Syed Abdul Haye, a marketing leader with experience at CPG giants like L'Oréal and Unilever, argues that marketers must rely on gut feelings informed by past experience.
He says that while founder-led brands excel at building an authentic "soul," they often struggle to scale, whereas corporate structures can stifle the very authenticity they seek to acquire.
The counterintuitive solution, he proposes, is to bring back full-stack marketers who function as mini-CEOs, a model inspired by the rotational training programs of the same CPG giants who are struggling to compete with small, agile brands.
Today's culture cycle is a blur. Trends that once lasted seasons now burn out in weeks, accelerated by the fleeting nature of TikTok and the cadence of limited-edition drops. Waiting for perfect data isn't a viable strategy for marketing executives wanting to crush their next campaign. By the time the numbers are in, the moment has passed. The brands that win now are the ones that move fast, take calculated risks, and trust an intuition honed by experience.
We spoke with Syed Abdul Haye, a marketing leader with senior roles at Fortune 500 giants like L’Oréal, Unilever, and Nestlé. He combines his insider understanding of the traditional CPG playbook with his entrepreneurial work as a founding team member for startups like HERbeauty to challenge the data-obsessed status quo.
The CPG giants who built empires on safe, universal platitudes, like Coca-Cola's "sharing happiness," now compete with founder-facing brands driven by distinct personalities. A deeper purpose, he says, is what elevates a simple commodity into the next billion-dollar brand. He points to Huda Beauty as a brand defined by its founder's compelling stances and YouTube presence, a strategy that would be too risky for a "safe" corporate house.
Data's paradox: In Haye's view, the relentless pace of cultural shifts presents a fundamental dilemma for marketers: act now, or wait for data that may never materialize. "Everything in marketing is fast and uncontrolled because it's all driven by external factors," he says. "This means you need to make fast decisions without data. You will never have the perfect data to make future decisions. Marketing leaders need to rely on their gut feeling informed by past experience."
A race against relevance: The fundamental disconnect, Haye argues, lies in the time it takes to execute a campaign versus the lifespan of a trend. "If I start a campaign today, it will take at least forty-five days to three months to launch," he says. "I don't know what's going to be relevant in those three months. I'm from a time where you would just lock in a year's campaigns and execute them, trusting your judgement on what will resonate."
Haye identifies a common archetype in modern marketing: the leader with a CMO title who, in practice, functions as a growth marketer. A purely growth-focused mindset, he says, can struggle to build a lasting brand. A brand’s soul—the intangible, uncopyable feeling it creates—can be its most effective competitive moat. "Competition can copy every tangible functionality of your product," he explains. "The only thing they cannot copy is the intangible part. It's how you make people feel."
Dollar Shave Club's acquisition by Unilever is a prime example of mismatched corporate souls. DSC is now working to return to its disruptive roots after splitting with Unilever, but the story serves as a case study for what happens when a brand with phenomenal growth is absorbed by a corporate structure focused on replication. If the two aren't aligned on a brand-purpose level, the process can strip away the soul of the smaller brand and hollow out what made it successful in the first place.
The spreadsheet's limit: Even when corporations try to create startup-like "scrum structures," the model often breaks down under constant board pressure for quantifiable growth. "Some models do not fall into that infinite growth mindset," Haye says. "The Dollar Shave Club's brand was based on humor and ease, but they are ultimately a functional product. However, the board pressure will always be there, demanding to get its target percentage of growth for the year from this independent brand. In that process, you take the soul away."
Today's high-pressure environment stems directly from the sheer velocity of modern pop culture. He explains this new reality with a "beer and froth" analogy from his time at Nestlé. The traditional model saw the core product as the "beer" (80% of business) and innovation as the "froth" (20%). In the Japanese market, he observes, the ratio is inverted to nearly 60/40. But for many brands today, the froth is the beer. The fast-paced cycle is exemplified by the cultural phenomenons like the rise of brands like Liquid Death, which built a valuable brand by "branding water so coolly."
Surviving the cycle: "Pop culture is changing so fast," Haye notes. "This week on TikTok, there's one song trending, and next week, it's something else. To be innovative and relevant to this pop culture, a brand has to get these drops out really quickly." Such a compressed trend cycle pressures marketers to embrace risk. That's where the agility of smaller brands can give them an advantage. But Haye injects a dose of realism by noting the high, often unseen, failure rate among them. "The indie brands, the smaller brands do this very well because they have the heart to do this," he says. "They either really hit the bank or they fail. We just don't hear about the ones that have really flopped."
The solution brings these threads together into a practical leadership model inspired by the CMOs of the past. "I grew up in a CPG marketing background, and for me, a marketer was never just a communications expert," Haye explains. "They were a mini-CEO who knew the P&L, supply chain, R&D, sales, and trade marketing. That person was the nucleus of the business and had to make it all work." To modernize that approach, he says today's leaders are required to operate in an "AND market," where choosing between being data-driven or brand-focused is no longer an either/or option. Instead, mastery of both is table stakes.
The 'and' imperative: Operating in this new era calls for a full-stack marketer, an integrated leader who uses the brand's soul as a strategic filter to decide which trends to chase and which to ignore. "It's not an 'or' market; it is an 'and' market," he stresses. "You have to be an expert in data and in media, because the basic tactics are the same for everyone. Everybody runs Meta ads, hires influencers, and gets publications. The real difference is execution excellence. Who does it better? Who does it faster?"
Know your no: But that doesn't mean a company should hop on every trend. Maintaining a clear brand identity in a chaotic environment requires disciplined discernment, particularly in deciding what to ignore. "You have to decide which of the bandwagons you will not hop on," Haye says.
Right now, small, agile companies are winning the cultural relevance race. But while CPG giants seem like symbols of the slow old world, they might actually be the ones best suited to succeed longterm. Their rotational training programs, which deliberately forge specialists into generalist business leaders, offer a compelling model for developing the full-stack marketers Haye says the industry needs. "The good part about most multinationals is they have rotational programs. They will put you in basic marketing for two years, then you'll go into trade. After you've spent ten years there doing different stints, they put you in a general manager role. This is something all industries need to take away from the CPG world, because it's what they do really well."
