The Kraft Heinz Marketing Model Runs On Cross-Functional Decision Intelligence

Catching lightning in a bottle on the internet has stopped working through the traditional brief-pitch-execute model, which moves too slowly to match the pace of online conversation. Now, brands that want to intercept culture in real time are pulling creative, media, and insights teams into the same room from day one. Kraft Heinz has built that shared, cross-functional foundation into its "Marketing That Happens" operating framework. Inside it, every idea runs through a strict filter of cultural, consumer, and brand truths that keep fast execution strategically clear.

Todd Kaplan, Chief Marketing Officer for North America at The Kraft Heinz Company, oversees a portfolio of 70 heritage brands from a seat that requires him to build cultural relevance for products that predate most of the modern attention economy. His experience comes from nearly 18 years at PepsiCo, where he led the turnaround of the flagship Pepsi brand and spearheaded the launches of BUBLY and LIFEWTR. Kaplan reads the current moment as one where the CMO's competitive advantage lives above the latest tools, in the judgment layer that decides what to act on.

"Human judgment will become one of the biggest competitive advantages. AI can generate options, but it can't tell you which idea is right for your brand, which moment is worth showing up in, or what will actually resonate with people," says Kaplan. Delivering that judgment consistently across such a large portfolio requires an operating model that lets teams move fast without waiting on serial approvals, which is where Kaplan's "collaborativity" framework comes in. The model gives creative, media, insights, brand, and agency teams a shared set of guardrails so they can navigate cultural moments together as they happen. The three-truth filter functions as the shared judgment layer that keeps the fast decisions strategically aligned.

Catching culture in real time

The "Marketing That Happens" framework earns its keep on the small, fast-moving cultural moments that the traditional agency cycle would miss entirely. During the World Cup, strict stadium sponsorship restrictions resulted in fans posting photos of censored HEINZ ketchup bottles. Faced with an unplanned brand moment, the Kraft Heinz team responded with a limited-edition run of unofficial, taped-over bottles that landed while the conversation was still live. A separate signal from the same tournament, an unusually high number of red and yellow cards on the pitch, produced HEINZ Penalty Packets, translating those colors into a consumer solution for fans wanting more sauce than a standard packet holds.

The deeper case study for that speed lives at airport security. When international tourists started posting online about TSA agents confiscating their bottles of ranch dressing, the Kraft Heinz team monitored the organic engagement, waited for the TSA to join the conversation, then developed a TSA-compliant carry-on run of ranch packets that moved from concept to public announcement inside a single day. "It was time to move with conviction, taking the idea from inception to announcement in just 24 hours," Kaplan notes.

Strategy first, software second

The framework only works if brand consistency holds across every one of those small executions. The discipline keeps the fast decisions rooted in a durable point of view about who the brand is, protecting the pricing power CFOs treat as a strategic asset. "I like to think of marketing like pointillism, where every interaction, whether it's a social post, a TV ad, or using the product, essentially places a dot in the consumer's brain," Kaplan says. "Over time those dots cluster together to form a true perception of a brand. The key is making sure every dot you are placing out there as a marketer, both big and small, is rooted in the same brand point of view and a consistent visual identity."

The consistency argument sharpens under the AI search evolution, where LLMs are rewriting which brand signals actually influence discovery. Kaplan points to a specific disconnect that most marketing budgets have not yet corrected for, and the pivot toward earned, organic, and owned brand presence is where the AI-era brand reputation work has to happen. "When you look at LLMs and where AI engines source their data, none of it lives within the world of paid media, yet that is where 90% of marketers spend their time and money," observes Kaplan. "The AI agents today are looking at organic, owned, and earned media channels to assess their recommendations and inputs on brands."

The larger AI conversation Kaplan wants marketing leaders to run is about strategy sequencing before tool selection. The clarity of the decision the team is trying to make has to come before the software choice, or the AI becomes a distraction dressed up as productivity. Speed can look like progress in the moment, but the underlying business problem is what tells the team whether the speed is producing anything durable. "Everyone talks a lot about AI without first starting with the real strategy you are trying to achieve to see where and how it can best help," Kaplan says. "AI can clearly help teams move faster and process more information, but if you are not clear on the decision you are trying to make or the process you are trying to optimize, using AI for the sake of using AI can be a distraction."

Great taste still moves the needle

Coming out of Cannes, Kaplan observes a maturation in how marketing leaders are talking about AI. The conversation has moved past what the technology can produce and into how the human elements around it, empathy, curiosity, taste, and gut instinct, unlock what the outputs actually accomplish for the business. Under that framing, the modern CMO role is evolving from brand steward into growth steward, holding responsibility for how consumer voice translates into commercial performance across the enterprise.

Human judgment becomes the differentiator once the same generative tools are available to every marketing team, because deciding which option deserves the budget is still a call the software cannot make. The decision layer covers which idea fits the brand, which cultural moment is worth entering, and which activation will actually land with consumers, and none of that work has an automated shortcut. "The depth of human nuance and understanding cannot be underestimated, so raising the importance of gut in the human decision-making process will be increasingly important to blend with the rigor and depth that AI models can provide in the future," Kaplan says.

The competitive moat sitting underneath it all is culture. Individual campaigns can be studied and copied. Every generative tool now on the market will eventually reach every marketing team. What's much harder to replicate is the way a marketing organization actually collaborates, decides, and moves ideas from insight to business impact. "The hardest thing to copy is culture: how your teams work together, how quickly they can move and how consistently they turn great ideas into business impact," Kaplan concludes. "The tools will continue to evolve, but great ideas, and the teams that bring them to life, will always be the greatest competitive advantage."