A conversation with Doug Martin and William White
When two marketing leaders from different sides of the retail ecosystem come together, the result is a masterclass in modern brand building, partnership strategy, and the evolving nature of the marketing funnel. Doug Martin, CMO of General Mills, and William White, CMO of Walmart, recently joined Marketers That Matter® to discuss how they’re navigating today’s evolving marketing landscape while maintaining strong brand foundations.
Martin oversees global marketing strategy at General Mills, where he leads brand building efforts for a house of brands that reaches more than 90% of U.S. households. With 20 years at General Mills, he’s witnessed the evolution from traditional brand marketing to today’s highly complex, tech-driven environment.
White has served as Walmart’s CMO for five years, overseeing customer insights and marketing strategies for the retail giant. His role focuses on driving demand, capturing demand, building customer loyalty, and modernizing the Walmart brand as a digital-first destination. Before Walmart, he spent nearly a decade at Coca-Cola and seven years at Target.
Together, Martin and White offer insights into how legacy brands are adapting to new realities while maintaining the fundamentals that made them so successful.
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What is brand and why are brands so powerful in today’s world?
Doug Martin: We all know that every single day every consumer is inundated with more and more messaging, and our ability to leverage technology to create more personalized messaging goes up all the time. A brand is really nothing more than a collection and grouping of thoughts that live somewhere in your brain that you can interact with at a faster-than-logical level. What are the experiences you’ve had over time with Cheerios? That answer is going to be beyond that it’s a circular, oat-based, crispy cereal. It’s going to be about memories you had as a child. It’s going to be the fact that you fed it to your child as a first finger food. It’s going to be the way that we’ve shown up in the world over time. And those things are, in many ways, the best and only insulation against the onslaught of messaging consumers are facing every day.
William White: That’s a great way to capture it. Marketers often say, “a brand is a promise.” A powerful brand, then, is keeping that promise, and that promise kept makes the brand powerful. And to Doug’s point, the brand is the intangible sum of all of a product’s attributes – everything someone thinks about your offering, whether that’s factual or not. And when someone thinks about the brand above and beyond the functional, you’ve created a powerful brand. And that leads to a level of engagement, loyalty, and trust, and it ultimately drives customer lifetime value.
How does brand building differ today from 20 years ago?
William White: The way someone interacts with a brand today is different than it was when Doug and I started out, and I think there is a greater level of transparency in all the inner workings of a company. Really understanding the purpose and values of a company has always been important for how people interact and get to know brands. But there’s a heightened level of awareness and understanding that customers have today. We certainly have more touchpoints to reach people. Brands can be amplified or brought down very quickly in a world of social media and cancel culture. So, it’s really important for brands to truly live their purpose and values, stay true to that, and stay authentic.
Doug Martin: When I started at General Mills, the playbook was literally to have one clear and concise message, and ensure that the same message was showing up everywhere. And that was possible in that world. Consistency obviously is still really important for brands, but that level of consistency is no longer helpful. A brand that just says one thing over and over again is a brand that is incredibly ignorable.
The level of control has also changed dramatically. We are so much more aware now that a healthy brand needs to have people talking about it, and that wasn’t really the point of view 20 years ago. Again, it was more unidirectional: What are we going to say to people?
We’re going to have to get continuously more and more comfortable with other people talking on our behalf. The way to get comfortable with that is to be incredibly clear about what you stand for and what your values are. Then you have some flexibility around those edges that are open to interpretation, and for the consumer to decide. It used to be we created a message. Now, we’re trying to create a movement. We’re inviting people in on behalf of the brand.
Should companies still invest in branding and classic brand strategy versus other areas of marketing?
Doug Martin: You have to invest, because, no matter what, even in a world where you are inviting a lot of people to talk about your brands, you still don’t know what is going to drive the conversation. There’s an awareness that we don’t know at all. But you want to amplify the messages that are working. So even in a totally social-driven world, you want to use some media to amplify that which is working.
I think the clarity of your brand is more important than ever in a world where you may be giving up control. If you are going to have an AI model creating some of your lower-complexity assets, that AI model needs to understand the look, feel, and tone of the brand. It is forcing you to codify things that might have lived in a collective team’s consciousness before, but never really been on paper.
William White: Often we talk about this question of “Are we investing in brands relative to performance marketing?” Over the last few years that has been a conversation in terms of how companies and brands think about going to market, and we continue to see time and again that performance marketing alone only goes so far. Many DTC companies start off in that space. As they grow, they realize there’s a real brand-building component to be done. We see performance marketing works harder when you have a brand level sitting above it; they work together in concert.
How do General Mills and Walmart work together?
Doug Martin: I certainly think of myself as a B2C marketer. The truth is we’re a B2B2C value chain. And, so, the first thing that’s important when you come to General Mills and learn about building brands is the importance of deeply understanding the consumer. What do you do for this consumer where you live in their life? How do you deliver value, solve problems, and deliver joy? But very quickly after that you have to realize that none of that matters if you’re not also understanding the retailer and providing value to them as well. What does your role in the retailer’s plan look like? And that’s critical to how we go to market.
William White: Walmart is kind of a branded house of brands. It’s important for us to build a meaningful brand that keeps people coming back. But we have to have the brands that our customers want and that are integral to their lives. And, of course, General Mills makes so many of those and has created so many of those brands. We have to work together because we need their products on our shelves because our customers are looking for that.
We’ve always been a sales channel but we’re increasingly also a media channel for General Mills, which is interesting as we’ve continued to grow and evolve our business in our retail media network. General Mills is certainly a big client. But we think about the moments that matter for our customers, and how our brands come to life, and while so many General Mills brands are everyday moments and are part of a regular weekly shop, there are really meaningful moments where we on the marketing side partner even deeper.
Back-to-school is a great example as families are getting ready to send their kids back to school, and all that that entails, like packing lunches. We come together in important ways. But we also come together in ways to support communities. When it comes to General Mills Box Tops for Education, which has been a big part of the General Mills story for some time, we’ve been proud partners on that and how it comes to life.
What’s your approach to the collapsing market funnel and how has it impacted your team structure?
William White: This is something we’ve really focused on at Walmart for the last five or so years. The upper funnel powers the lower funnel, so we invest in building awareness and creating demand to drive conversion. But we’re in a world where that funnel can collapse completely — whether it’s one-click purchases from a connected TV or native checkout within social platforms. All that creator-influencer activity that drives brand reappraisal is shoppable in the moment. The journey from inspiration to purchase is collapsed. We’re all in on that, and we have seen great success in our ability to shorten that distance between inspiration and purchase.
This shift has fundamentally changed our team structure. Creative and media have been blending more as disciplines, so we have a dedicated social commerce team that’s highly creative, analytical, and curious. They work seamlessly across our broader media, retail media, and creative teams. The ideas we generate can come from anywhere, but the execution needs to move at the speed our customers expect.
Doug Martin: Technology is showing us how false our firmly held beliefs were. We all used to pretend we could perfectly orchestrate a consumer journey, but at General Mills we operate in high-frequency, low-involvement categories so that was probably never true. But take a high-consideration, high-research category like buying a car. You used to think someone would say, “I’m having a baby; I need a four-door car” and be thinking about safety. But if they hadn’t been exposed to Volvo advertising for five years before that moment, you’ve lost before you begin. That upper funnel was always creating baseline understanding. We were kidding ourselves about how precise we were with the journey.
This complexity means we need deep experts, not people who know a little about everything. But those experts must work collaboratively. The retail media expert sitting next to the person coordinating the plan, next to analytics, next to insights. People who understand their area deeply but can operate within the broader ecosystem are invaluable.
Do you expect your marketers to be fluent in AI and what are you seeing with the use of AI in your marketing teams?
Doug Martin: People who are not curious enough to be using AI in their own lives, and to be asking questions about how they could use it at work are not positioned well for success. We don’t expect everyone to be an expert, but we do expect everyone to be asking questions and getting smarter.
William White: We’re using AI across the entire company. Every function is leveraging AI to a big degree today, specifically within marketing. We think about it in terms of hyper-personalized messaging and enhanced targeting capabilities that help us drive a greater level of relevancy, and reduce waste. And we’re optimizing a lot of the investments that we’re making, particularly in the performance channels. AI is powering all of that today.
Doug Martin: There’s a long way to go on this journey, of course, but we’re thinking about areas where we can gain efficiency in specialized use cases. For example, what if you could start a creative brief with a pre-populated set of business problems and decide if those are the right business problems? We’re thinking about it in a way to keep up with the demands of this ecosystem. How are we going to create the amount of content that we need to meet all these distinct consumer needs and distinct channel needs?
And then there’s that optimization point. It’s clear we’re going to want to have a human in the loop. But do I need to go talk to a brand manager and say, “Is this particular Instagram execution working harder than this particular TikTok execution?” Or are we just going to be shifting those dollars seamlessly as we’re tracking the right KPIs? Those are the kinds of things that people feel very comfortable with. Assets like the Pillsbury Doughboy, who is incredibly evocative and immediately brings brand awareness, have been traditionally very expensive and time consuming to use because he’s not real, just like Betty Crocker. But now, with AI, our speed to create content with the Doughboy can be like nothing we’ve done before.
Will AI replace marketing jobs?
Doug Martin: In the short term we are entirely focused on AI moving people to the part of their jobs that they want to work on and less on the parts of the jobs that are more rote and better performed by a machine.
William White: The line that is often used is “It’s not the AI that will replace jobs, but the people using AI who will replace the jobs of the people who aren’t.” I think that’s very true. Today, it is allowing our people to work on different things and solve other problems faster and more efficiently. It’s a great tool to help bolster and enhance the different functions within our business today.
What career advice would you give based on your own pivots and learnings?
Doug Martin: I came to General Mills about 20 years ago. The first 16 years I was in our brand management function, which was both our general management function and responsible for marketing. I would always lean a bit more toward the marketing side, but I liked not having to make that declaration. I got to a point in my career where I sat down with a boss, and he said, “Listen, now’s the time to say, are you trying to continue up the general management part of this company, or do you want to take aim at more of a CMO role and specialize?” I had to spend time thinking about it because I didn’t want to shut off any paths, but I had to be honest with myself and say, “This is the part of the job I get more excited about.” I made that decision and I’m glad I did.
William White: I’ve worked for four companies over 27 years, moving about a thousand miles each time for big pivots. But what I think is more compelling are the couple of times where I did not take a new job outside the company. I had offers when I was at Coke and Target but chose to stay both times. Those moves not made were probably my best career decisions. When I weighed the pros and cons, I realized there was still more to learn and great opportunity ahead. Those moments caused me to double down on curiosity and extract everything I could from my current role. I don’t think I’d be where I am today if I had made those moves.
What’s your best advice for marketers?
Doug Martin: One word: curiosity. Nothing can replace or coach people into being curious who aren’t. Show that curiosity and get involved and learn.
William White: Buy your Cheerios at Walmart.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview by Kathy Hollenhorst, Marketers That Matter® Advisor & Chief Community Officer
About the Visionaries
Doug Martin, CMO, General Mills
Doug Martin is the chief marketing officer at General Mills, where he leads the company’s global marketing strategy with a focus on building iconic brands through remarkable consumer experiences. Since joining General Mills in 2006, Martin has held key leadership roles across the company’s snacks, cereal and dairy businesses, where he launched winning innovation including Nature Valley Protein and Oui by Yoplait. Before his time at General Mills, Martin held leadership roles at Lord & Taylor, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Gap, Inc. Martin holds a bachelor of science in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a master of business administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
William White, CMO, Walmart
As the Chief Marketing Officer at Walmart, William White oversees customer insights and a full spectrum of marketing strategies, planning, and customer experiences. He and his team focus on driving demand, building customer loyalty, and strengthening the Walmart brand by positioning Walmart as a digital-first destination. William has 25 years of experience in customer and commercial leadership, operating at scale in global CPG and retail organizations. Before Walmart, William held marketing leadership roles at Target and Coca-Cola. In 2023, Forbes named William the world’s most influential CMO. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy and an MBA in Marketing, both from Duke University.
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