Nestlé Infant Nutrition — When Moms Decide, AI Guides (Taiwan)
PLATINUM — 2026 Marketing Makes a World of Difference™ Awards
By adapting marketing to the way mothers actually make decisions, Nestlé used technology to provide more relevant guidance while reducing unnecessary information and repetition.
Submitted by Zenith Taiwan
Winner’s Citation
For recognizing that one of marketing’s most valuable roles can be helping people navigate uncertainty—using technology and human judgment to make communications more timely, supportive and responsive to the realities of new parenthood.
How It Makes a World of Difference
Few decisions feel more consequential—or more personal—than those parents make for their children.
Yet new mothers increasingly make those decisions amid an extraordinary abundance of information. Searches lead to reviews. Reviews lead to recommendations. New questions create new searches. What looks like a straightforward consumer journey from the outside can feel anything but straightforward to the person experiencing it.
For Nestlé Infant Nutrition’s NAN HA3 brand in Taiwan, that presented a particular challenge. In an intensely competitive infant-formula market, traditional linear marketing funnels were proving inadequate for understanding how mothers actually evaluated their choices.
Research by Nestlé and Zenith Taiwan revealed something more interesting: mothers’ decision-making was both rational and deeply emotional. They searched, reconsidered, sought peer validation and moved backward and forward through the process. The team called this behavior “MomLogic.” And the critical insight was that building confidence could matter more than simply pushing product features.
Instead of asking mothers to follow marketing’s traditional journey, Nestlé decided that the marketing should become better at following theirs.
AI helped make that possible. By analyzing 45 days of digital behavior, the MomLogic model identified signals associated with different moments in the decision process. Two models—EXPLORER, focused on confidence, and PROSPECTOR, focused on action—helped determine when different kinds of information could be most useful.
But technology wasn’t allowed to make the entire decision. Human judgment established the tone and emotional guardrails. As the team described it, people determined the why and how, while AI helped determine the when and where.
The Difference Marketing Made
Marketing didn’t add more information to an already crowded parenting journey. It worked to make the information mothers received more relevant to the moment they needed it.
That distinction matters.
The initiative was designed not simply to identify people more precisely so that Nestlé could advertise to them more often. It included “fatigue guardrails” intended to prevent repetitive advertising from becoming overwhelming, while a rolling 45-day window helped keep communications relevant to a baby’s changing developmental stage.
In other words, the intelligence was used not merely to increase the efficiency of persuasion, but to make marketing more responsive and less intrusive.
For a category built around decisions that can carry enormous emotional weight for parents, that represents a meaningful shift in the role marketing can play.
Rather than saying, Here is what we want you to know, the marketing became better equipped to ask, What would be useful to you now?
Results That Make a Difference
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The strongest result wasn’t simply that greater relevance improved marketing performance. It was that Nestlé demonstrated that greater precision doesn’t have to mean greater pressure. Used thoughtfully, intelligence can help marketing know not only when to appear—but when not to.
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