Firebrands: Mars’ Najoh Tita-Reid on Marketing with a Mission

Najoh Tita-Reid is a marketer with an impressive CV, but she’s never had a job that makes people immediately light up and wag their imaginary tails in quite the same way as her new role as chief brand and experience officer at Mars Petcare. People will take any excuse to talk about their beloved animal companions - and that’s something that Najoh can relate to as someone who has lived with both cats and dogs throughout her life.

So, as both a cat AND dog person, Mars Petcare’s mission to improve the lives of pets and pet owners is something that Najoh finds inspiring on a visceral level. It’s the sort of thing you either have or you don’t.

And what Najoh also has is a unique combination of skills and experiences that makes her the perfect fit for this role. Having worked in FMCG at P&G, in healthcare, and in technology, she’s poised to bring her marketing and tech expertise to Mars’s pet care brands as well as their health and diagnostic services, to join the dots to create truly pet-centric services and experiences.

Last year at Cannes, while Najoh was working at Logitech, she got chatting to Leonid Sudakov, Mars Petcare’s president of growth, digital and platforms. The pair were serving as members of the same digital advisory board and Najoh was intrigued by the emotion of Leonid’s vision of using technology to transform the experience of pet ownership. Najoh shared some advice and insight and went back to her day job. But she couldn’t quite get that lofty, emotive vision out of her head.

“One thing led to another and I joined Mars, but it really was the vision… It was a transformation for the entire sector. I love being a part of big things and this was something that felt worthwhile.”

And so Najoh joined as Mars Petcare’s first ever chief brand and experience officer. As it’s a new role, Najoh has the chance to craft it into exactly what it needs to be. Explaining where she sees herself, she explains that the company has 10 billion-dollar brands, from Royal Canin to Pedigree and Whiskas, as well as cutting edge veterinary health and diagnostic services, including hospitals. Each brand is run by its own CMO and teams, working hard to deliver for the brands. Najoh can help connect them,thinking about pet ownership in a more holistic sense.

“When you look at the life of a pet owner or pet parent, and you look at the challenges that they’re experiencing, there was an opportunity to have somebody working  to connect our business units for a better consumer experience,” she explains. “We could make the experience of pet ownership better, and therefore everybody would benefit, everyone would have a unique way to deliver for their brands. But we could do that by putting the pet at the centre. So how I came in was looking to say, ‘what added value can I provide?’. It is around a more holistic experience. It is around building capabilities for the future.”

One connection she’s really excited about is veterinary care, nutrition and technology. Having worked for pharma giants MERCK and Bayer, the preventative benefits of food is something Najoh is keenly aware of. And Mars Petcare is unusual in its ability to offer the preventative lifestyle benefits of nutrition alongside the more acute, responsive vet health. Technology, then, provides the tools to bring those together.

“I’ve worked at human healthcare where, quite frankly, I had the solution or some of the drugs, but you knew that some of the challenges came from nutrition, but I didn’t have that. I went to a food company because I wanted to be more about prevention… going to healthy food and the source of it. Because food is such an important element of health,” she says, explaining that she realised that technology would then give people access. “This is the journey of my career, I think it also made me a great fit for Mars, because under one house they combined all three and I thought, it was too good to pass up, to be able to combine all of them to make the world better for pets.”

And having had that experience at a major technology firm, she’s also well suited to helping the marketers across the team to keep themselves match fit in a constantly changing world.

“It is overwhelming how many skills it takes to be fit for purpose today. How do we prioritise and make sure that we are continuing to upskill our amazing organisation and then, of course, making sure that we are very disciplined in how we drive growth across the business?” says Najoh. “So, those are some of the areas that I focus on, and I really hope to be the wind beneath the wings of all the CMOs in the organisation.”

Mars Petcare has an all-encompassing, sector-disrupting mission - which appeals to Najoh’s sense of ambition. And she’s already proven to have the necessary grit and determination to bring such a mission to being.

“I’ve worked 30-plus years and hopefully I’ve got 30-plus years more, but the through line in my career has definitely been leveraging marketing to drive value to make sure that I use the wonderful platform that we’re given as marketing leaders to be able to make the world just a little bit better than we found it.”

To give you an idea of how deep that sense of ambition and that desire to elicit change goes, as a child, Najoh’s ambition was to become the President of the USA. That led her to study politics in high school - and she quickly realised that it was not the world for her. Despondent, she asked her professor what to do. When the professor asked why she’d wanted to go into politics in the first place, Najoh declared simply that she wanted to change the world. Had she ever thought about business instead? Najoh wasn’t quite sure where the professor was going, and he said, ‘Well, who do you think supports the politicians? It’s business, right?’.

“I was 17, not really understanding how the world works, [realising that] in fact, if you work on brands, they have platforms that do a lot of good in the world. I remember and it stuck with me,” Najoh recalls. When she asked what the best place in the world to work was, the answer came: Procter & Gamble because of their reputation for training (Najoh says that’s just as true for Mars, but as a teenager she wasn’t so aware of the company).

Najoh became one of five interns to get a placement straight out of high school, starting out in sales before she found herself in marketing. That experience was foundational. “I’m super happy I started my career in sales because it is where you learn about the first ‘moment of truth’. You learn about what it takes to be able to add that value and what conversion is. It has helped me tremendously.”

During her time at P&G, Najoh was the catalyst behind an idea that would eventually grow into a major mission and purpose for the company. ‘My Black is Beautiful’ came from the insight that the company would better engage with African American consumers if it invested more money in them and made an effort to redefine beauty standards beyond the eurocentric norms. After some research, Najoh realised that this hunch was ‘absolutely real and universal’, that it was as relevant in markets like China and India as it was in the United States. But in the US, this lack of representation was still largely unspoken, particularly at a corporate level.

It was no small feat, not least because Najoh’s vision was not to create a one-off campaign or something that could be attached to just one of the P&G brands. Instead she saw this as a platform that could sit across the whole company - at a time when that wasn’t really done.

Looking back, she says that, like any new vision, ‘My Black Is Beautiful’ was hard. “We can romanticise what it was like today, but it was very challenging. But I’m so proud of P&G,” she says. These days, the legacy of ‘My Black is Beautiful’ is plain to see in the work that P&G does - from 2017’s ‘The Talk’ to its ad spend investments in Black-owned media brands announced in 2022. 

Najoh reflects that one thing that really helped get it off the ground was the mentorship and support she received, especially from Esi Egglestone Bracey - the very same Esi Egglestone Bracey who is now chief brand officer at Unilever. “We both believe in serving underserved consumers, and of course it became an award-winning campaign and the foundation of a lot of the work that P&G does today and that you’ll see at Cannes which is increasing inclusion in the industry.”

Of course, the topic of pet ownership and pet wellbeing is quite a different animal, but Najoh feels just as fired up about this new mission. “I’m very proud to be able to join Mars and to see that there’s an opportunity to transform the experience of pet ownership, given the good  that pets do in the world. It’s not just around selling nutrition and care. If you think about the benefits pets have in the lives of humans, the list can go on. From companionship and loneliness to mental health to so many other things, it does improve the quality of life for humans and for their pets.”

For the past six months, Najoh has been immersing herself in the world of Mars Petcare, meeting teams around the world and getting to know the global and local agencies that have been so effective in their use of  creativity to add value to the brands. Indeed, Najoh is just back from Cannes Lions where Mars Petcare and its New Zealand agency Colenso BBDO won the Grand Prix in Outdoor, as well as a Gold, Silver and Bronze Lion for its ‘Adoptable’ campaign. It’s one that builds on Pedigree’s decades-long work to help homeless dogs using the most cutting edge tech and data. The project takes photos of dogs that are up for adoption and, with the help of Nexus Studios and some seriously clever technology, turns them into poseable 3D models that can then be placed in ads and targeted to digital billboards in appropriate neighbourhoods.

Najoh believes that this has the potential to help dogs around the world. “That’s just the foundation but the global impact of that is going to be amazing, tied to our long-standing purpose, but enabled by technology to make a major impact and add value.”

Another recent campaign that Najoh loves is ‘Meowzer’ for Whiskas, a cheeky campaign that taps into the demand for unrealistically low maintenance dogs and suggests that perhaps people might be looking for a cat. These campaigns, Najoh is keen to underline, are creative ideas that were developed before she arrived at Mars Petcare, but she is super proud of the teams involved and sees them as an indicator for the direction of travel in terms of adding value, improving the lives of pets and owners and bringing technology into play.

It’s not just the marketing teams and partner agencies that Najoh’s been familiarising herself with - she’s also been getting to know pet owners and how pet ownership differs around the world (and, of course, the universalities too). She’s recently been to Hyderabad in India, where pet ownership is becoming more common and aspirational. Najoh recalls spending time in the home of two pet parents and the mother-in-law, who had an adopted pet and one bought from a breeder. “It was just so fascinating to have a discussion about [the fact] they didn’t grow up with pets… and, of course, now the pet is family and the dog has a gold chain and all the rest. It was just amazing,” she says.

It’s that very human - and animal - connection that makes the role such a treat. And while Najoh will certainly be using technology to join dots, create utility, and give pets and their human pals access to the help they need, it’s not about tech for tech’s sake. 

“Having a job where you’re a chief experience officer allows me to just have a bigger toolkit,” she says, explaining that she’s really excited about, for example, the way AI will allow them to interact with consumers in more targeted ways. However, she’s conscious about not letting tech take priority over the needs of pets and owners. “I could go on about the technologies, but I do think, for me, the excitement is as hard as the discipline that it takes as a chief marketing officer today.”

She asks, “How do you not get swayed by all this technology and run in a thousand different ways? How do you continue to put, in my case, the pet parent or pet owner at the centre (and in other people’s cases, the consumer at the centre) and make sure that you are committed to the experience you want them to have that’s actually going to improve their lives?”

Staying centred as a marketer, having the confidence in the mission and not being distracted by shiny things is key to making sure that tech enables pet owners and pets. Thankfully, Najoh has a secret weapon to keep her focused - the bright eyes, wet noses and boundless enthusiasm… of pet and pet owners alike. 

“It’s the best job in the world,” she says. ”We light up with our pets.”