Asia-Pacific Power List 2025: Le Thanh Tu, Nestle Water Vietnam

Le Thanh Tu  

Chief marketing and sustainability officer
La Vie, Nestlé Waters & Premium Beverages 
Vietnam
New member  

Le Thanh Tu is something of an F&B marketing queen in Vietnam. She’s dipped her toes in various marketing roles at the likes of Unilever for Knorr, Bel Group for The Laughing Cow, and Nestlé for Milo, and currently, bottled water brand La Vie, owned by Nestlé Water. With 15 years of F&B marketing under her belt, she’s rightfully known to be a specialist in the sector, often successfully driving new customer sets for her organisations. 

During Covid, La Vie was challenged by declining brand power, particularly among younger consumers. To battle this, Tu led the relaunch of La Vie’s ‘Positive Nature Regenerates Your Loud Life’ positioning with the aim of transitioning the brand from ‘hydration’ to ‘regeneration’. As a result, La Vie gained brand power throughout 2023 and 2024, and rose from a challenger brand to a market leader, picking up 36 awards along the way, including Campaign’s PR Awards Asia. 

Tu also led digitisation efforts for La Vie to personalise the consumer journey by leveraging data, CRM and AI to launch the brand’s social commerce presence and recruit new customers. And to tackle the challenge of unfamiliar palates for customers in the South of Vietnam, Tu and her team launched a light variant of La Vie's mineral water, which led to a gain in shares in the South that contributed to half of La Vie’s 2024 growth. This demonstrates Tu’s keen sense of localising products and campaigns to—literally—suit local taste. 

As sustainability head, Tu is passionate about driving ESG initiatives through La Vie and continually promotes recyclable plastic and sponsors clean water. To up the brand’s game, Tu relaunched its sustainability promise in 2024 and subsequently gained the confidence of key stakeholders to grow the marketing budget by a substantial margin last year. This marked the highest marketing investment in the company’s 32-year history. 

To ensure industry relevance, Tu is a member of the Modern Marketing Association (MMA) through which she has shared her experiences onstage as a Gold Global Winner at the association’s CMO CEO Summit. She was also a final jury member for the Smarties Awards in Vietnam and APAC. Last year, she shared La Vie’s case studies and AI learnings as a keynote speaker and panellist at various events like the MMA ALC Summit and the Vietnam AI Forum.