Growth, CFO Alliances & Brand Power: Inside Estée Lauder's AI Makeover

0:00I'm very Jerry Maguire, you know, show me the money. If you want to be successful in marketing, you definitely need to make sure that you have a CFO who understands that marketing is actually a gross engine. If you don't have the money, there's nothing you can do.

0:20Welcome to season three of Frontier CMO. Think about the last time you bought a fragrance or moisturizer. Did you wander the beauty counter? Scroll social media? Ask AI for help? If AI isn't part of your beauty routine yet, it probably will be soon. For nearly 80 years, the Estee Lauder companies have been home to some of the world's most iconic brands, from Clinique, MAC, Le Maire, Joe Malone, Tom Ford, and more. Today, the beauty giant is using AI to transform how consumers discover, shop for, and experience these brands. My guest today is Ode Gandon, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of Estee Lauder Companies.

0:58Just one year into the role, Ode is leading one of the most ambitious transformations in the company's history. From personalized shopping experiences to how its marketing teams operate in the AI era. Here's my conversation with Ode.

1:15Hey Ode. Hi Josh. You've been at Estee Lauder just a year. And I was really interested to get you on the pod now, a year in, because the CEO of Estee Lauder, although a long-term employee, he's only been the CEO for about a year and a half. And there was a change mandate, I think, that was announced. Your growth wasn't what your company wanted. Today, the last couple of quarters have gone very well, and you guys are sort of in strong growth again. Congratulations. But you came in, you're one year into what effectively seems like a change management role for a CMO at a time when the industry is going through this unbelievable change as well.

1:49I'd love to hear your thoughts on what that mandate has been, what your experience has been, some of the decisions you've had to make to navigate being a new CMO of this luxury company. Yes, so definitely a mandate on relooking at marketing overall. So as you mentioned, Stefan, our new CEO, who's been in the company, you know, for 14 years before he took over, launched a whole new program called Beauty Reimagine. And so which means that it was just not marketing, but overall thinking of the evolution and the transformation of the company. We have incredible brains and that's what consumers are interested in is the power of our brands and the power of our product innovation.

2:26And really kind of looking at, OK, what do we need to keep? What do we need to evolve? So we are getting faster, even more efficient, because that's what everybody is looking for as well. You know, efficiencies. There's two things I tackled straight away. The first one is we need to look at our organization. So we developed a new marketing operating model, which means that, you know, we really looked at who does what. Do we have the right skills? Do we need to revisit the job description? Who should be in charge of what? Who should be accountable for what? Absolutely globally. So from the global teams to the regional teams, to the market teams, to the local teams.

3:05And the other one was media. Obviously, you know, in a company like ours, media is always one of our biggest investments. So the decision I made was to come from a multitude of media agencies across the world to one. We moved to WPP and there were several reasons behind it. The first one is we needed to make sure that we would kind of level up the way we practice media. We get a lot more data driven, get a lot more real time. We talked about the dynamic of beauty. You always have some kind of new trends. It could be a hashtag happening on one of the platforms. And so we need to be able to understand very quickly what's going on and what type of assets work and where our brains are living on different kind of media and which one is working and not and that we couldn't do before.

3:50We were not really being able to react at the speed of the consumer and our environment. And so that was a very big decision because it was a decision made in my first year. It's usually not the type of decision I make in the first year when I take a new job. Usually you take your time to meet people, to listen and so on. But because, you know, when I arrived, the transformation has started. The company has already launched the beauty reimagined. So I had to make some decisions very quickly to be able to actually kind of integrate marketing into that transformation. How do you advocate in a company which is very much focused on we need to achieve this, this and this to actually get the investment required to actually build and grow the marketing function as well?

4:31I've always said, if you want to be successful in marketing, you definitely need to make sure that you have a CFO who understands that marketing is actually a growth engine. And for me, the best ally are the CFO, but the CFO, we need to spend time to make sure that they also understand what we do. I've always done this. I'm very Jerry Maguire, you know, show me the money at one point. If you don't have the money, there's nothing you can do. But so really making sure first that everybody understands it's not a cost, it's an investment. I know it can sound obvious, but it is not obvious, especially when companies have to make so much investment, but there's so many choices.

5:11There's so much pressure on operating margin and so on. But then to do that, you need to be extremely clear and communicate clearly on what is your plan, where do you want to invest, what are the KPI, and what is going to be the delivery on the business. And doing this tracking, like any other investment, is for me very key. And I think marketing is like everything else, you know, as it is a growth engine. If I want to invest a dollar, I need to be very clear on what I'm going to get back. Usually it sells, but it can also be nurturing the power of our brand because the brand has a value. You know, at the end of the day, the value of the company is in the value of its brands.

5:51So you have very different kind of items that you want to activate and to get a return on your investment. But I think getting that clarity and that agreement between the CFO and the marketing team on why are we investing there and what are we going to deliver is paramount to get anything done, but also to the success. Sometimes it's a bit too overlooked, I think. I'd agree. So we spoke about you being a change agent CMO, asked to help turn around or re-accelerate Estee Lauder overall. You need resources to be able to do that, right? And a CFO who is focused on and a CEO is focused on driving top-line growth and reducing bottom-line costs.

6:26So I was looking at your overall career, and I was just thinking about the role of the chief marketing officer and chief digital officer and some of these titles. And one of my favorite characters in history is the French diplomat, Talagran. For whatever reason, I did a history degree. I love the French Revolution and all that sort of stuff. And he was sort of the chief diplomat for Napoleon Bonaparte. And then for 50 years, he basically led the French state through his diplomacy. And it just struck me that you've navigated technology, you've navigated packaged goods in Nestle, you're navigating luxury, you're navigating the C-suite and the CFO and all these things.

7:00And this notion of diplomacy, when to push, when to negotiate, when to concede, feels like a skill that CMOs need in abundance, this ability to be the chief diplomatic officer within the C-suite overall. Does this make any sense? Do you agree with this? It does make a lot of sense. I love your reference to Talleyrand because I think he's one of the most interesting characters in French history, at least. I would refer back to what you said in the beginning on marketers being the connective tissue. And so you're absolutely right because we are the connective tissue in the company we also have a role of diplomacy i think it requires focus on what exactly do we want to really deliver and therefore what is very important to push for and then what is not that important and that's why you can sometimes as well compromise it also i think requires an ability to listen and usually very good marketers are the one who knows how to listen and hear what is being said but also what is not being said.

8:01You know, sometimes the unsaid in a meeting is actually what is going to provide you the best information. Understand in this kind of multi-functions, multi-layers organization, who is really going to make the decision. And then I think it's a question of courage. We sometimes, I think, don't talk enough about the importance of courage because it is not pure math marketing. There's more and more math because we have more and more data, but there's a lot of it which is you know not math and so when you feel like you have a clear path and a clear strategy then you also need to get the courage to kind of take everybody with you and say no no you know i i will carry it and i will deliver it and that's also what diplomacy is all about i think the the big diplomats were usually people who knew how to listen um how to build teams of people together who are influentials, but then have the courage sometimes to make big decisions on behalf of the whole team.

9:01Diplomacy sometimes gets given a bad name because somehow it's sort of like talking out of one side of your mouth. But actually, it's the art of everyone winning and not having to go to war, right? Yeah, exactly. I was feeling a little reflective and I was thinking about the state of marketing. So glass half full, glass half empty, midway through 2026. What's your feeling about the state of the marketing industry today, the role of the CMO overall? It's a fantastic question. I think marketing is having a sit back at the table. The transformation of digital platforms coming in, performance marketing kind of taking over, meant that we had an industry and marketers actually who kind of forgot the importance of all the fundamentals of marketing and how do you do brand building, how do you do brand differentiation and so on.

9:45A lot of the CMOs realize we've been too much into lower funnel performance marketing. We forgot everything about the brain power, the brain building. So there is a rediscovered kind of love and interest into marketing. And then, of course, in this craziness of the AI era coming up, first is going to mean that everybody is now even more going to be that they can do marketing because, you know, you take Banana Pro and you can do an ad very quickly. or suddenly you believe that you don't need the talent of a fantastic art director and a director to actually produce the film and so on and so forth.

10:22But that's something that we just need to navigate by reinforcing. It's not just having a set of pretty images you can do quickly with an AI tool. It's what is it conveying what my brain stands for? What is actually going visually to start to create an emotion on interest for a very specific target audience? Is it reinforcing my brand message? Is it going to actually deliver on my product benefits? And all this, you know, is not coming out of the ability to do easily an image because you have new AI tools. In terms of using AI, I was really struck by this thing you're doing with Jo Malone, right?

10:58So Jo Malone is fragrances, but you're using AI within the Jo Malone world. And I was just like kind of blown away by this. Tell everyone what you've been doing with Jo Malone here. Yes. So going back to what the brand stands for and what are some of the real kind of differentiating kind of proposition of Jomelon, it's always been about layering fragrances so you can really have your own very personal fragrance. In addition to this, it's very difficult to choose a fragrance when you can't be in a store. And so what we've done is we developed first the scent finder with Google that we have on our website, where instead of just answering a few questions, you can have a conversation to really nail what should be the right fragrance or fragrances for you.

11:40And that has been incredible because you have this intelligence supporting you into that journey of discovery. It's still new, but we've got great adoption. That for us is very key of how can we push the boundaries using technology to help consumers enter and enjoy this world, which is very intangible and very emotional. It's fun. And I think the transition point between using AI just for efficiency, just making the ways we've worked a little bit better, smarter, cheaper, to actually using AI for new creative expression and new business ideas. I went through it. My scent was recommended as a sort of Earl Grey, Bergamot and Citrus.

12:20Sounds quite nice. I like Earl Grey. It's great to see AI being used for creativity and new business. Should we expect more AI innovations across your brands from this German loan experience and more? Absolutely. Right now, the focus is how we can finally deliver on the long promise of personalization. personalization. And the second thing is how we are going to increase all the kind of new experiences we can provide to our consumers, how we can bring the product to life, how we can help you to make sure you get the right skincare routine, because we're going to be able to understand a lot more about you and we're going to be able to direct you a lot more on what product to use, how to use them.

13:03So your businesses right now are dealing high-end luxury, prestige. You've also been experimenting with TikTok shop. You've experimented with YouTube shorts. You've experimented on Instagram. Just talk about what you're learning about sort of the next generation of consumers as they use scaled platforms, but building luxury brands within them. There's some sort of tension there. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yes, there's definitely tension there. First, I think it's reminding ourselves we are here to delight and serve the consumer. So we We need to be where consumers are now shopping. Most of our history, we were in department store only.

13:40We just need to be everywhere the consumers are. Department stores, specialty stores, you know, like Ulta and Sephora, and of course, all the different online stores. What we're learning is, of course, that the difference in generations, obviously of the youth, to go and discover online a lot through creators, by the way. Huge compared to older generation, but the older generation on beauty, they're catching up very quickly. And so it means that, again, it's complexifying the role of a marketer because you still need the broad reach and you still need to be able to do the big kind of brand storytelling and so on.

14:13You also need to be able to get, you know, with a lot of the creators and influencers because they're bringing the brand closer to the audience. And of course, then we link it to commerce because at the end of the day, all the brands can be there. You can discover and buy a brand in two clicks. We signed a deal a year ago with Shopify because we also want to make sure that the shopping experience is as easy and as simple as possible. You're running a portfolio of 20 products, the Mac and Clinique and The Ordinary and the Estee Lauder brand, La Mer. These are high end, wonderful brands. Can you describe or talk about how do you actually spark creativity and sharing across your organization and not just have it all stay within each individual business unit, as it were?

15:01It's a great question because that's exactly one of the key focus we had when we did our new marketing model. We didn't have enough cross-exchange and learning and intelligence up to now. And so one of the big thing with change is the global kind of experts. So let's talk consumer intelligence. The global team who is doing consumer intelligence also work directly with all our key markets. They are basically one team. So you can be sitting as consumer agents in the UK or in China and you have the global kind of expert team, but they're actually all one team. So they can really first agree on what is important for a company or for a brand, you know, let's say for Estee Lauder, to learn and to tackle, you know, as a learning agenda.

15:45So they all focus on a very specific subject and they kind of gather the learning and intelligence together quickly. So at least everybody has the same level of information. And as soon as you do this, you know, it's a lot easier because everybody has a stake in it. Everybody is part of the same kind of team. You create a real community that we didn't have at that level in the past. It's so interesting you use the word community there. It's so apparent that for all the technology that we have at our fingertips, it's the people you work with. It's the insights they generate and that sense of coming together to solve common problems and being there for each other, which honestly drives the largest breakthroughs.

16:23And I think that's the only way today you can be a very performing marketing organization is by relying on different communities who are going to become the expert and exchange with each other so they can continue to evolve fast. So something you spoke about to me at Cannes, you fed 80 years worth of Estee Lauder iconography and advertising and materials into AI just to see what it would find out. And I love the notion of instead of just thinking about what we're doing in the future, you look to the past and ask AI to guide you. You went through this exercise. What did it tell you? And did it just reinforce what you already knew?

16:59Did it find things that you weren't aware of? How did this all play out? It reinforced a lot of what we knew sometimes by instinct more than really do it on purpose. It was very interesting because we fed the AI with the history of some of our brands. And so when I mean the history can be editorial, of course, campaigns, different packaging, and so on and so forth. And we let the AI run it and start to make some conclusions of what is the framework. for some of these products will have been relevant across decades and generations. So that was the objective. Let's take some of our iconic products.

17:37I understand why have they been able to stay iconic, you know, through different generations. When you look at it, nothing is that surprising. It's very surprising that an AI model can do it very fast and so well. But I think it suddenly kind of gave us a framework which provides more intent for us on, you know, when you want, you know, La Mer is going to be very different, for example, from a matte lipstick, because La Mer, of course, has a community. You have devoted users of La Mer, but it's also extremely high-end. It's expensive. So you build a community, but it will be very different from a matte lipstick, for example.

18:12And that has given us this framework to show us that you have a framework, there's five or six points. You don't need to tick the five or six points to be successful, but you need to be extremely choiceful on how you want to do your marketing. The fact that AI was able to do this was a big surprise. We didn't anticipate to get a result which was so sound on the analysis of the brand power, but also the marketing kind of power to make this product iconic. Most companies aren't 80 years old. You did this whole exercise, you used AI to understand all these brands going back decades and decades of data, effectively.

18:48Are there any macro insights from a specific brand or overall which could help the rest of us learn what elements actually contribute to a long-lasting, successful brand over time? Yes. What has been interesting for us, for example, was how some of our products became iconic. Like, for example, MAC. It was the Ruby Woo lipstick, which, Josh, you may not know, but it's an iconic red lipstick. Okay. And we actually never did the storytelling. We fully let the communities take it and make it their own and tell the stories. And this has been consistent over decades. So it's not recent. You know, we could believe, oh yeah, of course, it's obvious because, you know, everybody's doing this with social media.

19:33We've done it for the past 30 years. And so typically, you know, Ruby Woo Mac, full-on community and letting the storytelling by the consumers. A product like La Mer, it really has been fully about La Mer telling its story because it's a very specific product with a very specific research and patent. And so it was very important for us to be able to carry that message because it's very technical. It's a product which was developed by a researcher who was working for the NASA. So, you know, it's not an easy one to understand. And so it's basically at the opposite spectrum of each other. And they still are iconic after a multitude of decades.

20:11Yeah, it's super interesting. I love that. So the earliest communities, the Mac Ruby Red before social media, it was what everyone was talking about on their lips, right? Exactly. Love it. Absolutely. I want to ask you one more question about your career. I like this quote I heard that you gave, just because you don't fit doesn't mean you don't belong. Can you just expand on that and just talk a little bit about your experience in the C-suite? Yeah, no, of course, I've always adored my job. I've always felt like I've been given amazing opportunities. I've learned so much. And I felt that sometime because I was a woman, I could be dismissed pretty quickly.

20:50So I felt that sometime I had to kind of work the extra mile, but also push a bit more to be able to even be heard. People are going to dismiss you, then prove them wrong or just don't pay attention as well. You can decide not to pay attention to all the noise. Trust yourself. Makes sense. I agree. I love it. Something else I learned, this blew my mind. I was watching the World Cup. I was noticing all the players with their pink boots. And I was just researching using Gemini and Google search to identify why they're all wearing pink boots. And I went on this little explority quest of discovery.

21:23And I uncovered that breast cancer pink ribbon was designed and invented by Estee Lauder. Yes. Blew my mind. Yeah. 1993. It's something which is extremely important in the company, very dear to our hearts. It was initiated by Evelyn Lauder, and the company has been doing an incredible work. Thanks to this foundation, we finally talked about breast cancer, which was not something which was talked about in the past because, you know, it's very personal, obviously. We have incredible kind of research funds and teams around the world. They discovered and developed new medicines, new treatments. We also support families because, of course, when you have some women suffering from breast cancer, it impacts the whole family.

22:10It impacts on the financials as well, of course. And so it's not just research and medicine, but it's also supporting the patients and the families. And so it's very important. So now when you're going to see a small ribbon, you can think of these still order companies. It's one of the iconic things of the last 35, 40 years. It's a truly remarkable thing. And it's great. You've had a long career across these different disciplines, categories. What do you think has been the single most positive thing you've learned, developed, your skill that has actually allowed you to be successful as a marketer across this career journey you've been on?

22:46I think it's a mixture of curiosity and hard work. In life, you need to be curious, especially right now, because it's changing so fast. If you're not, you can be left a bit pretty quickly. But I think very often we don't talk enough about the importance of hard work. It's not very sexy, but that's how you develop. That's how you usually go sometimes faster than your peers is because you put more effort into it. I always say, you know, I really believe on success is 10 % talent and 90 % hard work. I'm a big believer of this because I think that's the only way you actually learn and you develop.

23:24I love the curiosity of the wonder of the world, all the possibilities, but marrying that to you've got to work very hard, put your shift in and more to really to capture that. I think it's a great message for a CMO today and for the next 50 years. Thank you. Thank you. So, Ode, new season of Frontier CMO, season three. I'm going to end each episode doing what I'm calling the CMO download. Rapid fire, I'm going to ask you some questions, get a little flavor. Okay, ready? Ready. All right. So, Ode, what was the last thing that you read? Strangers by Belle Burden. A lot of people are talking about this book.

24:04It's not very creative on my part. Incredible book. What's it about? And did you read it on a Kindle, on a device, or the actual physical copy? So I read it on a Kindle. it's a story of a woman who talks about her marriage basically ending very interesting very interesting amazingly well written sounds great i'm going to avoid giving it to my wife um okay what's the last thing you listened to olivia dean one thing i didn't realize even though i've seen her in the past is how charismatic and elegant she is which comes back to the importance of actually sometimes getting out of a digital world where I was listening to her on my YouTube channel and then suddenly seeing her live on stage.

24:49What's the last YouTube video you watched? There's a creator on YouTube I really like and I'm sorry I may butcher her name because she has a Korean name. Ji-yoon Dohner. I adore her content. She is a mother, a model. She She lives between Singapore and Seoul. And she has these videos where she talks about her life. They're always very nice and soothing. And she talks about her cooking and her travel, her family. Food is always at the heart of everything she does. So I absolutely adore watching her videos. She sounds great. I'm going to check her out and give her a follow. What's the last thing you searched for?

25:31Well, watching in Cape Cod. I'm preparing my summer holidays. And I've always dreamt of going to whale watching and I discovered that it's actually happening in August. So that's my search. That sounds awesome. Send a picture. What's the last thing AI helped you solve? I had to do an opening for a meeting and my opening notes, I developed them on AI. It's just incredible and it knows me better and better. So it's getting better and better every time. Makes sense. Last one. Who are you listening to for advice or who do you listen to for advice? My kids, I have two Gen Z. I love having the point of views.