Hall of Fame Profile: Matthew Wheeler, Kimberly-Clark
Matthew Wheeler has built his career at the intersection of shopper understanding, retail evolution, data, technology and commercial strategy. Together they represent a space defined by rapid change, he acknowledges, but one that fuels his passion to create clearer connections between shopper behavior, customer needs and brand priorities.
As the shopper insights lead for digital commerce at Kimberly-Clark, Wheeler is seizing the opportunity to help the organization make sense of that change in a way that leads to better decisions. It’s an exciting time to sit where he does, recognizing that the scope of his work will continue to expand as the marketplace becomes more digital, more fragmented and more influenced by emerging technologies.
“In many ways,” he says, “I hope the next chapter of my career builds naturally on what I’m doing today: helping translate complexity into clarity, connecting insights to action, and bringing teams together around the shopper and the customer.”
The Early Years
Wheeler grew up in a quiet suburb just north of Chicago, and his upbringing was grounded and shaped by hard work. His parents modeled perseverance and responsibility early on, teaching him the dignity of hard work through their blue-collar jobs while raising his much younger brother and sister.
Wheeler describes his childhood self as active and curious. He dived into different sports and shared a love of music with his father and grandfather. It was with music that he first learned the joy and importance of listening closely, appreciating different styles and finding meaning in the details — lessons that translate to his work today.
Like many Midwesterners, his first jobs consisted of mowing lawns and shoveling snow. In seventh grade, Wheeler started working at a local country club as a caddie. He continued there through high school and while on breaks during his college years at Winona State University, holding roles of increasing responsibility and ultimately becoming a caddie master.
The experience was formative, he says, because it taught him how to build and maintain relationships and trust, communicate with many different kinds of people, and carry important life lessons as he moved into his first professional role.
Career Development
With a degree in marketing and economics, Wheeler made his first career stop at The Coca-Cola Co., where he spent six years in merchandising, sales and category management roles, building a strong commercial foundation and focusing on the importance of execution, customer relationships and category-level thinking.
“Those experiences were important because they taught me that the best work often happens when manufacturers and retailers are aligned around a shared view of the shopper and the category,” he says. “I learned a lot about listening, building trust and bringing objective thinking into commercial conversations.”
From there, he moved into insights and analytics work, spending nearly nine years with Nielsen in client leadership roles supporting Kraft Foods and later Wrigley. Looking back, he credits this time with helping deepen his capabilities in syndicated data, shopper analysis, category management and executive-level storytelling.
In mid-2009, Wheeler joined IRI, now Circana, where he led a North America client insights team supporting the Mars-Wrigley confectionery business. He is most proud of the work he and his teams did at both companies to make data and insights more accessible, practical and actionable for client organizations.
“Whether supporting customer teams, category leaders, brand teams or senior executives, the goal was always to help people see the business more clearly and make better decisions,” he says. “Those roles helped shape my belief that insights are most valuable when they move beyond reporting and become part of how teams operate.”
Wheeler’s next three stops were at startup firms. He spent nearly two years as the head of sales at VideoMining before joining Foresight ROI in late 2014 to lead the company’s analytics efforts. As part of a smaller, entrepreneurial organization that was growing quickly, he was instrumental in helping its clients evaluate the effectiveness of brand, shopper and omnichannel marketing investments during his more than six years there, which included a move from analytics to eventually leading this company’s sales team.
He joined the third startup, Fetch Rewards, in mid-2021, a move that he says gave him the opportunity to lead business intelligence for several top CPG partners while getting exposure to a fast-growing digital platform. “It helped broaden my perspective on data, loyalty, consumer engagement and the increasing importance of one-to-one connections between brands and shoppers.”
Making His Mark at K-C
In 2022, Wheeler realized he was finding himself increasingly drawn to opportunities where insights could help connect brands, retailers and shoppers in more meaningful ways. It was then that he knew it was time to return to the CPG side of the business.
He joined Kimberly-Clark in March 2022 as senior manager, shopper insights, applying his learnings across CPG, retail, analytics, shopper behavior and digital platforms, ready to support the company’s iconic brands and a constantly evolving marketplace.
“More importantly,” he notes, “it gave me the opportunity to keep learning, contribute to a broader team, and do work that sits at the intersection of business impact and purpose.”
Today, Wheeler leads shopper insights for the company’s digital commerce efforts. A major part of his team’s work is building stronger learning agendas around the digital shopper journey.
“That includes helping teams think more deeply about how people discover, evaluate and purchase products across digital and omnichannel environments,” he notes, adding that the goal has not been to create research for research’s sake but to ensure insights are practical, connected to business questions and useful for teams making decisions across content, retail media, fulfillment, customer planning and brand strategy.
Recent successes have come in strengthening collaboration across functions because, as Wheeler says, the best digital commerce work requires different teams to come together. “I’ve tried to help create connective tissue across those groups so we can look at shopper behavior more holistically and make decisions with a more complete view of the marketplace.”
He says his team’s focus on improving how Kimberly-Clark brands show up digitally has been a highlight during his tenure, and beyond that, continuing to learn from emerging shopper behaviors and technologies.
“These efforts have required a combination of curiosity, rigor and partnership, and they reflect where I think the industry is headed,” he says, adding that the team’s most important contribution has been helping move digital shopper insights from a supporting capability to a more strategic input into how teams think, plan and activate.
“As shoppers move more fluidly across physical, digital and omnichannel retail environments, our team has focused on developing learning that helps clarify how people discover, evaluate and purchase products — and how brands can better support those moments.”
He and his team have changed the way the company’s brands show up in digital environments through learning around content, product detail pages, imagery, search, retail media and the broader set of digital touchpoints that influence shopper decisions. Recent collaborative work involved partners from across disciplines, including insights, analytics, brand, customer, omnichannel and digital commerce teams.
“What makes it meaningful is that the insights are designed to be practical and usable,” Wheeler says, helping teams make more informed decisions even in the face of rapid change.
The team has recorded notable progress in a short time, specifically as it relates to advancing the company’s learning around emerging shopper behaviors and technologies. By bringing structure, curiosity and discipline to how they understand those changes, Wheeler says the group has been able to help translate complex marketplace shifts into clearer implications for their teams.
The continued elevation of digital commerce insights as a more strategic input into planning and activation is progress for which Wheeler will go to bat. Rather than treating digital as a separate channel or afterthought, he says the work has helped reinforce the importance of understanding the shopper holistically.
“That has required strong cross-functional partnership and a willingness to learn together,” he says. “That is one of the most rewarding parts of the work for me — helping teams connect insight, action and purpose in service of our brands, customers and consumers.”
Looking Ahead
Helping Kimberly-Clark build a deeper, more connected understanding of the shopper in a marketplace that is changing quickly is what motivates Wheeler every day. But yet he knows it’s not enough to simply identify what is changing. Understanding what it means for the company’s brands, customers and consumers is the holy grail, and that requires strong research, disciplined analytics, cross-functional partnership and clear storytelling.
Wheeler also believes there is still a lot to learn about how these capabilities may influence shopper behavior, as well as retailer choice and brand decision-making over time. “It’s important to ask the right questions and translate learning into practical implications,” he says.
Learning how to continually adapt as the business environment has changed is one of the biggest challenges Wheeler has experienced throughout his career.
“The industry I entered earlier in my career looks very different from the one we operate in today,” he says. “Retail has evolved, the role of data has expanded dramatically, digital commerce has become much more important, and technology continues to reshape how consumers and shoppers engage with brands.”
But he says strong teams and generous mentors have helped him not only see around corners, but also simplify daily complexities and stay focused on what matters.
Now that it’s his turn to offer advice to a younger generation of changemakers, Wheeler encourages them to stay curious, work hard and learn the fundamentals. Even as rapid change becomes the norm — especially with the growth of digital commerce, retail media, data and artificial intelligence — the basics still matter.
“You need to understand the shopper, the customer, the category, the brand and the commercial realities of the business,” he says.
He also stresses the importance of getting comfortable with data, but cautions others to not stop there. “Data is incredibly powerful, but the real value comes from being able to interpret it,” he says. “Connect it to a business question and explain what it means in a way that helps others make better decisions. The ability to simplify complexity is one of the most important skills you can build.”
Matthew Wheeler
Title: Shopper Insights Lead, Digital Commerce
Company: Kimberly-Clark
Career path:
- Kimberly-Clark: Shopper Insights Lead (2026-present); Senior Manager, Shopper Insights (2022-2026);
- Fetch Rewards: Director of Analytics (2021-2022);
- Foresight ROI: Senior Vice President of Sales (2017-2021); Vice President of Sales (2016-2017); Vice President of Analytics (MMM) (2014-2016);
- VideoMining: Vice President of Sales (2013-2014);
- IRI: Vice President Customer Lead, Mars-Wrigley (2009-2013);
- Nielsen: Director – Customer Lead, Wrigley (2007-2009); Associate Director, Wrigley (2005-2006), Manager, Kraft Foods (2002-2004); Associate Manager, Kraft Foods (2000-2002);
- The Coca-Cola Co.: Category Manager, Safeway and Walgreens (1997-2000); District Sales Manager (1995-1996); Merchandising Manager (1994-1995).
Industry activities: Retail Media Guild, Path to Purchase Institute; eMarketer, Product Advisory Council; eCommerce Council, Cleveland Research Co.; CPG Shopper Strategy Share Group, Coogan Partners.
Education: Winona State University, Bachelor’s, Marketing and Economics; Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management, Strategic Selling certificate; The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, Omnichannel Strategy and Management certificate; University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School, Business Insights and Analytics certificate.
