The first product Ana Maria Henao marketed was not glamorous. It was detergent, the kind of purchase made in a supermarket aisle and judged later beside a washing machine. She was an assistant brand manager at Procter & Gamble in Bogotá in 1999, starting a career that would move through color cosmetics, fine fragrance, shaving products, beer, chips, software and, eventually, a refrigerator's worth of food. The categories changed. The question underneath them did not: what does a person need, and will the company act on the answer?
More than twenty-five years later, that question has landed inside Sigma Foods. The Mexico-based company created a global chief marketing officer position in 2024 and appointed Henao in January 2025. Her brief is to align marketing across a business that sells food across countries, channels and cultures, and to turn consumer understanding into long-term growth. It is a large coordination problem disguised as a title.
Henao arrived with an unusual inventory. She had learned the classical discipline of brand management at P&G, the regional texture of Latin America at SABMiller and PepsiCo, and the pace of consumer technology at Microsoft. She had worked locally in the United States, regionally across the Americas and globally. She had managed both mass and luxury brands. Few careers offer such a clean test of which marketing ideas travel well.
Three words for when the recipe stops working
About five years before joining Sigma, Henao began trying to name what her own leadership meant. She settled on three C's: compassion, curiosity and courage. They sound soft until she defines them as a sequence of work.
Compassion
Empathy converted into a decision.
Curiosity
A refusal to become a finished product.
Courage
Action before perfect certainty arrives.
Compassion, in her formulation, is empathy plus action. A marketer can study consumers, map their frustrations and repeat their language in a presentation. But if the final decision serves whatever is easiest for the company, the empathy has produced nothing. Compassion creates a harder test: what changed because the team understood?
Curiosity keeps the system alive. Henao describes the brain as a muscle that needs daily training and the leader as a permanently unfinished product. That belief became practical when she moved from a quarter-century in packaged goods to Microsoft in late 2022. Within months, generative artificial intelligence became the organizing event in technology. Henao went on to help bring Copilot applications for Windows, Office and Surface to consumers across the Americas. A marketer trained on household goods was suddenly explaining a new way to work with a machine.
Courage closes the loop. Henao does not define it as fearlessness. She treats it as the point where action becomes more important than another decimal place of certainty. Leaders still need information and judgment. They also need to notice when the search for more data has become a comfortable form of delay.
“The brain is a muscle that you have to keep training every day.”
Ana Maria Henao, Earned podcast, 2023
Together, the three words form a loop: listen closely, learn continuously, then move. The result becomes the next lesson. Failure is useful when it feeds that loop, while inaction produces no comparable information. It is less a leadership slogan than a compact method for making decisions in unstable conditions.
The brand manager loses the spare key
Henao has a neat image for the marketing world she entered at P&G. It was like baking. The ingredients were known, the amounts were written down, and careful mixing reliably produced a cake. A brand might make two or three major pieces of content a year. Segmentation leaned on demographics with a little psychographic detail. The center held.
Now the ingredients change every day. A campaign may speak separately to students and parents, then split those groups again. Content arrives by the hundreds, much of it made by creators or consumers. The brand team no longer writes every line or controls every setting in which the product appears.
Henao calls the new arrangement “sharing custody of the brand.” The phrase works because custody includes responsibility. It does not mean handing the brand to the crowd and walking away. It means accepting that other people already participate in its meaning, then designing a relationship with that fact. A creator's version may not match a brand book perfectly. It may, however, carry the fluency and trust that a polished corporate asset lacks.
This is a surprisingly personal change for a profession built around stewardship. The old brand manager was rewarded for consistency and control. The modern one must preserve a recognizable center while allowing useful variation at the edges. The skill is no longer just approval. It is discernment.
A career built by changing the object
The most revealing feature of Henao's résumé is how often the object changes. At P&G, she spent thirteen years moving from Colombian and Venezuelan detergents to color cosmetics across Latin America, then fine fragrances, The Art of Shaving and ZIRH. Those assignments crossed routine and ritual, supermarket shelf and luxury counter.
SABMiller added content and digital marketing across Latin America. PepsiCo expanded the canvas from regional consumer connections to leadership of food and beverage marketing in the region, then to a global vice presidency focused on marketing excellence and partnerships. Microsoft placed the same consumer instincts inside a technology company as artificial intelligence began rewriting the product story.
Changing the object forces a leader to distinguish experience from habit. Experience identifies a recurring pattern. Habit keeps applying the old answer. Henao's emphasis on curiosity is the mechanism separating the two. The accumulated career matters because it supplies better questions, not because it guarantees a familiar solution.
Her path also runs from Colombia outward without discarding its regional intelligence. She studied International Business at EAFIT University in Medellín, later completing executive programs at Stanford, Singularity University and Columbia Business School. She has described herself as a lifelong learner, but her education is not confined to programs. Each category and geography functions as another classroom.
She has also kept a window open beyond the companies on her résumé. Since 2015, her LinkedIn record lists volunteer work with Joshua's Heart Foundation, a youth-led organization focused on hunger relief. Her industry service follows a similar pattern of participation: she has judged effectiveness and creative work for LATAM Effie, USA Effie, FIAP and the Festival of Media, including a jury chair role. A judge has to explain why an idea worked, separate a persuasive case study from a persuasive result and compare work built for different markets. For a marketer who prizes curiosity, the jury room offers another kind of classroom. It also puts her in a recurring conversation with the agencies, strategists and brand leaders shaping Latin American advertising. The connections are professional, but the practice is consistent with her larger point: learning is something a leader schedules, not something she claims.
“Compassion is all about empathy, but the definition of compassion is empathy plus action.”
Ana Maria Henao, Earned podcast, 2023
What Sigma is really buying
When a company creates a C-level role, it makes a diagnosis. Sigma's diagnosis was that marketing alignment and consumer centricity required a global owner. Its portfolio spans different food categories and markets, each with its own channels and habits. Centralization alone would flatten those differences. Total local autonomy would squander shared learning. The useful middle is a system that makes insight travel without pretending every consumer is the same.
Henao's career has rehearsed that tension repeatedly. Regional roles taught her to work across cultures. Global roles taught her to build common standards. Mass and luxury brands showed different kinds of value. Microsoft demonstrated how quickly a product narrative can change. At Sigma, those lessons meet a category that is intimate and habitual. Food enters homes, routines and family preferences. A global marketing strategy has to respect the local table.
The three C's offer one way to hold the assignment together. Compassion keeps the system anchored in people rather than headquarters convenience. Curiosity stops a successful playbook from hardening into dogma. Courage lets teams test, learn and move while consumer behavior keeps changing.
There is a quiet consistency here. Henao's public philosophy asks the marketer to surrender two comforts: the comfort of empathy without consequence and the comfort of certainty without action. Shared custody asks for a third surrender, the fantasy of total control. What remains is more demanding and more useful - a brand sturdy enough to recognize itself, open enough for people to make it theirs, and led by someone willing to keep learning what happens next.