People to Watch 2015: Mindy Rickert, Mondelez International

Working in the trenches of retail as an assistant store manager at Target for two years out of college, Mindy Rickert realized the challenges associated with the business. But it also sparked her interest in brand management and consumer behavior. “I was very intrigued by actually seeing how consumers interacted with brands to the point of buying,” she says.Fast-forward a few years, and with an MBA in hand, Rickert began her post-graduate career at Wyeth Consumer Healthcare (now Pfizer) working on the ChapStick business. She developed a solid understanding of general business management, combined with a deeper dive into marketing theory and case studies. “While I leverage learnings from my marketing classes daily, I’m surprised by how often I’m pulling from cost accounting, finance and other classes in business school.”Taking on another marketing role in gum innovation, she moved to Cadbury Adams. She has since held various positions within Mondelez International, most recently leading the Trident gum brand. Now managing shopper marketing for the company’s small-format customers, she and her two-person team activate in the drug, value and convenience store channels. “It’s our job to build shopper plans that both align with our brand and business objectives as well as with our customers’ key strategies and initiatives.”She points to Oreo’s 2015 priority integrated marketing communications initiative, “Play with Oreo,” as a program she’s proud of because of its success across all channels. “It was activated and tailored around each customer’s owned assets and came to life a little differently at each, while staying true to what it was all about nationally,” she says. “It really drove consumer excitement and engagement around the Oreo brand.”Currently she’s hard at work on her company’s Shopper Futures program. Three convenience customers – 7-Eleven, Quick Chek and Kum & Go – are partnering with the company to launch innovation pilot tests with startups this fall. Rickert is leading two of those pilot programs. She says they’re meant to “encourage us to think like a startup and partner with highly innovative, early stage startup companies. As a large company, we don’t normally get access to them until they’re a bit larger. But this is a great opportunity for us to be truly cutting-edge with our marketing, and it helps us act more nimbly.”Rickert credits a former director with some of her early success. “She was a huge believer in developing people, and she spent a significant amount of time talking with me about evaluating where I wanted to go in my career, as well as building the plan to get there,” she says. “She also nominated me for specific projects and roles that helped me move to the next level.”Staying in marketing is her long-term goal, “but I could see myself stretching into roles in sales or product innovation for a year or so to become a more well-rounded general manager,” she says. The balance between sales and marketing in her current role allows her to stay close to the company’s brands and consumers, which are her passions, she says, while immersing herself in the sales organization.She and her team will continue to be challenged by testing, measuring and evaluating programming “to drive efficiencies and understand the true ROI of our shopper marketing spend,” she says. “Our company invests more and more in shopper marketing every year and there’s always a desire to better understand the return on investment, which for some programs is still a big challenge to determine.”But being inside a big company has its perks. At the forefront of digital and mobile media investment, Rickert says Mondelez is constantly evaluating its media mix and continuing to shift more marketing dollars into the space. “It makes a ton of sense because mobile is where our consumers and shoppers are, and it’s where they’re consuming media and content. I think you’re going to continue to see that shift.”

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