Top 25 eCommerce leaders 2022: Charlotte Allen

As the global eCommerce excellence lead at Mondelez International, Charlotte Allen (pictured) works with the team to drive digital commerce growth globally.

Responsible for upskilling the organisation on all things digital commerce, and for driving eCommerce and marketing integration, her role spans across the Mondelez portfolio of superstar snacking brands such as Cadbury, Oreo, Toblerone, and Ritz.

At Mondelez, digital commerce touches every function of its business from sales to marketing, supply chain, packaging, legal, finance, and much more.

“To continue to accelerate we want to tap into the amazing cross-functional expertise we have at Mondelez and make digital commerce everybody’s job,” she said.

Recognising the powerful role that a strong people capability agenda could play in accelerating its eCommerce growth, Allen created a digital commerce people capability strategy in 2021 to rally the team behind.

The mission was to upskill the entire Mondelez organisation on digital commerce, equipping teams with the knowledge they needed for the company to continue to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

Since then, Allen and her team have partnered with internal and external experts and spearheaded a targeted, engaging, and action-orientated eCommerce training programme that it has rolled out at scale.

“I have been working in-depth on the integration between digital commerce and marketing. Working more closely with marketing is one of our biggest opportunities to accelerate eCommerce growth,” she said.

She is also a big believer that eCommerce is no longer just a sales channel, it’s a critical consumer touch-point for brands, and will play a key role in driving brand growth in the years to come.

One of the most important and proudest initiatives Allen has led to support digital commerce was the development of a framework to incorporate digital commerce into the company’s brand growth strategies.

Partnering with marketing excellence teams and an agency team, she and her workmates developed a brand strategy digital commerce acceleration guide which shows all the areas of Mondelez’s brand strategy where teams should be thinking about digital commerce.

Another big initiative she proudly led was with the global Cadbury team. According to Allen, the team was feeling the digital shelf experience didn’t quite match-up to how consumers felt about the Cadbury brand.

Kicking-off a project to look at how to optimise the end-to-end consumer experience for Cadbury on the digital shelf, Allen and the team created a Cadbury digital shelf playbook, and a toolkit of assets and resources, to improve the digital shelf experience for customers.

The team looked at the full consumer journey from discovery to consideration, to purchase and loyalty, and worked through how the brand should be showing up for consumers across these touch-points in a distinctively Cadbury way.

Allen shares the simple truth remains that the pace of change is fast in digital commerce, and to excel in the space, we as a community cannot stand still. Constant learning is key.