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Danone bets on brand investment to fix North America EDP; Lush grows without Meta or TikTok ads; Liquid I.V. hires former Poppi CMO for cultural push.
Danone is spending more, not less, to rescue its North America dairy business. Lush killed paid social and still grew. And Liquid I.V. just hired the CMO who built Poppi into a cultural phenomenon.
In this episode:
The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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Also from Marco & Klara: The Digital Commerce Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Good morning — three solid stories on the table today.
Klara: We've got Danone going on the offensive in North America after a rough quarter, Lush proving you can grow without paying Meta a single euro, and Liquid I.V. bringing in serious challenger brand firepower with a high-profile CMO hire.
Marco: Real decisions, real consequences. Let's get into it.
Marco: Danone is pushing harder into its struggling North American dairy and plant-based business — rather than cutting costs and waiting it out.
Klara: So let's back up a little. Danone is one of Europe's biggest food companies — think yoghurts, plant-based drinks, specialised nutrition. Within that, they have a division called Essential Dairy and Plant-Based, or EDP for short. It covers big brands like Activia and Oikos. That division has been losing ground in North America — meaning slower sales, weaker consumer demand compared to what Danone expected.
Marco: In Q3, Danone posted overall organic sales growth of four percent — organic growth, meaning growth from actual sales rather than currency movements or acquisitions. Solid enough. But North America EDP dragged the whole number down. Management didn't sugarcoat it. They've explicitly said the response is to play offensive — their word. That means leaning into the brands, spending more, not less.
Klara: And that's the interesting part for brand managers. When a regional business underperforms, the classic reflex is to cut marketing spend, tighten promotions, and protect margin. Danone is going the other way.
Marco: Which I think is the right call. Brand equity — basically, how much consumers trust and want your brand — erodes quietly over time if you starve it. Activia and Oikos are strong names. The problem likely isn't the brands themselves, it's whether consumers are still being reminded why those brands matter.
Klara: I'd add some caution though. Spending more only works if you know precisely why shoppers drifted away in the first place. Is it price? Competition from private label — meaning supermarket own-brands? Or a product issue? An offensive posture without that diagnosis can burn through budget fast.
Marco: Fair challenge. The execution will tell us everything.
Klara: We'll watch that one closely. Now, let's turn to our next story.
Marco: Lush — the cosmetics brand famous for its bath bombs and strong ethical stance — walked away from paid advertising on Meta, TikTok, and X. And it still grew.
Klara: For context, those three platforms are where most consumer brands spend the bulk of their social media budgets. The standard logic is simple: you pay to reach people, you measure how many buy, you spend more on what works. It's called performance marketing — basically, advertising where every pound is tracked to a sale.
Marco: Lush said no to all of it. Their reason wasn't budget — it was values. They didn't want their brand sitting alongside the kind of content and platform practices they fundamentally disagreed with. So they pulled paid social entirely. No Meta ads. No TikTok spend. No X campaigns. And they rebuilt their approach around owned channels — meaning their own website, email lists, in-store experience — plus word-of-mouth and community.
Klara: What makes this newsworthy isn't the decision itself — it's that their sales kept moving in the right direction afterwards. Because that's the part that's supposed to be impossible.
Marco: For any brand manager sitting in a budget review right now, trying to justify spend through short-term return on ad spend — ROAS, meaning how much revenue you get back per pound of media — this is a genuinely uncomfortable data point to explain away.
Klara: I'd be careful about the conclusion though. Lush has an unusually passionate customer base built over decades. Their shoppers seek them out. Most FMCG brands — especially in categories like dairy or household cleaning — don't have that same pull. Drop paid social there and you might just become invisible.
Marco: Agreed. The honest read is probably this: Lush proves it's possible, not that it's universal. The model travels — but only if the brand equity is already doing serious heavy lifting.
Klara: Worth stress-testing either way. Up next — our third story.
Marco: Unilever has just made a very deliberate hiring decision at Liquid I.V. — and it tells you something about how the company wants to manage acquired brands.
Klara: Liquid I.V. is a hydration brand — those little powder sachets you mix into water. Unilever bought it a few years ago. Until now, it's been marketed mainly on its functional benefits: hydrate faster, feel better. Classic product-led messaging. The question was always whether Unilever would let it keep its challenger edge or absorb it into the corporate machine.
Marco: The answer just arrived. Unilever has hired the former CMO of Poppi as Liquid I.V.'s new marketing lead. Poppi, for those who don't know it, is the prebiotic soda brand that became one of the most culturally talked-about challenger brands in recent years — built on creator partnerships, community, and a very strong identity — before PepsiCo acquired it. The mandate for this new CMO is explicitly about cultural impact. Not reach-and-frequency. Not media efficiency. Culture.
Klara: That word choice is doing a lot of work. Cultural impact in practice means: building genuine communities around a brand, working with creators who actually use the product, and trying to own a space in people's lives rather than just their shopping basket.
Marco: And the organisational signal here is just as interesting as the hire itself. Unilever is essentially saying — we're not going to run Liquid I.V. the Unilever way. We're importing challenger brand thinking deliberately. That's unusual for a company of that size.
Klara: Though I'd note the obvious test: Poppi's cultural success was built before the acquisition, when it had everything to prove. Replicating that energy inside a large corporate structure, with a bigger budget but also more stakeholders, is genuinely harder than it sounds. The playbook exists — whether it travels is another question entirely.
Marco: That's the one to watch. Brand culture isn't a hire. It's a daily decision.
Marco: Today's clearest thread — whether you're rebuilding brand equity, walking away from paid social, or hiring someone to shift your cultural positioning, every one of those moves is a bet on brand over short-term numbers.
Klara: So look at where your brand is quietly losing ground — and ask whether you're actually fixing it, or just papering over it.