Ahold Delhaize Europe - Creatives for Change
Creatives for Change
In 2022, while leading Ahold Delhaize Europe & Indonesia’s Health & Sustainability agenda, I took the initiative to build the company’s first-ever academy and network for Chief Marketing Officers and their marketing, brand & communications teams across brands in Europe: Creatives for Change.
Our community was soon joined by dozens of leaders, each dedicated to inspiring healthy and sustainable customer choices and behaviors. We designed the initiative around three building blocks:
1) Academy: virtual interactive sessions I co-facilitated, together with world-class experts and thought leaders on the topics specified below (around 30 consistently returning joiners rated sessions with an average rating of 8-9 out of 10).
2) Internal digital platform: for brand-level marketing, brand & communications teams to (a) share and profile their best practices: from TV ads to campaigns, and from store-level behavior change interventions to loyalty programs and (b) find specific, carefully curated resources: from videos and articles to “how-to” guides, and from exclusive access to learning platforms to insightful books.
3) Community offering a safe space: for participants across brands to easily connect with one another to discuss dilemmas or find solutions to similar challenges.
Topics covered (selection):
Your role as creative: rewiring marketing, reimagining its purpose, developing yourself as a confident “architect” of change;
Behavior Change: scientific models, theory and practical tactics;
Green Claims Directive: emerging EU legislation on environmental and social claims;
Creative Agency - Client interaction: changing the brief;
Sustainable User Experience (UX) design: digital design choices that impact customer choices and behaviors.
Examples of organizations I carefully selected faculty members from, included: Unilever, KPN, Futerra, Purpose Disruptors, the University of Groningen and WeFilm agency and several independent experts known for their unique track record and experience in specific domains.
An internal digital hub was created for participants from all of the company’s brands in Europe, to share one another’s good practices.
Infusion of practical, tactical and academic insights
The design of Creatives for Change was an infusion of my own practical experience working with all retail teams on a daily basis, and the courses I had taken on these specific subjects at the University of Cambridge (see this case), the Academy of Change (see this case) and other courses at Duke University and Climate KIC, as outlined here.
With this initiative, we collectively created an “epicenter of actionable insights” on using creativity as a force for good, in a way that creates commercial value.
“We fill 6 million plates every single day. We want to inspire our customers to make these plates healthier and more sustainable: by making it fun, easy, tasty and affordable! The Creatives for Change program gives great insights and tools to create and speed up behavioral sustainable change for our customers. We are now using the insights in our campaigns and daily work.”
“Creatives for Change increases our common understanding of Health & Sustainability between my digital team and the wider business. It really helps to make it part of our daily work and inform our strategic multi-year roadmap.”