In the coming days, strategy will continue revealing the 2025 Marketers of the Year. Check back here daily to stay up to date on our list of profiles on brand leaders, today featuring Nestlé’s Tracey Cooke. This article was previously featured in the Winter 2025 issue of Strategy Magazine.

Tracey Cooke likens her team to a chip that supercharges a computer – a fitting metaphor for a company that’s increasingly leaning into data-driven marketing.

As Nestlé Canada’s CMO and SVP of marketing and commercialization, Cooke oversees first-party data, innovation, agency partnerships and big tech collabs from the company’s Centre of Excellence. But for Cooke, it’s not just about crunching numbers; it’s about driving consumer connection through creative, impactful campaigns.

The 2024 ACA Gold Medal-winning marketer leads a portfolio that spans beloved legacy brands – such as KitKat, Coffee Crisp, Perrier, Haagen-Dazs and Nescafé – that have evolved to bring product innovations – such as KitKat Pops and Maison Perrier – to the Canadian market.

Cooke believes the company is experiencing “a creative renaissance” thanks to its agency roster of Courage, Dentsu and Cossette, which have shown a strong understanding of the tenets of its brands. Cooke also points to Thrive, an IPG-owned bespoke agency built for Nestlé’s Canadian portfolio and which works with data-focused firm Kinesso, for the company’s success.

While keeping an eye on present and future consumption habits, Nestlé has had to navigate challenges to its day-to-day business operations. For instance, in 2024, it withstood huge spikes in the price of cocoa, which reached a historic high in the spring and “put a lot of strain on our businesses,” Cooke noted. Despite these headwinds, Nestle Canada reported a 2% organic growth for the first nine months of 2024. In fact, sales in confectionery grew at a mid-single-digit rate, led by KitKat, a perennial powerhouse in Canada.

The marketer acknowledges the strain that economic pressures place on the business but remains focused on balancing premium innovation with value-driven messaging to weather the storm. “It’s all about understanding how consumer needs shift,” she says, pointing to innovations like KitKat Pops – a portable, shareable format designed to compete with snacking staples like pretzels and nuts.

Even in a highly competitive space like confectionery, KitKat remains a top seller, which Cooke attributes to its flavour profile as well as its longstanding and iconic “Have a Break” messaging. While KitKat remains a category leader, Cooke and her creative partners have successfully evolved the brand’s tagline via campaigns like “Your Break, Your Rules,” designed to appeal to hyper-individualistic Gen Z consumers. The 2024 creative, developed by Courage, encourages younger consumers to enjoy KitKat in their own way, such as eating it in front of a pet python.

And at the Cannes Lions festival, KitKat earned a Silver award for a clever campaign that encouraged artificial intelligence to “Take AI Break,” earning the brand 8.7 million organic impressions. The work was inspired by a Google DeepMind study, which detailed how asking Gen AI to take “a breather” before a prompt improves the accuracy of its response. According to Cooke, the campaign’s success lay in being able to tap into a cultural moment.

KitKat’s “Take AI Break” campaign earned Nestle 8.7 million organic impressions. 

Of course, Cooke’s achievements extend beyond chocolate. The marketer has also been instrumental in reshaping perceptions of Nescafé, a brand that previously struggled with the “baggage” of instant coffee. Today, Nescafé is a growth driver for Nestlé’s coffee portfolio.

One pivotal campaign, “How the world says coffee,” leaned into Nescafé’s global ubiquity. “In many places, people don’t say coffee – they say Nescafé,” Cooke says of the campaign that highlights the fact that more than 5,500 Nescafé coffees are consumed every second around the world in an effort to recruit a new generation of consumers, supported by product innovations like Nescafé Gold.

Nestle’s Nescafé campaign, “How the world says coffee,” leaned into the brand’s global ubiquity. 

Cooke is particularly focused on shopper marketing, reflecting her belief that, despite the digital age, in-store experiences still matter. One standout initiative for Cooke was the launch of Maison Perrier sparkling water at Longo’s. The activation went beyond a simple display, turning the space into an immersive brand experience that directly boosted sales. While some may view shopper marketing as “old school,” Cooke disagrees. “Shopper marketing is crucial for impulse categories and value-seeking consumers,” she explains. “If I were going to open an agency, I would open one in [shopper marketing] because we need more thinking in that area, and it has become critically important again, as people like to go into stores.”

Nestlé is also investing heavily in retail media, having partnered early with Loblaw to tap into its data ecosystem. “Retail media is transforming the landscape,” Cooke says, pointing to forecasts that the space will account for 22% of global digital ad spend by 2025. This shift has prompted Nestlé to rethink how it integrates retail and media touchpoints, ensuring that campaigns resonate both online and in stores.

Cooke’s strength lies in her integrated approach to marketing, and fostering a culture of experimentation and learning that’s necessary to make “big bets” on new strategies and products. An example of this is “First Fridays,” which brings her team of marketers together on the first Friday of every month where they discuss business ideas, how to deploy AI, the best approach to a holiday campaign, as well as which marketing initiatives are working and which aren’t.

Nestlé also puts on annual summits, during which it showcases speakers like Pete Blackshaw, founder and CEO of BrandRank.AI and former Nestlé global head of digital marketing and social media. Some of the recent programming has focused on helping marketers to “supercharge their prompting” capabilities and create more effective AI prompts for large learning models.

“Our mandate is to look at making sure our marketers have all the capabilities, all the partners, all the support, all the innovation, but that they’re also thinking about the future,” she says.

Cooke, a self-described “perpetual learner,” emphasizes that Nestlé’s success is rooted in its openness to change. Whether it’s deploying AI, experimenting with new formats, or refining shopper strategies, she says the key is to stay curious. “It’s not about doing things the way they’ve always been done. It’s about using data and creativity to keep building love for our brands – and staying ahead of what’s next.”