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Alison Lewis
Chief Growth Officer at Kimberly-Clark
Professional Background
Alison Lewis is an accomplished leader in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry, currently serving as the Chief Growth Officer for Kimberly-Clark, where she is a crucial member of the global executive leadership team. With an impressive 30-year career, Alison has built a formidable reputation for driving significant growth by revolutionizing the way Kimberly-Clark creates, markets, and sells its exceptional product range. She spearheads the development of four key consumer categories that include some of the most recognized brands in the world such as Huggies®, Kotex®, Kleenex®, Depend®, Poise®, and Cottonelle®. Alison's strategic focus is on maximizing innovation, leading category growth with effective market execution, and cultivating a digital-first marketing model that generates disciplined, profitable revenue.
Creative Leadership and Industry Recognition
Alison is well-regarded for her creative leadership and visionary mindset. Her approach to marketing transcends traditional boundaries, incorporating a holistic view that emphasizes the importance of delivering consumer-first experiences. She champions a ‘global to local’ strategy for purpose-led brand building, ensuring that brands resonate on a cultural level while maintaining worldwide scalability. This innovative mindset has garnered her numerous accolades over the years, solidifying her as a thought leader in the marketing domain.
Career Path and Accomplishments
Before her current role at Kimberly-Clark, Alison made significant contributions as the Chief Marketing Officer at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health, where she guided marketing strategies that enhanced brand presence and consumer connection. Prior to this, Alison enjoyed a lengthy tenure at The Coca-Cola Company, holding various senior leadership positions, including Chief Marketing Officer for North America, Senior Vice President of Franchise & Commercial Operations, and Vice President of the Sprite & Flavors Business Unit. Her time at Coca-Cola highlighted her ability to successfully navigate and lead within a highly competitive beverage industry, using her expertise in brand management to elevate market performance and consumer engagement. Before venturing into Coca-Cola, she honed her skills through multiple brand management roles at The Kraft Heinz Company.
Education and Achievements
Alison’s academic foundation is rooted in a Bachelor of Commerce degree, specializing in General Management and Marketing from Queen's University. This education provided her with essential business knowledge and marketing insight that she has effectively applied throughout her illustrious career. As a recognition of her impactful contributions to the industry, Alison has received numerous awards, including the prestigious titles such as 'Top 50 Most Innovative CMO' by Business Insider and 'Advertising Woman of the Year' from She Runs It. She was also recognized at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as 'Creative Marketer of the Year' and acknowledged by Advertising Age as 'Marketer of the Year.' These honors reflect her commitment to excellence and innovation in marketing.
Key Skills and Leadership Style
In her roles, Alison exemplifies key skills that contribute to her success, including strategic innovation, integrated marketing, and operational excellence. Her leadership style emphasizes collaboration and empowerment, encouraging teams to pursue creativity in meeting consumer needs. By advocating for a balance between global strategies and local relevance, Alison ensures that her companies remain agile and responsive to market dynamics.
Alison Lewis stands as a beacon of leadership in the CPG sector, known for her profound impact on brand growth and consumer engagement. Her 30 years of experience, combined with her educational background, positions her as a significant influence on the future landscape of consumer marketing and innovative growth strategies.
Highlights
One of the great honors and privileges of my life has been to engage others to see the power of marketing to drive growth and to do it with people who are absolutely the best in business. I have been blessed with the best jobs and career in the world. I learned from the greatest companies, leaders and teams across the likes of Kraft, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and most recently Kimberly-Clark. My days were exhilarating, challenging, demanding and full of new ideas/thinking. I spread my wings and personally grew more than I had ever imagined. My greatest joy has been serving all of you who were my leaders, managers and teammates over so many years. I tried to leave all I touched a little better every day. But like any good marketeer, I love new beginnings.
After almost 35 years in the CPG industry, it is time to soar at a different level – not the hustle and bustle of an operating role – but creating new growth opportunities and giving back through advisory, boards, start-ups, community and most importantly my family, friends and passions that sometimes were unintentionally put on hold. Careers like mine are incredibly rewarding but take sacrifice and I am fortunate to be able to take all I have to offer but package it a little differently going forward. As a former colleague of mine once said, it is not ‘retirement’ but ‘rewirement’.
While it is always hard to close a chapter, I leave my current role with the full confidence that this group of leaders at Kimberly-Clark (including many of those captured below and beyond) will continue to shine by carrying Kimberly-Clark’s growth strategy forward with passion and energy. #wearekc #grateful #newbeginnings
I am proud to be a part of the Texas Women's Foundation Gender Matters podcast series – sponsored by Kimberly-Clark featuring Cheryl Polote Williamson. Cheryl is an inspirational CEO and Founder of an organization that supports disenfranchised, under-served, and previously incarcerated women through lectures, conferences and coaching. When women thrive, we all thrive! https://lnkd.in/dFPcAJQ
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Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.