How Newell CMO Uses AI to Win Over Agents and Human Consumers Alike

Expanding Access to Data

Before tapping into technology transformation, the company had to refocus its data efforts, centralizing and democratizing insights for marketers so they could more easily make decisions.

"For a while, we were very fragmented — data was in silos, and it wasn't very accessible. Now we've made it much more at the fingertips of a brand marketer," Hammitt tells CGT.

Newell now uses an AI-enabled platform called iHub that allows marketers to run queries in the same way someone would use ChatGPT or Gemini. The AI pulls from the company's repository of consumer research and presents learnings based on that information. Newell also has a similar portal for its media assets to formulate campaigns and promos.

"It really kind of operationalizes [marketers] and speeds up the workflow, saving countless internal back-and-forth questioning," he says.

At the core is data that can elevate the consumer experience. As such, Hammitt has kept tabs on what consumers are getting excited about by using a sentiment engine to scrape social feeds and other channels.

"We're constantly managing and monitoring our ratings and reviews to understand how they're feeling about our products and our brands that we put out in the marketplace," says Hammitt. 

These data points are then paired with internal processes and AI technologies to help inform teams how they can best deploy media, launch new or revised products and ensure that the organization is showing up in the right forums to really influence shoppers and rank higher on AI answer engines.

"If we find out that something is more exciting versus less, we can change the kind of search terms and occasions that we go after," says Hammitt. "We can adjust some of the creative that we're doing on the fly to be able to address those things. All of that is how we react to data in the moment."

Making Sense of Colliding Voices

Hammitt says the organization has had to face the challenge of what it calls "a second set of consumers." Because AI agents are playing a larger role in guiding consumers on their shopping journey, Newell has to have two separate strategies.

The machines (the AI) are not emotional like consumers, he explains. They think only rationally and are data-dependent. Newell marketers have had to understand the best way to work with them — how they think and act, which Hammitt says is 100% different than the end-consumer who will ultimately buy the product. 

"The biggest learning for me was to take a step back and listen and understand those businesses well and then figure out what are the areas where we can, as a kind of center of excellence, drive value," said Hammitt.

What matters most is the consistency of the messaging. LLMs value what a brand stands for and what it talks about in different spaces. If done correctly, it has a compounding effect and the AI ranks the company as a credible source, he says. 

Meanwhile, if the message is all over the place, it discounts the organization because it can't rank it for having the best answer for whichever question is being asked.  

Installing AI-Enabled Efficiencies

As part of Newell's AI-enabled transformation, Quantum Leap, Hammitt has been leading several approaches to technology implementation. 

Overall, the company is embedding AI within every function and sub-function, using it in concept development and validation and content creation within its marketing business area.

"We have a number of folks that we call 'AI navigators' that are function-specific folks who also have a desire and a willingness to dive into the AI space. We've been training them and getting them fully up to speed on the latest and greatest within AI and having them then think through their unique perspectives."

Also: Newell says internal investment is key to digital intelligence growth

Rather than taking the more manual approach to innovation, Hammitt is helping drive a more iterative approach that automates how Newell can "lean into consumer insights, develop and build great concepts, and validate those concepts."

For content creation, the company is using a custom agent created with the help of tech company CommerceIQ tool to automate and identify content optimization opportunities. And by partnering with Adobe, Newell's marketers can automatically figure out how to take a base idea or concept and variant it out to all different sizes, languages and customer requirements.

This then feeds into Newell's media endeavors, through which the company looks to engage with consumers with more enhanced and contextual deployments rather than relying on the more traditional "search-word approach." Through new AI-enabled automations, the company can capture the intent of the consumer when they write a paragraph about what they're looking for.

It's a way to take a "non-strategic" job off someone's plate so they can focus more on questions like "how do we grow next," says Hammitt, adding that the previous content- and asset-generation process took weeks and months, but now designers can quickly move the needle on 15 different formats. 

Collaboration & Consumer Experience 

A key part of this AI initiative is creating cross-efficiencies for the marketing business. 

"I have a media function, I have an insights function, I have an e-comm function, I have a design function," says Hammitt, adding that in the past, processes within these would include self-contained work streams.

"But because of the technologies and the way we're no longer doing linear processes, it doesn't make sense to have these groups all siloed and not engaging with each other," he says.

By working in a much more collapsible way, Hammitt says Newell's associates can be much more nimble and agile, engaging with each other on a more frequent basis to "ensure some of the ideas that somebody might have in design are brought into the account earlier on in the equation so it makes their lives infinitely easier and quicker in the outcome."

And it all comes back to the consumer, because if an organization can't understand what their dreams and pain points are, then it can't tailor its products and solutions toward them, he says. 

"A lot of times we are a little bit mismatched there," says Hammitt. "Sometimes we have commercial innovation opportunities that come up that are pretty quick turnarounds, and you have to be realistic about how to maximize them, but doing it in a way that we can actually deliver the outcome that we want."

This is why the company has been so focused on linking product and message as close together as possible so that consumer insights bring the proposition to life, and Newell gets consumers to feel it in the moment rather than just checking off an item on the agenda.