Jess Gaedeke (00:00)
Welcome to Dig Inspiration, a quick recap where we dig deeper into the story behind the story. In each bite-sized episode, I'll revisit key moments from our incredible guests, highlighting the most inspiring parts of the stories they share.

Today, we're dropping a quick reflection on some of the most memorable parts of my talk with Liz Ackerley, Senior Director of Strategic Insights and Analytics at Danone.

Liz's story was filled with so many great lessons about deploying their consumer love program, which is all about people centricity. And so many of our listeners are rolling out global programs in some fashion. So this is another great example to learn from. One of the pieces she shared was about how to get her cross-functional stakeholders really believing in the program. And she shared a story about someone from her supply team.

the opportunity to understand the emotional connection that's really inherent with some of their products. And in this case, this was about infant formula, which has a lot of emotion underpinning it. And hearing that directly from the consumer made this person think about their job very differently. It was such an aha moment, a little bit of a chills moment. Like as Liz said, you

This is part of the everyday job for insights. You understand that consumer story. But for this person in supply chain, it fundamentally changed their thinking. And that's the power of empathy, and that's the power of insights.

And when we talked about success criteria for the program, she spoke about socialization and engagement as a success metric, which I thought was really, really compelling.

when they launched the program, they did the memorable stuff like gave it an important brand name, Consumer Love, right? Who doesn't love that?

have t-shirts, they have pens, they have different swag, but there's also some competitive fun around this program. So quarterly, they're sharing how many Consumer Connects people are having across the organization. So you don't wanna be that leader, say in finance, who's at the bottom of the leaderboard and really sharing that for visibility and a little friendly competition can go a long way in rolling out a program like this.

And then finally, Liz talked about her view on mentoring. And I thought she did a really important framing for me about coaching versus mentoring. I really haven't thought of this

you get coaching when you need help, right? Sometimes when you've done something wrong or you need to get better at something, that's when you get coaching. But mentoring is about seeing the possibilities, connecting dots from a different perspective.

and mentors can be found in lots of places.

is something I'm really passionate about, so it really spoke to me and helped me reframe my thinking about coaching versus mentoring. So grateful for Liz's perspective.

Well, that's your Dig inspiration recap for the week. We would love to hear your takeaways and thoughts on the conversation. So please visit the link in the description and leave us a comment.