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"Coming with that vision of 'We're global, we're telling you what to do and we know best,' does not work." — Diana Macia, Director of Global Omnicommerce Capabilities, Kellanova
Building a truly omnichannel organization requires establishing a strategic vision, cultivating buy-in, breaking silos, and fostering collaboration.
In the best of circumstances, accomplishing all these things is challenging. But in a distributed global organization, it requires a herculean effort.
Diana Macia, director of global omnicommerce capabilities at Kellanova, one of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, understands this all too well. The company, formerly known as Kellogg, has transformed itself into an omnicommerce organization where connected experiences are the rule rather than the exception.
Macia discussed how Kellanova has done it during an episode of the "Unpacking the Digital Shelf" podcast, "Those Silos Ain’t Gonna Bust Themselves." Here’s what Macia shared about the organizational and cultural shifts Kellanova has made, how the company defines omnicommerce, and why driving lasting change should start from the bottom up.
As part of the global growth and marketing excellence function at Kellanova, Macia and her team lead digital marketing transformation for the company. When Macia joined Kellanova in 2022, the company had already restructured its North American business unit and created an omnicommerce team.
"[It was] the first time of really breaking those silos and bringing ecommerce and shopper marketing together," she says.
Those efforts laid the groundwork for a reimagining of omnichannel within Kellanova, one that the organization has redefined as omnicommerce.
Macia says Kellanova views omnicommerce from two distinct lenses.
"One is really bringing that more seamless shopping experience," Macia says. "So, from a shopper perspective, how do we bring online and offline together?"
Second, Kellanova focuses on embedding omnicommerce across the enterprise and executing it upstream. For example, when Kellanova does creative briefings and creates experience plans with its agency partners, it always brings a shopper lens to these discussions.
"We are coming out now with plans that are fully integrated experience plans, meaning they're really accounting for every touch point and every channel that our brands are going to be lived through. It’s bringing the shopper and the consumer to the center." — Diana Macia, Director of Global Omnicommerce Capabilities, Kellanova
Change management is a critical part of building an omnicommerce organization. It also can be a point of friction if companies don’t think through how to empower their workforce.
Kellanova has successfully navigated this by bringing together diverse stakeholders from different business units early on to build buy-in, define its agenda, and create a sense of community around the changes it hoped to make. The group, called the Global Commerce Council, assessed strategy plans from different regions to determine what the global team could solve.
Macia says capacity building was a huge part of the global team’s focus because different regions were at different stages in their commerce maturity. Some had assembled best practices, while others had launched pilots.
To close this gap, Macia says Kellanova developed commerce training certification programs to "increase the digital IQ of the organization," which has allowed the company to create a common language around commerce — from the digital shelf all the way through retail media.
As a big CPG company, implementing changes from the top down would have been the path of least resistance for Kellanova. Instead, its global team embraced a bottom-up approach.
"Coming with that vision of, 'We're global, we're telling you what to do and we know best' does not work," Macia says. "So, it really started with ‘we need to take a bottoms-up approach.'"
By starting with each region’s strategy plans, the Global Commerce Council let the regional teams be the driver, transforming their needs into the global agenda.
"We're building and co-creating what best practices look like," Macia says.
For example, one of Kellanova’s omnicommerce programs involves the global team creating 80% of the content to reduce the lift for the regional teams. The regional teams then customize 20% of the remaining content to account for local nuances and different retailers, capabilities, and market regulations.
"People are very receptive because we're speaking their language," Macia says. "I'm not the one delivering it. I’ve partnered with my regional leads and I empower them."
Breaking silos has fostered better collaboration across Kellanova’s global organization. Kellanova now has a common language and streamlined internal processes that have enabled global and regional teams to seamlessly work together to execute campaigns.
Macia says other brands that want to chart a similar path should focus on "building their tribe" of like-minded internal stakeholders to evangelize omnicommerce across the organization. They also should work together to set success criteria and then track this data to measure their progress. Macia says it’s critical not just to analyze performance metrics, but to tell a story with the data.
“You need to measure and you need to have storytelling," she says. "You need to show those numbers, because that's the only way others in the organization are going to rally behind you."
To hear more of Diana’s insights on driving omnicommerce, listen to the full episode.
