There was a time when the job of a chief marketing officer at a confectionery company mainly involved deciding which holidays to emphasize and how much to spend on television commercials. That time, it appears, has passed.
Daniel Mohnshine, the senior vice president for global marketing services at the Hershey Company, says the modern marketing role has expanded well beyond communications to encompass innovation, research and development, and data strategy — what he called "the whole nine yards."
"Hershey is 100 percent consumer at the center of everything," Mr. Mohnshine said. "And how we behave, not just within marketing, but across all functions."
What has changed most recently is the deployment of artificial intelligence tools inside Hershey's product development pipeline. While much of the public conversation about A.I. in marketing has focused on the generation of advertisements and social media content, Mr. Mohnshine said the more significant transformation is occurring earlier — in the concepting, testing and consumer feedback stages that precede any actual candy bar.
"We've reduced our innovation pipeline development time, from a concepting standpoint, by three months by leveraging A.I.," he said. "And we think it can get faster."
For a company of Hershey's scale — it has been making chocolate in Pennsylvania since 1894 — removing three months from a development cycle is not merely an efficiency gain. It changes how many ideas can be tested and how quickly unsuccessful ones can be abandoned. (The confectionery business has always run on tight windows; Easter does not wait for anyone.)
"Failing fast is valuable," Mr. Mohnshine said. "Failure is learning."
He pushed back, however, on the notion that artificial intelligence would replace the marketers themselves. "We still look for people that are highly strategic and understand consumers and can use A.I. as a tool to amplify skills they already have," he said.
The machines, it seems, can help develop the prototypes. Knowing which ones people will actually want to eat remains a human specialty.
Original story published in The Drum: "Hershey’s Daniel Mohnshine on how AI is cutting product development by three months | The Drum"