Beatriz Faustino – Brand Growth Through Relevance, Experience And Business Impact

For Beatriz Faustino, brand growth starts with a simple but often overlooked principle: marketing must be at the service of the business. Drawing on her experience as Chief Marketing and Digital Officer across leading retail, restaurant and lifestyle brands including Carrefour, McDonald’s, Burger King, Swatch and Imaginarium, she sees the CMO role as a strategic bridge between customer understanding and commercial growth. In this conversation, Beatriz explains why relevance is the foundation of lasting brand relationships, why customer experience has become one of the most decisive moments of truth, and how AI, data and personalisation are reshaping the way brands connect with people while still needing to deliver real business impact.

Marketing as a Driver of Business Growth

For Beatriz, marketing should never sit apart from the business. Its role is not only to manage campaigns or build visibility, but to understand the market, the competition, the product and the customer, and then help the company make better strategic decisions. That also changes how marketing success should be measured. Brand metrics such as awareness, consideration, preference, NPS, conversion and traffic matter, but they need to connect back to commercial growth. As she puts it: “The best ally of the business should be the marketing team,” she says. “By business, you can understand market share, sales, traffic, depending a bit on the sector. But yes, it means being extremely close to the business.”

In her view, the first measure of growth is whether the business itself is moving forward. “The first KPI has to be building the business, which the marketing team must serve.” That starts with sales. Margin and efficiency are important, but they cannot compensate for a weak top line. “If the first line of your P&L is sales, and you do not make that grow, the lines underneath are not going to help you make the bottom line good.”

At the same time, Beatriz does not see this as a choice between acquisition and loyalty. In retail, she has seen how loyalty programmes can contribute strongly to both sales and margin when customer knowledge is used well. That balance becomes harder when the commercial agenda becomes too narrow.

“If we start with a dynamic of, I only want to sell what I really want, with the margin I want, it is extremely difficult to convince the customer that this should be the purchase decision they have to make.”

Relevance is what Makes Brands Grow

When Beatriz talks about what truly moves the needle, she comes back to the ability of a brand to connect with people in a way that feels useful, attractive and timely. Having worked for brands that are part of everyday life, she has seen that visibility alone is not enough. A brand has to keep earning its place in people’s routines.

“What makes your value proposition unique and attractive to the customer is something that, for me, I consider as relevance,” she says. “Relevance is the way in which you connect with your target audience.”

That connection matters whether a brand is speaking to an end consumer, a B2B customer or another audience. The challenge is to capture attention, create real interest and build a relationship over time.

“If you do not have good relevance with customers, if you are not relevant for the proposition you make, if you are not there at the right moment, if you make a value proposition outside what is attractive to them, that brand will never grow.”

For Beatriz, this makes customer understanding one of the most important sources of growth. Brands need to stay close to the market and context, but also listen carefully to customers themselves. They tell brands what matters, often directly and without filters. The challenge is whether companies are willing to turn that into action.

Building for Today and Tomorrow

One of the biggest tensions Beatriz sees in marketing today is the pressure to deliver short-term results while still building long-term brand value. Annual plans may still exist, but quarterly and monthly targets increasingly shape decisions. “The closing of the quarter is where the real number comes in,” she says. “Everything becomes shorter in that process.” For marketing teams, this means becoming more versatile: they need to support today’s business while also building the brand for tomorrow.

That balance also shapes how Beatriz thinks about strategic investments. The decisions that create the most impact are rarely one-off actions. She points to examples such as digital ordering kiosks, table service, personalised coupons and digital content adapted to the consumption moment at McDonald’s. These are connected choices that make the customer experience more distinctive. “When there are strategic decisions behind something, it means there has been reflection, there is a long-term vision, there is decision-making at the right stages and at the right times.”

For Beatriz, this makes customer experience one of the strongest opportunities for future growth. It is the moment where the relationship becomes real, and where customers decide whether the brand is worth continuing with.

“For me, the purchasing experience is decisive and will be one of the major growth bets of the future, because that is really the moment of truth.”

Personalisation, Consistency and AI

Technology is making it possible to personalise experiences in ways that were previously impossible. Beatriz sees hyper-personalisation, omnichannel integration, AI, frictionless experiences and emotional connection as key trends for the future. At the same time, brands need to adapt to different channels and contexts without losing their identity. “You can lose that consistency by adapting very well to the medium,” she says. “You have to understand very well what the medium allows you to do, but without losing sight of what you want to convey.”

That consistency matters because consumers do not think about brands as much as marketers do. Messages need to be simple, clear and easy to recognise.

“Many times we get distracted and we brands think that customers are thinking about our brand 24/7. No, that is just us and that is it.”

AI plays a central role in this future, both as an internal tool for automating processes and saving time, and as an external tool for building more personalised customer relationships. But Beatriz stresses that organisations need the right culture, training and practical use cases to make it work. “AI does not suddenly arrive and everyone is trained in it,” she says. “You have to help and encourage teams to have good training and good use cases.” In media and communication, she sees AI as an opportunity to plan more efficiently, target better and adapt content across channels, while recognising that the industry is still learning. “This has only just begun and we are still in trial-and-error mode.”

The CMO as a Hybrid Growth Leader

As brands become more data-led, technology-enabled and customer-focused, Beatriz sees the CMO role becoming much broader. It is no longer only about communication, but about combining strategy, analytics and customer knowledge.

“The CMO has evolved into being more hybrid in strategy, analytics and customer knowledge than ever before. It has to be a strategic position that helps you across all disciplines of your business.”

That also changes how CMOs need to manage budgets and internal relationships. With more pressure on lower-funnel results and more marketing spend going into technology, they need to work closely with data, IT, finance, CEOs and CFOs. “We have to fight to get our companies to see us as an investment, not as a cost,” Beatriz says.

For Beatriz, sustainable brand growth comes from connecting business goals, customer understanding, experience, data, AI and organisational versatility. It is not about choosing between brand and performance, but about making marketing capable of delivering both.