Claudine Besserer: Global Brand Leadership, Creating Your Own Path, Encouraging Challenge
This week's guest is Claudine Besserer, a global brand strategy leader who spent 32 years at Mars. She rose from a 21-year-old sensory analysis technician, training factory workers to taste-test chocolate and ice cream, to leading global brand strategy for Royal Canin, a brand she helped grow to 6.5 billion euros. Claudine built her career by repeatedly creating roles that did not exist and moving into fields where, by her own account, she was nowhere. She now consults on brand and long-term value creation and lectures at French business schools.
In this episode:
- Why a brand has to start from the real DNA and values of a company, or it becomes what Claudine calls blah blah marketing that consumers can feel is not true.
- How she built three different careers inside one company, moving from biology and research and development to market research to strategic marketing, each role created from nothing.
- What fourteen years in research and development taught her about failure, and why carrying the learning from each failed project into the next is what eventually succeeds.
- Why moving between disciplines gives you different cards to play, and how that helps you challenge silos and see the bottlenecks other people miss.
- Why leaders who cannot take being challenged will struggle in a volatile world, and how the need to be loved and right becomes the biggest threat to a business.
- How she rebuilt a marketing culture across 8,000 people at Royal Canin by proving the gap between internal and external brand perception with evidence, not stories.
- Why she believes you should be loyal to one person on earth, which is yourself, and what it means to define success as having fun rather than chasing ambition.
- How a working-class childhood as a miner's daughter shaped her resilience and her belief that everything is possible if you are honest about what you want.
Claudine's advice on building a career on your own terms:
"You have to be loyal to one person on earth, which is you."
Resources mentioned:
- Lumina (personality and team profiling tool referenced as part of Mars's leadership development) - link TBC, to be added before publishing
- Influencing Without Authority (leadership development approach referenced from Mars) - link TBC, to be added before publishing
Read the full episode notes at www.the-career-library.com/career-stories-episodes/claudine-besserer
All opinions are the guest's own.
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Creators and Guests
Host
Dr Luella Forbes
Dr Luella Forbes is a consultant specialising in Organisational Change and founder of The Career Library and it's podcast, Career Stories.
