Richard Manso Is Building the Marketing Muscle Between Data and Trust

In the early 2010s, a beauty brand had a very modern problem. Lancôme’s websites, ecommerce operation, and online marketing depended on developers and creative staff working across an in-house team, outside partners, Chicago, India, and points between. The work moved, but seeing the work was harder. Richard Manso, then the brand’s director of interactive marketing services, reached for a tool better known in software teams: Jira.

The choice sounds ordinary now. In 2012 it was a revealing act. Manso was not asking technology to make marketing look futuristic. He was asking it to reduce meetings, cut the email relay, and show everyone where a project stood. The valuable outcome was visibility. A campaign could move faster because fewer people had to reconstruct its status from fragments.

That small operational scene contains most of Manso’s career in miniature. His path has run through consulting, interactive production, ecommerce, brand portfolios, retail platforms, and now the C-suite. At each stop, the recurring problem has been connection: between the creative idea and the delivery system, between a customer signal and an organizational decision, between a global platform and the person standing in a store aisle.

The technologist in the beauty aisle

Manso did not arrive in beauty by the customary route. His earlier work included roles at Accenture, Science Applications International Corporation, and Razorfish, spanning technology consulting, business analysis, and digital project management. In a later L’Oréal feature, he was direct about the gap in his résumé: he did not have a background in beauty. What he had was a deep interest in digital and technology.

That distinction became useful. An industry organized around brand codes, counters, launches, and physical retail was rapidly acquiring a second anatomy: content pipelines, websites, customer databases, direct commerce, search, social platforms, and measurement. Manso could see the machinery without mistaking it for the point. The systems existed to help a team deliver an experience and learn from the response.

E-commerce and digital is a strategic priority for the business.Richard Manso, L’Oréal’s Beauty Tech & Beyond series

His responsibilities widened with that anatomy. The Lancôme years brought public digital-excellence recognition in three consecutive editions of L2’s Beauty Digital IQ Index, from 2012 through 2014. By 2015, The Network Journal had named him among its 40 Under Forty Achievers. He returned to L’Oréal in 2017 and rose through senior ecommerce and digital roles, eventually serving as Chief Digital & Marketing Officer for the Dermatological Beauty division.

The division included CeraVe, SkinCeuticals, La Roche-Posay, Vichy, and Dermablend. Its digital work could not be reduced to a single store or media channel. It involved direct-to-consumer sales, acquisition and retention, performance marketing, data activation, and the difficult work of getting specialist teams to behave like one business. When Manso recruited publicly for the group in 2022, he credited its progress to “talented and passionate individuals” and promised some fun alongside the acceleration. Former colleagues answering the post praised his leadership and the team. Public recommendations elsewhere describe someone reserved, detail-minded, analytical, and able to build consensus.

A career measured in widening circles

The promotion story is easy to tell as a ladder. The more interesting version is a set of widening circles. First came individual projects. Then a brand. Then a division and its portfolio. Google added a platform view, where marketers, merchants, media, and consumer behavior collide at enormous scale. Haleon now adds the full U.S. marketing organization and a seat on its leadership team.

Manso joined Google in late 2022. He served as Senior Director of Retail & Merchant Marketing and later as Senior Director of Global Ads Marketing. The company says he led large-scale B2B programs and helped drive adoption of data- and AI-enabled marketing solutions. Those words can become vague quickly, but his published work gives them shape.

In March 2023, Manso wrote an essay on the next five years of retail. Its central observation was that shopping was becoming ambient. A person could discover something in a social feed, research it through video, inspect it in a store, and purchase it through a different interface. The channel was no longer the journey. Content, commerce, and physical space were bleeding into one another.

He also argued that automatic brand loyalty was weakening, that partnerships would become more valuable, that Gen Z would exert more influence, and that consumers wanted both value and less risk around their data. Read three years later, the essay feels less like a forecast than a specification for his next job. A portfolio marketer has to help brands stay recognizable while the places of discovery multiply. A leader has to connect the organization as quickly as the consumer moves.

The trust brief

Haleon appointed Manso U.S. Chief Marketing Officer on April 27, 2026. He reports to Nathalie Gerschtein, the company’s U.S. CEO and President of North America, and leads the integrated U.S. marketing organization. The stated remit is to combine data, technology, creativity, and human insight while building more personalized, transparent, and relevant consumer experiences across the portfolio.

The portfolio includes names that have lived in cabinets, travel bags, and shopping lists for years: Advil, Centrum, Sensodyne, Theraflu, and TUMS among them. Familiarity is an asset, but it can also make marketing lazy. A known label still has to earn attention in a discovery environment shaped by search, retail media, video, recommendation engines, and an expanding set of digital assistants.

There’s a real opportunity to rethink how brands show up, not just as products, but as trusted partners in everyday life.Richard Manso on joining Haleon

The word “trust” is doing serious work in that sentence. Data can tell an organization when and where to appear. Technology can personalize the encounter. Creative work can make the message memorable. None of those, alone, decides whether the appearance feels useful. Trust is the judgment the consumer makes after the machinery has done its work.

That makes Manso’s operator background more relevant than a standard CMO narrative might suggest. The challenge is not merely selecting a campaign idea. It is designing the conditions under which thousands of decisions - about audiences, content, commerce, measurement, and brands - add up to something coherent. The old Jira story returns at a larger scale. Make the work visible. Give teams a shared view. Reduce the distance between a signal and a decision.

The quiet advantage of being hybrid

Manso’s public profile does not perform the founder mythology of a single breakthrough. It shows an executive apprenticeship assembled across different kinds of rooms. A consultant’s room values structure. A beauty brand’s room protects meaning. An ecommerce room measures friction. A platform room sees systems and scale. A CMO’s room has to hold all four without letting one vocabulary dominate.

That hybrid quality is increasingly the job. Modern marketing leaders are asked to be translators between creative teams and technical ones, between quarterly performance and long-lived brands, between personalization and restraint. Manso’s résumé makes sense because marketing itself absorbed the categories that once sat beside it.

There is a personal footnote in the record, too. In 2021, after a nomination from L’Oréal USA leadership, Seramount recognized him as the company’s Working Dad of the Year. The award sits beside digital rankings on his public list of honors. It adds a human counterweight to a career full of systems language. Colleagues’ descriptions do the same: hard-working, reserved, reflective, supportive, capable of holding detail and consensus at once.

Haleon is the newest and widest circle. Manso has said he wants to bring data, technology, and creativity together to form more meaningful consumer connections and help drive the company’s next phase of growth. The aspiration is public. The proof will arrive quietly: in teams that share information sooner, brands that appear with better timing, and consumer experiences that feel connected even when the organization behind them is vast.