A former executive at Coca-Cola, Danone, and Carrefour, Caroline Benoist now leads French marketing for Thai Union, owner of Petit Navire and Parmentier. At the head of a team of around fifteen people, she carries a dual mission : to uphold the value of heritage brands in a mature market and to drive a more impactful, more efficient, and more digital marketing transformation. In this interview, she shares her daily challenges, organizational trade-offs, and levers for scaling up.
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What are your main challenges today?

Caroline Benoist : The context is very specific. As in many FMCG categories (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods), the inflationary period has challenged volume growth. In such an environment, the question of perceived value becomes central. Petit Navire is the historic leader in canned fish with nearly 30% market share in value, and Parmentier recently became number one in volume for sardines. But to maintain this position, we constantly have to justify our price, facing very active private-label brands.

Our challenge is therefore both to defend our brands and to continue making the category attractive. That means innovation, for example, with the launch of our new range “Et Hop,” shredded tuna in pouches, but also a new communication platform for Petit Navire. And of course, deep work on relevance and desirability, especially to rejuvenate our core target.
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Do these business challenges lead you to evolve your organization ?
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 C.B.: Yes, because everything has to be executed efficiently. Today, we already dedicate a significant part of our investment to digital, but we could go even further, especially by having content that is even more tailored to each target and occasion.

On a strategic level, we are also beginning to reexamine our organization, particularly the placement of digital. Should digital be integrated into the brands, or be a cross-functional hub? Until now, everything was very siloed by country, but a group marketing department has just been created. It will likely aim to accelerate and create synergies on certain topics, and I hope digital will be among the top priorities.
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What role does digital play in your roadmap today ?
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C.B.: We have already made strong progress in digital, but it is still sometimes treated as just one lever among others. I want to make it a more strategic connection point and a true performance driver.

There is strong encouragement from our leadership, especially within an Asian group where digital and e-commerce are culturally very advanced. People sometimes ask me, “Why are you still investing in TV ?” But with a mostly 50+ target, TV remains a relevant channel. We can’t shift the entire strategy overnight. However, we can manage it better, make smarter trade-offs, and activate more effectively.
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Concretely, where do you start to make digital more foundational ?
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C.B.: My first priority is efficiency. I want every euro invested in digital to be well used, and especially well tracked. I’m not only talking about paid performance, but also about relevance to the target, coherence in activation, and alignment with consumer insights.

Then, we need to think further ahead and try to imagine the role and weight of e-commerce and digital in our strategic plan. A fascinating topic !
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Precisely, what skills do you think your teams will need to develop ?
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C.B.: The role is evolving, and it’s a great opportunity. I believe that in the future, we’ll need even more curious profiles, more outward-looking, able to adapt, explore new mechanics, and react quickly. In FMCG, we often have very solid, well-trained teams, but they also need to gain agility, digital reflexes, and the ability to think outside the box.

It’s a good daily challenge for our teams and our agencies. We regularly enrich our team’s digital culture with external contributions, sessions led by our agencies, or group sharing times. It would be interesting to explore how to go further : implement more continuous learning that is deeply embedded in daily work, to bring the whole team along in this transformation. It’s a very concrete project I want to accelerate.
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And on artificial intelligence, what role do you see in the medium term?

C.B.: AI will clearly become part of our marketing daily life. For now, we’re still in an exploratory phase. Some team members are already testing generative AI tools to write a concept or structure a tagline. These are interesting initiatives, but still very individual.

I believe the real challenge is moving from experimentation to structuring. AI can become a lever for efficiency, provided it’s thoughtfully integrated, with relevant use cases, training, and proper oversight. We see that some of our agencies are already using it with agility: it’s inspiring, and we’re eager to move forward with them in this space. My ambition is for the team to be not only familiar with AI, but also equipped to make it a true driver of collective performance.
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Outsourcing, freelancers, agencies: how do you organize your partnerships?

C.B.: We work with several external partners (media, social, influence, PR agencies), and we also occasionally rely on freelancers. These external partners are often a good solution to absorb peaks in activity or accelerate on specific topics.

We also sometimes bring in external partners to challenge us and help us grow. Indeed, we need to regularly reassess our standards and surround ourselves with more specialized partners who can inspire us and pass on their expertise.

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