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Better Marketing Pod Ep. 54: Taide Guajardo on 36 years of brand building and why marketers must market marketing
Marketing has rarely moved faster, which makes it easy to lose sight of the fundamentals. David talks with Taide Guajardo, former Chief Brand Officer, Europe at Procter & Gamble, about what 36 years and four countries taught her about building brands, and why marketers need to make the case for marketing itself
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In this episode Taide looks back on moving into media in Italy just as digital arrived, when nobody was quite sure what a banner was. She is candid that not every early bet paid off, and that nothing back then compares with today. AI, she says, is another level of fast, and when it arrived, teams ran hundreds of tests without codifying what they learned. Her answer is to treat test and learn as a discipline, starting with a hypothesis, checking the maths shows a payout is even possible, and measuring well enough to know what to keep and what to drop. Done that way, failing is not failing. It is learning.
She also issues a clear warning. If everyone uses the same AI tools in the same way, she argues, the result could be the death of distinctiveness. You will hear a habit you could copy this week. P&G’s creative training starts with a gut test, so before any checklist, ask what your gut tells you about the work, because turning an insight into a big idea is still human. We also cover how she rewrote P&G’s marketing talent strategy from scratch, why brand building runs through all four Ps, and how a corporate role taught her to lead by influence rather than authority.
Taide led more than 1,300 marketers and agency partners across 49 countries as P&G’s Chief Brand Officer for Europe from 2021, and spoke at WFA’s Global Marketer Week in Stockholm in 2026. She closes with a challenge to the profession. Marketers now have tools they have never had before, she argues, and it is their job to market marketing, positioning it as one of the best ways to add value to any company.
If you are working on marketing capability, the case for marketing’s value, or how to adopt AI without losing what makes your brand distinctive, listen in and share this with a colleague.
The Better Marketing Pod explores the industry's biggest stories and the people in the industry who are shaping them and is ideal for CMOs looking to lead brand transformation. Subscribe here:
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