From CMO to president: how Melanie Huet is redefining marketing leadership at Newell Brands

“I was always angling to run a business unit,” she says. “At Unilever and Kimberly-Clark, they trained brand people to be brand general managers. So I had some nice training around that. Then I took intentional moves to learn how to commercialize. That variety of experiences really helped.”

When she joined Newell Brands as CMO, Huet made it clear she wanted to prove that marketing can drive business results. “When I got hired, our CEO Chris Peterson and I had an agreement that I would be tracking towards president – but I had to prove myself in the CMO role first.”

It worked. This year, she became president of Home & Commercial, leading brands like Mr Coffee, Calphalon and Yankee Candle. Her journey is a signal to the industry that marketers can lead full-scale P&Ls – if they can speak the language of growth.

“In the boardroom, they want to hear about revenue, margin, growth, market share and profit,” she says. “You need to tie what you’re doing in marketing back to those priorities.”

She built a weekly scorecard that went straight to the CEO and peers. “We just undeniably showed we were making progress. This is how we support you.” Metrics included everything from AI-driven productivity and talent development to readiness for market launches. “I put really clear metrics against everything,” she adds. “Some were numbers, others were deliverables, but everyone understood where marketing was going.”

Back to brand fundamentals

Huet’s biggest message for marketers at ANA echoed that of P&G’s Marc Pritchard: don’t forget the basics.

“I 100% agree with Marc” she says. “It’s better if brands are consistent. Way too many brand managers want to change the logo, the colors, the positioning, but repetition strengthens your brand. Think about Mountain Dew. ‘Do the Dew’ ran for 20 years, but every year it had a fresh look. It felt new, but it was consistent.”

That philosophy sits at the core of how she re-engineered Newell Brands.

Reorganizing around brands, not categories

When Huet arrived, Newell was structured around product categories. She and Peterson flipped it.

“We said, if we want to be consumer-first, we need to be brand-first – then innovation-led,” she explains. “So instead of a leader of pens or markers, you now have a leader of Sharpie. That leader owns the brand – the P&L and the strategy.”

It’s made a measurable difference. “The value of our innovation pipeline has more than doubled,” she says. “Every year we’ve grown the number of tier-one innovations – the big ones worth real money. We’ve done a better job with the consumer, better with insights, and it shows up in our new-product launches.”

The new structure also means global coherence. “We’re jealous of Coca-Cola,” she laughs. “Everywhere you go in the world, it shows up the same. We aspire to do that. We’ve made tremendous progress.”

From trash cans to horse feeders

One of Huet’s favorite examples of brand-led innovation is Rubbermaid’s Brute franchise.

“You’d think, what more can you do with a trash-can business?” she says. “But the team did insights work and realized there was a huge opportunity on farms. They designed new feeders for horses, cattle and goats – and discovered that horses stomp on them and toss them around! Using our expertise in plastics, we created ultra-durable feeders that launched this summer at Tractor Supply. We even designed a lid that locks out raccoons.”

The line, internally known as Farm Line, shows how a brand can expand authentically. “It’s just taking our expertise in injection molding and re-applying it,” Huet says. “It’s been fantastic – an unmet need met by a brand people already trust.”

Stranger Things and the power of nostalgia

Huet lights up when she talks about another project: Newell’s collaboration between Coleman and Stranger Things, timed for the show’s final season.

“Coleman is doing a Stranger Things tie-up right now – it’s so fun,” she says. “It fits the 80s vibe perfectly. We have Stranger Things sleeping bags, mini-backpacks and a Hellfire Club mini fridge. I bought a bunch for my nieces and nephews!”

The partnership taps into the cultural nostalgia that fuels both the Netflix series and the Coleman brand’s heritage in American outdoor life. It’s part of a wider push to make Newell’s legacy products feel fresh and collectible again.

AI as accelerant

If brand consistency is Huet’s north star, AI is the engine speeding everything up.

“It’s revolutionized Newell,” she says. “We embraced it quickly. We shortened our innovation process from four months to about five days by using AI. We can go immediately from concept to photorealistic product imagery, get feedback from synthetic personas and refine instantly.”

Her team has built a suite of custom agents to automate tasks from metadata tagging to multilingual translation and dynamic email creation. “We function in up to 24 languages,” she notes. “One agent takes copy and immediately translates it with the right localisms. Another builds emails in three or four clicks. It’s saved us hours and hours – and freed people to do what they love.

Lessons for marketers

Huet believes marketing’s credibility in the boardroom will depend on connecting creativity to commercial outcomes – and staying curious.

“Now is the time to get involved with AI,” she warns. “If you don’t start, you’re going to get left behind.”

But for all the technology talk, she still comes back to basics: “Whenever new technology comes in, we have to remind ourselves not to get too enamored. The fundamentals of marketing – understanding consumers, building consistent brands – still matter most.”

With 98% of US households owning a Newell product, Huet has proof that those fundamentals still work – and that, in the right hands, marketers can run the whole show.