The Candid CMO: Natalia Ball, Global Chief Growth Officer, Mars Pet Nutrition

Being comfortable with not being an expert is a key skill for marketing leaders as they manage bigger and bigger organisations, says Mars Pet Nutrition’s top marketer. At Mars since 2015, Natalia now oversees brands like Pedigree, Whiskas, Sheba and Iams, helping drive the success of one of the world’s largest pet food manufacturers.

“Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella once said: ‘we’re going from knowing it all to learning it all’. I think that also resonates with my leadership journey, because early in my career and as I progressed through middle management, I thought I had to be an expert of everything; the business, the consumer, the brand,” she says.

Then came a conscious moment of realisation and an important switch in her management style, when she understood that the key for marketers moving up the ladder is to be both comfortable with not being an expert and also very curious, always asking questions. “I now feel confident entering into any situation and not knowing anything because I can learn. I have the agility to learn, and if I have the right people and I focus on creating the conditions for success, nothing can come in the way of meeting our objectives," she says.

“Now my role is more about instilling trust and curiosity, making sure that I'm building the right capabilities, that I'm giving them the right resources so that they can do the jobs that they are meant to be doing," she says as she reflects on how her role has evolved over the years. “That's a huge shift that has allowed me to then take bigger and bigger responsibilities."

Consumers first

Another key learning has been the importance of not losing touch with consumers. In her first marketing role at P&G, where she worked on the successful launch of Naturella, there was a blueprint – “same copy, same product, same packaging, every single time, consistency, consistency, consistency, because it was working," she says.

Launched first in Mexico City, the brand quickly expanded across the country before launching across Latin America, becoming a $350 million brand in 10 years.

“We were focusing on that winning model that we had created, but we were not keeping pace with consumer needs. The brand started to suffer and when we went back to diagnose, we realised that consumers' needs have moved on, that they had different expectations from the category," she says.

It's a lesson that she's applied in her current role at Mars, “because I know that's the recipe to success". She's invested heavily in a strong consumer insights team to generate real-time insights and the methodologies the company needs to stay in touch with an evolving consumer base.

A culture of excellence

The apex of both her drive to let others work the details and the importance of customer-centricity has been the Caramelo campaign for Pedigree in Brazil, which got Mars a Titanium at Cannes Lions 2025.

In Brazil, mixed breed dogs called Caramelos are 90% less likely to get adopted than breed dogs, so the campaign was designed to make people see how wonderful these dogs are. For the first time, a mixed breed was given a dog show, a kennel club as well as a starring role on the Pedigree packs.

Doing good paid off: Pedigree has grown double digit in Brazil ever since, eighteen months on.

“The reason why this campaign is so meaningful to me is because when I took this job, one of my objectives was to elevate creative excellence. And this campaign showed that those efforts of making sure we had the right training, the right briefs, the right culture of creativity paid off," she says.

From systems engineering to P&G

Natalia started in marketing as part of a Procter & Gamble programme called Challenge to Excellence, which recruited the best students from Venezuela's top universities, regardless of degree (Natalia’s was systems engineering), for a week's overview of the company. The internship led to a job in marketing.

Despite changes in technology, the media landscape and consumer behaviour, since her early days, she says, the fundamentals she learnt remain critical. "There are some things that will never change, and I don't want my team to lose sight of that because of so much change that is happening in the world. Growth will come first and foremost from driving mental and physical availability, and having fantastic and relevant propositions that consumers love at the right price. Those fundamentals will never change."

Reflecting on her 25 years in the industry, Natalia says that she'd tell her younger self that everything is going to be okay: "Don't stress so much."

“I wish I would have been a little bit more relaxed. It's okay not to know things. It's okay not to be perfect. As long as you're doing your best and you're learning through it and taking care of your team, it will be fine," she says.

About WFA’s Candid CMO series

WFA wants to celebrate the world’s best marketers and explore the journeys they are on to deliver better marketing. This series helps distil some of the biggest learnings of our CMO members. As we are great believers in the power to learn from successes as well as missteps, we hope this will give our readers the opportunity to learn more about the things they are most proud of, but also about where they may have done things differently. More at https://wfanet.org/CandidCMO.

If you'd like to nominate someone with an interesting story to be interviewed for the Candid CMO series, get in touch with Charles Chaplin.