From introducing result-driven campaigns to integrating customer-focused strategies, explore how these 15 global leaders are leading change in the marketing and CX function.
Women are leading the great reshuffle in the marketing and CX role, transforming their brand ethos globally. In the corporate world, they stand ablaze, cutting through the noise in their respective roles.
Some encapsulated result-driven marketing campaigns that were praised globally, whereas others spearheaded the development of out-of-the-box products and strategies that drew exceptional customer experiences.
Delving into the contributions these powerful women made, we shortlisted a few leaders that are a must follow.
Top 15 Global Women Leading the Change in Marketing and CX
1. Aude Gandon
Designation: Global CMO, Nestle
Aude is a proficient global marketer, overseeing the company’s vast portfolio of over 2,000 brands across 186 countries. Her client partnering and team-building capabilities have helped the brand rev up its marketing game. During her tenure, Nestle partnered with WPP OpenMind in 2023 to execute its marketing operations across Europe.
2. Abigail Jacobs
Designation: Senior Vice President of Integrated Marketing and Brand at SEPHORA
Abigail is a seasoned marketer and strategist, overseeing the brand’s digital marketing strategies, catering to a variety of touchpoints. She leads the brands’ decisions to collaborate with global influencers to connect effectively with the target audiences. One of the latest initiatives on the list was the “Make A Rare Impact” Campaign.
3. Aida Baban
Designation: Head Customer Excellence & Governance at Bayer Pharmaceuticals
Aida is a customer experience leader mentoring the team of medical information specialists in her company. With her risk management and liasoning expertise, she has helped the organisation’s shares plunge by 32.5%. She keeps participating in different customer-centric events, and the latest one is the 13th Annual Strategic Customer Excellence Summit to be held in Vienna.
4. Anne Rigail
Designation: Directrice générale, Air France
Starting her journey as the VP of Information Management Ground Services in 2004, Anne transitioned several roles at Air France before becoming the Directrice générale. Recently, her company, Air France-KLM, was into the highlights for its negotiations with Scandinavian airline SAS to take the latter’s majority stakes.
5. Christel Heydemann
Designation: Chief Executive Officer, Orange
Among Europe’s top telco leaders, Christel has always been the talk of the industry for introducing customer-focused innovations. She introduced AI and chatbot features into her company’s operations that predicted appealing marketing offers for target customers. This approach has proved to be helpful in driving measurable revenue globally.
6. Conny Braams
Designation: Chief Digital and Commercial Officer at Unilever
With her 34 years of service at Unilever, Conny has already left an indelible mark in the consumer goods industry. She played an essential role in transforming Unilever into a future-fit, fully digitised organisation to gain a competitive edge. Currently, she leads Unilever’s end-to-end digital transformation, marketing and sales worldwide.
7.Hloni Mohope
Designation: Chief Marketing Officer, KFC Central and Eastern Europe
From joining KFC Africa as Senior Brand Manager in 2013 to becoming the Chief Marketing Officer, Hloni has delivered exceptional executions during her journey. She is also a founding member of KFC Africa’s Women on the Move Programme, an initiative catering to female leadership development.
8. Jane Wakely
Designation: Chief Consumer and Marketing Officer and Chief Growth Officer, International Foods at PepsiCo
Jane oversees PepsiCo’s international operations, including the R&D, marketing, insights, design and category strategy. Her expertise in managing highly complex product categories is something that has helped the organisation grow. Before joining PepsiCo, she was the lead CMO at Mars where she was a driving force in the transformation of Mars’ consumer functions. Presently, PepsiCo owns over 23 brands that generate more than $1 billion each.
9. Julia Goldin
Designation: Chief Product & Marketing Officer at the LEGO Group
Leading a team of 1800 people globally, Julia has made impressive contributions to LEGO’s marketing strategies. Her commitment to innovation and diversity has made LEGO an over 7.4 billion U.S. dollar brand. Apart from overseeing LEGO’s marketing operations, she also serves as a board member at Fiskers Group and Museum for the United Nations.
10. Marian Lee
Designation: Chief Marketing Officer, Netflix
Marian monitors a global team of entertainment marketers focused on introducing Netflix’s content to audiences. With her vision to continuously drive cultural conversions and audience engagement, she believes in empowering strategic and creative thinking. Prior to joining Netflix, she worked as Vice President & Co-Head of Music at Spotify, delivering best-in-class experiences to both Spotify users and artists.
11. Marisa Thalberg
Designation: Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, United Parks and Resorts
Heading the company’s marketing and communications team for promoting its portfolio, Marisa is a brand-building innovator. During her career, she has inspired teams to brands to new heights of consumer resonance. Previously, she also led a team of over 130 people in forecasting, developing and delivering sales growth at Taco Bell.
12. Mary Alderete
Designation: Chief Marketing Officer, GAP
With a demonstrated history of spearheading marketing strategies in apparel and retail history, Mary’s contribution isn’t hidden from anyone. GAP is often in conversation for its out-of-the-box marketing campaigns, all thanks to leaders like Mary, who support such executions. Before joining GAP, Mary also held the position of CMO at Banana Republic, ModCloth and True Religion Brand Jeans.
13. Melissa Sheehan
Designation: Marketing Director, Macy’s
Melissa is an outcome-focused leader with a decade of experience in eco-conscious branding and merchandising. At Macy’s she has developed and executed several multi-channel marketing campaigns for a $4 billion business. Throughout her career, she has brainstormed ideas for combining effective content strategies with data analytics to drive awareness, engagement, and conversion.
14.Morgan Flatley
Designation: Global Chief Marketing Officer and Head of New Business Ventures at McDonald’s
From directing McDonald’s global branding and menu strategies to signing various media partnerships, Morgan leads the company’s end-to-end marketing efforts. Before working with McDonald’s, Morgan oversaw PepsiCo’s long-term innovation agenda and brand positioning, making it a nutrition-led food and beverage company.
15. Sanaa Bougazzoul
Designation: Global Chief Digital Marketing Officer, L’Oréal
Sanaa has been serving L’Oréal since 2029, where she transitioned various marketing and consumer-centric roles. Currently, she leads the global marketing efforts for the L’Oreal Dermatological Beauty division. Under her surveillance, the division strengthened its recommendation-based model and grew rapidly twice as fast as the dermocosmetics market.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring, sentiment analysis, etc. Currently, Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of more than 220,000 employees worldwide.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service software provider, offering robust CRM and automation solutions. Some of its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, Content Hub, Commerce Hub, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software. Guided by its inbound methodology, HubSpot enables companies to prioritise innovation and customer success.
Monday.com is a project management software company, offering a cloud-based platform that enables businesses 
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is a global AI-powered business software provider. Its tech stack includes a scalable and comprehensive suite for IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring value for immediate business impact. Its product portfolio includes Customer Service Suite, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshsuccess, and Freshservice. Freshservice for Business Teams has helped several global organisations to enhance their operational efficiency.
Talkdesk offers an innovative AI-powered customer-centric tech stack to its global partners. The company provides generative AI integrations, delivering industry-specific solutions to its customers. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds utilise modern machine learning and language models to enhance contact centre efficiency and client satisfaction.
The company offers comprehensive cloud-based solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gaming Consoles, Microsoft Advertising, Copilot, among other things, to help organisations offer enhanced CX and ROI. Its generative-AI-powered speech and voice recognition solutions,such as Cortana and Azure Speech Services empowers developers to build intelligent applications.
IBM is a global hybrid cloud and AI-powered 
Uniphore is an enterprise-class, AI-native company that was incubated in 2008. Its enterprise-class multimodal AI and data platform unifies all elements of voice, video, text and data by leveraging Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI and workflow automation. Some of its products include U-Self Serve, U-Assist, U-Capture, and U-Analyze. Its Q for Sale is a conversational intelligence software that guides revenue teams with AI-powered insights, offering clarity on how to effectively keep prospects engaged.
Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. Its enterprise-grade solutions leverage modern technology to solve the most criticial business problems 
8×8 offers out-of-the-box contact centre solutions, assisting all-size businesses to efficiently meet customer needs and preferences. It offers custom CRM integrations support and integrates effortlessly with third-party CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and more. Offering global support in all time zones & development teams in 5 continents, its patented geo-routing solution ensures consistent voice quality.
Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company for all customer-focused functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform lets organisations offer human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Upland offers a comprehensive suite of contact centre and customer service solutions with products including InGenius, Panviva, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers. InGenius enables organisations to connect their existing phone system with CRM, further enhancing agent productivity. Panviva provides compliant and omnichannel capabilities for highly regulated industries. Whereas, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers are its AI-powered solutions, 
Zoho Social, a part of Zoho’s suite of 50+ products, is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. The Zoho Social dashboard includes a robust set of features, such as Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Approval Management to offer businesses all the essential social media publishing tools. Its monitoring tools help enterprises track and respond to relevant social conversations.
Hootsuite, headquartered in Vancouver, is a social media management platform that streamlines the process of managing multiple social media accounts. Some of its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising. Its easy-to-integrate capabilities help marketing teams to schedule and publish social media posts efficiently.
Brandwatch enables businesses to build and scale the optimal strategy for their clients with intuitive, use-case-focused tools that are easy and quick to master. Bringing together consumer intelligence and social media management, the company helps its users react to the trends that matter, collaborate on data-driven content, shield the brand from threats and manage all the social media channels at scale.
Zoho Corporation offers innovative and tailored software to help leaders grow their business. Zoho’s 55+ products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance, and recruitment requirements. Its customer analytics capabilities come with a conversational feature, Ask Zia. It enables users to ask questions and get insights in the form of reports and widgets in real-time.
Salesforce-owned Tableau is an AI-powered analytics and business intelligence platform, offering the breadth and depth of capabilities that serve the requirements of global enterprises in a seamless, integrated experience. Marketers can utilise generative AI models, AI-powered predictions, natural language querying, and recommendationsons.
Fullstory is a behavioural data platform, helping C-suite leaders make informed decisions by injecting digital behavioural data into its analytics stack. Its patented technology uncovers the power of quality behavioural data at scale, transforming every digital visit into actionable insights. Enterprises can increase funnel conversion and identify their highest-value customers effortlessly.
Contentsquare is a cloud-based digital experience analytics platform, helping brands track billions of digital interactions, and turn those digital 
Amplitude is a product analytics platform, enabling businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform leverages the capabilities of 
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirement for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its platform helps play an essential role in managing different digital content or assets to improve customer happiness. Its easy-to-optimise content gives users appropriate marketing streams, ensuring product awareness.
Started in 2005 in a Sweden-based small town, Norrköping, Voyado offers a customer experience cloud platform that includes a customer loyalty management system. This platform helps businesses design and implement customer loyalty programs, track customer 
TapMango provides a comprehensive, customisable, flexible and feature-rich customer loyalty program. The loyalty tools include an integrated suite of customised consumer-facing technology, easy-to-use merchant tools, and automation algorithms, all aimed at enhancing customer experience. Adaptable to any industry, TapMango’s platform helps merchants compete with larger chains, converting customer one-time purchases into profitable spending habits.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its innovative platform has played an essential role in managing different digital content or assets, to improve customer happiness or satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage.
