How Melanie Batchelor Leads Through Industry Disruption and Mentorship

Career Path Across Global Brands

From PepsiCo to Campari Leadership

Melanie Batchelor’s ascent from a junior marketer in Sydney to the president and CEO of Campari Americas didn’t follow a textbook trajectory—it zig-zagged across hemispheres and categories. She spent her first 12 years inside PepsiCo’s system, learning how to scale billion-dollar beverage brands while absorbing the nuances of global operations.

That foundation gave her two assets she still leans on: the ability to read P&L statements like a thriller novel, and a passport thick with Southeast Asian, European, and North American entry stamps. When Campari Group came knocking, she crossed the Rubicon from non-alcoholic to spirits, trading cola wars for cocktail culture.

The move required more than swapping soda fountains for whiskey barrels; it demanded translating lessons from mass-market scale to heritage-brand intimacy—turning Wild Turkey from a dusty “dad’s bourbon” into a story three generations of the Russell family could tell on Instagram.

Cross‑regional Marketing Experience

Ask Batchelor what time zone she considers “home” and she’ll laugh: “I’ve spent more of my life on airplanes than in any single bed. ” The accent that lands somewhere between Sydney and Singapore is the residue of launching innovations in Manila, negotiating sponsorships in Munich, and defending share in São Paulo—all before lunch. At PepsiCo she learned to flip cultural lenses overnight: the sweetness level that tested off the charts in Bangkok would be cloying in Texas, while the color palette that screamed premium in Milan read “funeral parlor” in Jakarta.

Those geographic pivots taught her that consumer empathy isn’t a research deck; it’s the ability to sit in a street-market stall at 6 a. m. , watch a mother mix breakfast for her kids, and re-engineer your product in your head before the coffee gets cold.

Later, at Campari, she applied the same curiosity to bourbon country, spending weekends in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, listening to distillery workers describe the difference between “honey barrels” and “heads cuts” so she could translate craft cred to urban bartenders in Brooklyn.

Transition to General Management

The jump from marketing chief to P&L owner happened faster than she anticipated—an internal re-org left the Canada president role vacant, and the board asked if she wanted to add “running a country” to her résumé. Batchelor’s first instinct was to reach out to Campari’s regional CFO: “I asked him to mentor me, not because I couldn’t read a balance sheet, but because I needed a translator for the language of general managers—capital allocation, risk-adjusted returns, union negotiations.

” Within six months she had doubled the Canadian subsidiary’s operating margin by axing low-velocity SKUs and redirecting spend to Aperol during its pre-spritz inflection point. The promotion to president, Campari Americas followed, catapulting her into the rare air of female CEOs running North American alcohol divisions.

She still keeps the CFO’s first piece of advice taped above her monitor: “Spend the company’s money like it’s your grandmother’s inheritance—every dollar needs a story and a return.

Building a US‑Canada Portfolio

North of the border, Batchelor inherited a portfolio heavy on Italian bitters and light on awareness; south of the border, she faced a fragmented three-tier system where 50 brands fought for distributor mind-share like teenagers battling for Wi-Fi. Her playbook: treat each country like a start-up, but leverage continent-wide scale for production and media. In Canada, she bet early on the Aperol spritz before patio culture had a hashtag, seeding bright-orange bicycles to influencers who rode them through Toronto’s distillery district.

In the U. S. , she weaponized Wild Turkey’s authenticity against the flavored-whiskey craze, filming three generations of master distillers Jimmy, Eddie, and Bruce Russell in a single-take Super-Bowl spot that cost less than a New York subway ad but generated 14 million organic views.

The result: Aperol sales tripled in 36 months, Wild Turkey reversed a decade-long decline, and Campari’s North American revenue crossed the billion-dollar mark for the first time in company history.

Sources of Inspiration and Learning

Family and step-kids as motivators

Batchelor credits her three step-children—now scattered across college campuses—for keeping her leadership style human. “They inspire me every day,” she told the podcast, noting that watching the youngest pack for freshman year reminded her how courage often looks like an 18-year-old pretending to know how to do laundry.

Those dinner-table conversations about fairness, inclusion, and “why Mom gets the big office” forced her to translate boardroom strategy into language a teenager can audit. The exercise paid off: when Campari’s Canadian union threatened strike action, she opened negotiations with a story about her daughter’s first minimum-wage job; the gesture cut through tension and led to a three-year deal ratified in record time.

Her rule: if you can’t explain your decision to a 15-year-old, you haven’t thought it through.

Podcasts and audiobooks for growth

Commutes between Toronto, New York, and Milan left Batchelor with headphones surgically attached. She rips through audiobooks at 1.

75× speed, pausing only to scribble voice memos she later turns into team Slack posts. Recent favorites include *The Culture Code*—“great frameworks for turning marketing teams into cults of collaboration,” she laughs—and *Arrive and Thrive*, whose webinar she joined last week to pressure-test her post-Campari plan.

Adam Grant’s *WorkLife* podcast gets the Sunday-morning slot while she meal-preps; she once cold-e-mailed Grant a question about gender bias in promotion cycles, then forwarded his reply to HR with the subject line: “New performance-review checklist—let’s debate Monday. ” The payoff: her 2023 engagement survey showed a 22-point jump in “I see a path to advance” among female employees.

Mentors and consultants shaping thinking

Early in her GM transition, Batchelor asked the regional CFO to adopt her—“not for spreadsheets, but for the guts to say no. ” He taught her the 24-hour rule: any budget request above $250 k sits overnight before signature; if you can’t remember why it mattered the next morning, kill it.

External voices matter too: consultant Andrea Carter reframed her entire DEI approach, shifting the conversation from “hiring diverse talent” to “engineering belonging. ” Batchelor piloted Carter’s model in the Canadian branch—small rituals like rotating who runs the weekly huddle—and saw voluntary turnover among under-represented groups drop to half the industry average in twelve months.

Her takeaway: “Mentors don’t give answers; they loan you their courage until yours arrives.

Continuous industry curiosity

Despite two decades inside beverage giants, Batchelor still schedules “bar safaris” once a quarter: she and a cross-functional squad visit five venues in a single night, tipping in cash, eavesdropping on order language, and photographing back-bar layouts. A recent crawl through Nashville’s Broadway strip revealed that THC seltzers were outselling vodka-sodas after 10 p. m.

; she summarized findings in a one-page brief that landed on the desks of Campari’s innovation team Monday morning. She keeps a “trend graveyard” slide deck—dead fads like CBD bitters or crystal-infused tequila—to remind herself that timing beats trend-spotting. Her ritual question when interviewing potential marketers: “Tell me about the last product you paid for with your own money that shocked you.

” If the candidate can’t name one, the interview ends over coffee—her treat, but her search continues.

Decision‑Making in Disruptive Times

Saying no to focus on high‑potential brands

The hardest decision Batchelor ever made wasn’t green-lighting a splashy campaign—it was pulling seven-figure support from legacy SKUs that had paid the bills for decades. “My boss told me strategy is as much about what you say no to as what you say yes to,” she recalls.

With a 50-brand portfolio whispering for dollars, she instituted a “zero-based happiness test”: every brand had to prove it could deliver either volume, margin, or cultural heat; anything that scored zero on two consecutive quarters got relegated to maintenance mode. The move freed $18 million in year-one spend, which she immediately reinvested into Aperol and Wild Turkey—two brands that doubled their contribution within 24 months.

Her rule of thumb: if you can’t write a one-sentence funeral announcement for a brand you’re cutting, you’re not being ruthless enough.

Launching the Afro Spritz initiative

In 2017 the U. S. market had never heard of Afro, an Italian aperitif that lived in Aperol’s shadow across Europe.

Rather than dilute focus, Batchelor doubled down, diverting 30 % of the entire North American media budget to a single-country pilot. “We seeded bright-orange bicycles to influencers, hosted sunset yoga-spritz events, and convinced bartenders to swap the traditional Aperol for Afro in their summer menus,” she explains. The gamble paid off—Afro volume grew 400 % in key metro accounts within one season, forcing national distributors to bump it from bottom-shelf obscurity to eye-level placement.

The lesson: challenger brands don’t need bigger budgets; they need calendar-defining moments consumers can photograph and post before the ice melts.

Balancing risk and opportunity

Batchelor keeps a “risk ledger” taped inside her notebook: left column lists worst-case scenarios, right column lists learnings even if the worst happens. When THC beverages began swallowing shelf space in Illinois, her team pushed for a quick joint-venture launch; she paused, citing regulatory fog and the three-tier system’s allergy to ambiguity.

Instead, she allocated a modest experimental fund to track velocity data and lobby state associations for clearer rules. “We spent $150 k on insight instead of $15 million on inventory,” she laughs.

The data now guides a 2025 rollout roadmap that factors in excise-tax shifts and distributor margin tolerance—proof that smart delay can be more profitable than first-mover bravado.

Timing product launches with trends

Flavor trends, Batchelor argues, behave like S-curves: too early and you’re educating an empty room; too late and you’re fighting for scraps. At PepsiCo she watched an all-natural cola die in 2010 because “the wellness wave hadn’t hit the Midwest yet.

” The miss taught her to overlay Google Trends data onto distributor depletion rates, creating an index that signals when a niche is ready for mass shelves. “We mapped the espresso-martini revival six quarters before it exploded, reformulated Skyy Vodka with a coffee-botanical expression, and shipped it to on-premise accounts the week bars reopened post-lockdown,” she says.

Result: 2. 3 million incremental cases without a national TV spot, validating her mantra—“launch at the inflection, not the inception.

Navigating Shifting Consumer Trends

Health‑focused and non‑alcoholic growth

Batchelor spotted the wellness wave before most spirits executives acknowledged the category existed. "Consumers have more choices than they ever have," she notes, tracing the trajectory back to her PepsiCo days when better-for-you formulations were already reshaping soft drinks. The spirits industry simply arrived fashionably late. Now she's watching non-alcoholic brands multiply like craft breweries in 2012—fragmented, experimental, and hunting for shelf space. Her advice to founders: don't benchmark against alcoholic counterparts; study how Vitaminwater convinced Americans to pay premium prices for colored water.

The real opportunity lies in ritual replacement—creating the same ceremony as a 6 p. m. pour without the ethanol. She's tracking startups adding adaptogens and nootropics, predicting the winners will master occasion-based marketing rather than ingredient bragging rights. The challenge isn't consumer acceptance—it's distribution economics.

"The companies have been a little bit later to the game," Batchelor explains, but shelf sets in progressive states already dedicate 4-6 feet to zero-proof sections. She's advising brands to launch direct-to-consumer first, building evangelists who'll badger their local retailers for placement. Traditional wholesalers still treat these as niche, so she's seen success through hybrid models: one brand partners with yoga studios for monthly subscriptions, then uses that data to prove velocity to skeptical distributors. The metrics that matter? Repeat purchase rate and cross-shopping patterns—evidence that consumers aren't just dabbling but converting their Tuesday night routine.

Emerging THC‑infused beverages

The THC beverage aisle fascinates Batchelor because it breaks every rule she learned in alcohol. "It's still very unclear from a regulatory point of view," she cautions, pointing to recent federal shifts that could reshape category economics overnight. Yet consumer behavior is sprinting ahead of legislation. Walk any Illinois dispensary and you'll spot THC seltzers shoulder-to-shoulder with craft beer—shelf space doesn't lie. She's counseling clients to treat this like 2018 CBD: massive potential, massive volatility.

The winners won't be first movers but fast followers who can pivot when the FDA inevitably clamps down on dosage labeling or cross-state shipping. Her framework for evaluating THC plays mirrors venture capital due diligence. First, understand the state-specific regulatory moat—some markets require vertically integrated supply chains, others allow white-label production. Second, analyze consumption occasions: data shows 72% of THC drinks are consumed solo at home, suggesting marketing should emphasize relaxation rather than party culture. Third, price elasticity behaves differently; consumers will pay $8 for a 10mg drink but balk at $12 for 5mg, creating inverse value perception versus alcohol.

She's tracking a stealth opportunity in hospitality: hotels in Colorado and California adding THC mocktails to room service menus, capturing travelers who can't smoke in non-smoking rooms. The category's dirty secret? Most products taste terrible—opening the door for flavor innovators who've mastered the art of masking cannabis bitterness.

Mapping flavor cycles for relevance

Batchelor's trend-spotting methodology could make Wall Street quants jealous. At PepsiCo she watched an all-natural cola launch crater because "it was probably a bit ahead of its time"—a $50 million lesson in timing over taste. Now she overlays Google Trends velocity against distributor depletion data, creating a "flavor S-curve index" that signals when niche becomes mainstream. The espresso-martini revival? She mapped it six quarters before TikTok caught fire, helping Skyy launch a coffee-botanical expression weeks after bars reopened post-lockdown.

The key insight: flavor trends travel through three concentric circles—mixologists, then lifestyle media, then grocery store buyers. Miss the second ring and you're explaining yuzu to suburban moms who still think Sriracha is exotic. She's currently tracking chili-mango as the next breakout profile, but warns founders that execution geography matters. "You need to think about mapping those trends looking at what stage in the life cycle was ideal to launch," she explains, noting that a flavor acceptable in fine dining might bomb at Walmart. Her team built a 24-month pipeline calendar working backward from development lead times—if tahini-caramel tests high in focus groups today, it hits shelves in spring 2026.

The sweet spot? Launch when Google search volume hits 65% of its eventual peak but before three major chains list competitors. She's seen mid-size brands win by owning micro-seasons: one rum company releases limited "harvest" expressions tied to sugarcane varietals, creating FOMO that justifies premium pricing without national advertising.

Challenger mindset for mid‑size brands

"Even if you're big within a category, you're small within the context of brands that consumers are exposed to each day," Batchelor insists—a philosophy that turns underdog thinking into competitive weaponry. She brought in Eat Big Fish consultancy to train her Campari marketers in challenger psychology: How do you build drama when consumers scroll past 3,000 messages daily? The exercise forced teams to audit real consumer behavior—watching Netflix with one eye while Instagramming with the other—then design campaigns that could hijack that fragmented attention. One breakthrough: Skyy Vodka's "Proudly American" campaign launched during immigration debates, generating 400% more engagement than product-centric ads by owning cultural tension.

She's exporting this framework to mid-size food and beverage clients who can't outspend Coca-Cola but can outmaneuver them. Step one: identify the giant's "reluctant sacrifice"—the consumer segment they've under-served because margins look better elsewhere. Step two: create a "David vs. Goliath" narrative that reframes competition on your terms.

Step three: exploit speed advantages; while conglomerates need seventeen approval layers, you can prototype packaging in 48 hours. She's advising a craft tonic water company to attack Coca-Cola's premium mixers by positioning themselves as "the brand that doesn't own a sugar plantation"—turning supply chain transparency into moral high ground. The result: 40% velocity lift in independent retailers where story can outweigh shelf blocking.

Female Leadership Mentorship Strategies

Seeking allies, mentors, and sponsors

Batchelor learned the hard way that climbing without a rope is reckless. "You cannot get there on your own," she insists, recalling how she used to treat independence as a badge of honor until a missed promotion taught her otherwise. During the Women in Leadership roundtable, she absorbed Janet Fowdy’s distinction between allies who amplify your voice, mentors who guide your growth, and sponsors who throw your hat in the ring for stretch roles. Each plays a different instrument in the same orchestra: allies retweet your ideas in meetings, mentors rehearse tough conversations with you after-hours, sponsors hand you the solo before you think you're ready.

Batchelor’s breakthrough came when she started treating these relationships as strategic assets rather than nice-to-haves, mapping who filled which seat for every major career move. Her practical approach is almost transactional in its clarity: identify one gap per quarter—negotiation skills, P&L fluency, political savvy—then source the person who already models it. When she needed to understand distributor economics, she didn’t ask her boss; she asked the national accounts VP who had survived three ownership changes and still grew share. The request was specific: "Can I buy you coffee and walk through how you built that bridge with Southern Glazers?

" She arrived with a one-page agenda, left with a four-step action plan, and closed the loop two months later with results. That disciplined cadence turned casual advice into a living curriculum.

Formal mentorship program design

After watching too many promising women stall at mid-level, Batchelor stopped leaving mentorship to chance. She commissioned a simple survey—seven questions on skills, career goals, and personality preferences—then licensed a plug-and-play platform that matched mentors and mentees like a corporate dating app. "We encouraged all people managers to participate," she explains, making mentorship a line item in leadership objectives rather than a charitable afterthought. The pilot matched 120 pairs in the first month; within a year, voluntary turnover among female high-potentials dropped to half the industry average.

The secret sauce wasn’t algorithmic genius—it was accountability: every match had to set a 90-day goal, document it in the system, and review progress in their performance review. Suddenly mentorship carried the same weight as hitting shipment targets. She iterated quickly. Round-one mismatches taught her to weight personality complementarity over functional expertise—finance whizzes paired with brand storytellers often produced more innovation than finance-to-finance pairs.

They also added a “reverse mentorship” track where Gen-Z analysts taught senior directors how to read TikTok sentiment, flattening hierarchy and keeping veteran executives culturally fluent. Quarterly virtual mixers replaced awkward coffee setups; mentees pitched three-minute “problem statements” and mentors voted with virtual sticky notes on which issue to tackle as a group. The result was a living network rather than a static directory—one that survived her departure and is now run by an internal committee she no longer needs to chair.

Leveraging internal and external networks

When Batchelor stepped into general management, she felt the language shift immediately—marketing acronyms were replaced by cash-flow ratios and union bylaws. Rather than fake fluency, she sent a concise email to the regional CFO: "I need a mentor for six months to help me speak shareholder. " The CFO’s reply—"I’ve been waiting for someone to ask"—opened a structured relationship that met twice a month and covered everything through the lens of capital allocation. Internally, she also mined “horizontal networks,” joining the monthly supply-chain stand-up even though it wasn’t mandatory; those relationships later saved her when a glass shortage threatened holiday shipments.

Her rule: attend one meeting a month that’s outside your direct remit and take notes like a foreign correspondent. External networks proved equally strategic. Despite fierce competition, spirits executives share data at industry conferences that no consultant can buy. Jessica Spence, then at Bacardi, walked her through distributor negotiation tactics over a 45-minute call; Claudia Schubert, ex-Diageo, sent a two-page teardown of how to position a premium American whiskey in Canada.

Batchelor reciprocates by sharing anonymized learning’s on her LinkedIn, creating a karmic loop that keeps intelligence flowing both ways. She keeps a running “ask list” in her phone—three names she still needs an intro to, two white papers she can’t locate, one speaking slot she wants—and reviews it every Sunday night, turning serendipity into schedule.

Paying mentorship forward

Batchelor’s inbox is a museum of courage: junior analysts asking for 15 minutes, MBA students pitching thesis ideas, mid-level managers requesting feedback on promotion narratives. She answers every one within 48 hours, often with a voice note while walking between terminals. "People generally want to help," she reminds herself, channeling the generosity that once lifted her.

She’s developed a “five-sentence framework” for quick replies: gratitude, one insight, one tactical next step, one resource link, open-door closer. It keeps the interaction meaningful without consuming her calendar and trains mentees to arrive prepared with specific questions rather than vague pleas for “career advice. " Her preferred currency, though, is visibility.

Once a quarter she hosts a virtual “career studio” capped at eight participants; each gets ten minutes to present a career dilemma and receive live coaching from the group. Alumni of these studios have landed stretch assignments in London, pivoted from finance to brand, and one recently became her peer—a fellow GM in a sister division. Batchelor’s metric of success is simple: when the people she mentored start mentoring others, she knows the flywheel is spinning without her.

Actionable Advice for Emerging Leaders

Taking career into own hands

Batchelor’s most candid admission is that she spent too many early years waiting for permission. “You need to go and seek out those opportunities in your career. You cannot get there on your own,” she warns, sounding more like a ringside coach than a C-suite veteran. Her first proactive move was embarrassingly simple: she asked the regional CFO to adopt her for six months while she learned the grammar of cash-flow statements. The request felt audacious—she was a marketing VP confessing ignorance—yet the CFO later admitted he’d been waiting for someone to ask.

The lesson: craft a one-sentence ask that makes it impossible for the other person to say “I don’t have time. ” Hers was: “I need thirty minutes a month to keep me from bankrupting Canada. ” Specific, slightly humorous, and outcome-focused. She now counsels rising managers to keep a “curiosity invoice. ” Once a quarter, list the three things you don’t understand that could derail your next promotion—union law, route-to-market math, TikTok media buying—then invoice yourself for the answers.

Send one cold LinkedIn voice note per item; accept the first reply that offers a concrete next step. Batchelor’s hit-rate is 70 %, and she tracks it in a spreadsheet color-coded by response time. The meta-skill isn’t networking; it’s learning to treat your own development like a P&L line item with quarterly targets and a clear ROI.

Building consumer‑centric brand thinking

During her “bar safari” nights, Batchelor forces marketers to leave the boardroom and sit where decisions actually happen—on sticky bar stools at 11 p. m. “Walk in your consumer shoes,” she insists, banning focus-group two-way mirrors in favor of real-time eavesdropping.

One team member noticed women ordering vodka-sodas then secretly topping with Diet Coke to cut calories; the insight birthed a lower-ABV spritz line that added 14 % incremental volume without cannibalizing core SKUs. Her rule: if you haven’t overheard a stranger bad-mouth your category in the last thirty days, you’re too far from the front line. To operationalize empathy, she issues a “wallet biopsy.

” Each marketer must spend one Friday night using only the cash an average target consumer carries—say, $37 for a 28-year-old in Austin—and document every choice fatigue point: cover charge, tip screen percentages, ride-share surge. The exercise kills corporate vanity metrics; you can’t brag about impression share when you just watched a student abandon your brand for a $2 well-shot special. The deliverable is a 90-second TikTok-style video summarizing the night; the best clips are stitched into onboarding playlists so new hires absorb consumer pain before they learn the org-chart.

Using data to anticipate trends

Batchelor’s obsession is the gap between Google Trends and distributor depletion reports. “If you jump on trends once it's already in the market, you're probably too late,” she cautions, describing how she overlays search velocity against wholesale shipments to spot the 65 % inflection point—high enough to indicate mainstream readiness, low enough to avoid commodity bloodbaths. When espresso-martini queries hit that threshold, she fast-tracked Skyy’s coffee-botanical expression into production, hitting shelves two weeks after bars reopened post-lockdown. The product grossed 2. 3 million incremental cases with zero national TV, validating her mantra: “Data doesn’t predict the future; it buys you a head-start in the race you’re already late to.

” She turns every marketer into an amateur statistician by issuing a “trend ledger. ” Each person must log three signals per week—TikTok audio, niche sub-reddit posts, regional menu sightings—then rate them on a 1–5 “S-curve stage. ” Items that average 3. 8 across the team trigger a 30-day sprint: reformulate, design, and soft-launch in a single metro market. The ledger is visible on an internal Notion page that auto-updates like a stock ticker; red cells indicate missed windows, green cells show early entries.

Batchelor reviews the board every Monday at 7 a. m. with the same intensity she once reserved for Nielsen decks, turning trend-spotting from creative voodoo into a measurable KPI.

Creating influence through collaboration

Campari’s internal mentorship platform started as a side project; Batchelor weaponized it into a collaboration engine. “We encouraged all people managers to participate,” she says, but the secret was forcing cross-functional matches—finance paired with brand, supply-chain with creative. The result: a marketer learned to model cash-flow impact of a new flavor, while the accountant discovered how cultural heat could justify risk.

Six months later, the duo jointly presented a case to divert $3 million from legacy brands into Afro, a move that tripled revenue and became the template for portfolio re-allocation. Influence, she realized, isn’t granted by org-charts; it’s engineered through shared spreadsheets and mutual wins. Her final hack is the “reverse ask.

” Instead of requesting mentorship, rising leaders offer micro-expertise: “I can decode Gen-Z TikTok audio for your brand if you’ll let me shadow your next distributor negotiation. ” The swap feels equitable, removes awkward power dynamics, and creates a deliverable both parties can showcase. Batchelor’s last reverse ask produced a dual by-line in *Beverage Dynamics*—a junior analyst on media metrics, a senior VP on route-to-market strategy—cementing both careers and proving that the fastest way to gain influence is to give away specialized knowledge first.