go back to that impetus, and I just don't know that many organizations are there yet. It feels like we're still at that part of deploying and we need to plan for that future of tracking. Is it actually helping us achieve what we wanted it to?

Nick (29:14)
Right, exactly. I think obviously, you know, that to me starts with a really clear brief about what we're trying to solve for. And I think to your point, lot of times transformation projects get very sucked up in the what as opposed to the why. But if you have a really sharp and clear why to your point about marinating in the problem as frustrating and time sucking as that can feel for people when you're sort of kicking off a project.

being really clear on that and being able to say, okay, like the future will look like this and it will mean three extra, three fewer hours doing this. Okay, then I can measure that. can measure that. can design a system or a set of solutions and behavior changes that will enable that. And I can think about what we want to use those three extra hours to do. But if it's not as precise and as focused as that, you end up with sort of fluffy briefs that lead to

fluffy or not precise solutions and then it's very difficult to monitor if they worked or not. So I agree, think throughout this being really precise on the change that you want and then as you said, being able to monitor it and optimize it on the backend is part of this cycle and is more of a cycle than a linear process. This cycle of actually getting the change that you want.

Jess (30:34)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you can tell that a lot of things inspire you, Nick, but I'd love for you to kind of leave us with what keeps you so inspired day to day to be working in this industry and with your clients and colleagues, what does it for you?

Nick (30:46)
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I I still love this industry. I still think there's a huge role for insights and analytics leaders in industry, probably actually now more so than ever, given the complexity and volatility we find ourselves with. And honestly, you know, the need to nudge consumer and shopper behavior in the direction we want hasn't gone away. It doesn't matter what technology we throw at it. It's still...

the need for us and the need for a team that can help organizations make better decisions about how to do that, I think is more important than ever. I think what honestly what keeps me excited is seeing what people are playing around with at the edges of our industry, right? So one of the most exciting things I guess about my new life is I have a bit more time and capacity to be able to

be out seeing what people are doing at conferences, podcasts, webcasts about what they're doing at the edges of our business. So, you know, I'm doing some interesting work looking, you know, particularly at what AI is capable of. But again, trying to then think it, link it back to someone, you know, with my experience of corporate life, trying to get back to, this could potentially solve this problem. Or actually, this is just a, you know, shiny new tool without really any sort of problem to solve. So.

That to me is what's keeping me inspired and excited. But probably most of all, what's g-s me up more than anything else is seeing teams that I've worked with, people that I've mentored, making an impact in their organizations. Quite apart from the whole transformation thing, the thing that excites me most is seeing

impact from insights leaders affect business decisions. mean, there's nothing more inspiring than seeing a great insight leader persuade an organization to do something differently than what they'd already planned.

Jess (32:46)
Yeah, and helping create that next generation of leadership is something that's so fulfilling. So I love it. I love it. Well, we're going to turn to the final dig. This is all about you as a consumer. Feel free to pull off that professional hat for a moment. Although again, I don't think there's a great divide between the personal Nick and the professional Nick. There's no two versions of these answers. What's the last product or service you bought on impulse?

Nick (32:50)
Totally. Exactly.

Yeah.

No, no, they're pretty, pretty much the same.

Probably chocolate. I'm not sure what's chocolate. I mean, I am a big chocolate-holic. That's why my last job was probably perfect for me in lots of respects. I have zero resistance to that. It was probably, since we're here, was probably some sort of milk chocolate product, I think.

Jess (33:13)
Mm-hmm. There.

Thank

Yeah. Well, I was going to say it's either the best thing or quite dangerous for you to be working in chocolate category if you are a chocoholic. So maybe some distance from that. What's the category or brand that you could rationalize any price point for? You just have to have it in your life.

Nick (33:37)
for sure.

certainly, this is pretty true in the last few months since I spent a lot of money on is Apple. So basically anything Apple, despite ever more exorbitant prices that they choose to charge me for the thing that I'm using to speak to you on the wealth of Apple devices that are in front of me right now, even though I bulk it in.

really seriously, how many thousand dollars am I paying for this? There is something about the effortlessness of the experience, the fact that things, that the sort of function design experience of it, everything feels like it's intuitive, everything feels like it's in the place it's meant to be. And then honestly, you know, as now it's a system, right? So I've got an iPad, an iPhone, MacBook, and it all sort of syncs together, just.

Even tiny things like I'm not sure this is worth thousands of dollars, but it's a copy paste on my iPhone and straight into my into my MacBook Just that power is a stupid thing, but it feels like wow this feels transformative the amount of time and energy. is saving me

Jess (34:49)
and now you can't live without it. And that's their whole goal. So that's excellent. Good example.

Nick (34:53)
Totally. So I'm sure

I'm sure that they're very happy as well. Sure. Keeping keeping Tim Cook very happy.

Jess (34:56)
Yes.

And we all know brands have distinct personalities. What's a brand that you would date and a brand that you would marry? And it's up to you. They can be the same brand or they can be different.

Nick (35:08)
Yeah, think a brand that I would date but probably not marry would be like a brand like Nike, right? So a brand that is fun, adventurous, like empowering, pushing you to be better, know, just some, you know, particularly as I'm starting to try get back into running, like a brand that's like, yeah, you get out there, you do this, like I'm right behind you. But I think it would be pretty exhausting.

as a long time partner, be like, okay, can I just like lie in today and not have to go out and do anything? I like just not do it possibly today? But I think for a short period of time, you know, that's that is, and right now that feels exactly what I need. marry is a tricky one. I was thinking the other day.

Jess (35:39)
Right.

Just nodding. Yeah.

Nick (35:56)
I don't know if any brand I would really marry per se, although I guess in a way probably you are. We are all married to brands, right? Because we've got stuff that we've taken with us over a long period of time. I mean, certainly for we there are brands even before I joined Mondelez like Cadbury that I've always had like a huge emotional pull for, know, brands of my childhood. And so I think there are brands like that that are sort of unconsciously stuck with me and, you know.

being back in the UK a months ago, just seeing purple packaging immediately brings back all these memories. So I guess there's that sort of relationship for sure. By choosing to marry though, I would say, I dunno, I was thinking something like, something like Spotify in the sense that, you know, always knows, always knows everything, it knows about you, it always knows what you need, always kind of popping up with like the range of different things.

And there's always a sort of something to suit the different moods and modes of you, right? So it isn't, know, if you want dance music, it's got dance music. you know, sometimes you're like, I want podcasts because so think something that can something like that that can stimulate you across the range of emotions and moods that isn't just the, you know, Nike, just let's get out and do this.

Jess (37:11)
Yeah, exactly. And keeps pushing you, right? Keeps suggesting new and adventurous things. Well, that's a great brand to potentially marry. any last words from you, Nick? This has been such an inspiring conversation and I really appreciate it. Anything you want to leave us with?

Nick (37:16)
Exactly.

I mean, I would just say, you know, I think I'm really, as I said before, I'm really excited about where our industry is going. think insights, research, data analytics, I think there's, again, we've never had a more exciting opportunity. Having said that, to bring us got a full leap to the story of transformation. I do think we're at a bit of a crossroads where we need to decide.

With the transformation that will inevitably come with AI and technology and advanced analytics, et cetera, over the coming years, I do think we need to talk now about who do we want to be when we're grown up? Who do we want to be when we get through the other side of this transformation and revolution? And, you know, our lives will have changed. know, there will be things that, I mean, there's already things today that I'm delegating.

to chat GPT because it's much faster and cheaper and quicker and easier for it to do a first draft of something than it is for me to do it. So as we get through that revolution, our lives will have changed. What we do day to day will have changed. What we do versus what a machine does will have changed. And I think we need to not be scared of that. As human beings, we have always used tools to help us do our jobs better, make our lives easier. But I think we as an industry need to grab hold of it and say,

Okay, this is going to happen. Let's shape, therefore, the future of what our industry looks like ourselves proactively, as opposed to sort of waiting for this transformation and then seeing what's left behind. Because I think that could be a much more difficult position for us to be in rather than we seize the initiative now and sort of shape that future for ourselves.

Jess (39:02)
Yeah, well, that's great advice. Some really important things to think about. it's easy to sort of forget about that longer term planning of who you want to be when we grow up. But now is the time to figure that out. So well, thank you for being such an influential and inspiring leader in this industry. I truly mean it. I have a hard time whenever I interview you because I'm trying to keep up with all the thoughts in my head that I'm responding to what you're saying. But thank you so much for taking the time. We really, really appreciate your friendship.

Nick (39:13)
for sure.

Great to see you again, Jess. Thanks so