Building Brands, Dot by Dot: Todd Kaplan (SOM '06) on the Art of Marketing
Todd Kaplan (SOM ’06), Chief Marketing Officer of North America at Kraft Heinz, returned to Yale School of Management this semester as a featured speaker in the YCCI Colloquium on Marketing Leadership. With a career spanning global brand transformations, category creation, and culture-shaping campaigns—from PepsiCo to Kraft Heinz—Kaplan offered a candid and creative perspective on modern marketing.
Marketing as the Art of Meaningful Moments
In a business world saturated with data, Kaplan shared with students his perspective that marketing is as much an art as it is a science. Drawing from his years of brand-building experience, he introduced the idea that effective marketing resembles pointillism—the painting technique where individual dots form a larger image only when viewed from a distance.
“Think of every brand interaction as a dot... every brand interaction that you're doing as a dot… Over time, those dots form a brand perception; so a social post, you read an online review on the brand, you see a TV spot, you drive past it on the highway, your friend is talking about it… whatever it is, over time, every time you interact with a brand, some sort of perception is going in your brain and making a dot.”
This long-term perspective reframes how marketers should think about brand equity. Kaplan emphasized that iconic brands aren’t built overnight—they’re built and reinforced one touchpoint at a time, with thoughtful consistency across message, voice, design, and occasion. It’s this mosaic of moments, layered over time, that creates enduring preference.
From Iconic Products to Iconic Brands
Kaplan emphasized there is a difference in evolving iconic products into iconic brands: emotional connection. While many brands are recognizable, few become tattoo-worthy. His current challenge is to modernize, energize, and culturally connect brands with 150-year-old legacies to today’s dynamic consumers.
Through humorous anecdotes and compelling visuals, Kaplan showed how modern brand-building is about layering creativity on top of strong fundamentals—voice, purpose, audience, visual identity—all while evolving with cultural relevance and digital fluency.
Advice from the C-Suite to the Classroom
Kaplan closed with advice for students, grounded in his own journey from SOM student to CMO. Key among them: treat your MBA not as a credential, but as an investment in your long-term brand.
He encouraged students to be curious, create their own opportunities, and lean into the access Yale offers, and reminded students to have fun while they’re here.
With humor, energy, and honest perspective, Todd Kaplan left a lasting impression—one more dot in the growing mental mosaic for Yale SOM students as they consider what’s next.
Interested in a speaking opportunity at Yale SOM? Reach out to us at ycci@som.yale.edu.
