September 2026 Bonfire Marketer of the Month: Juan Florez

Each month, Braze selects one individual as our Marketer of the Month in order to celebrate the exceptional work being done by members of our Braze Bonfire community. Whether it's providing support for their fellow marketers or going above and beyond by sharing their innovative ideas and strategies, these individuals are making essential contributions to their companies, their users, and the customer engagement space as a whole.

This month, we’re recognizing Juan Florez, Head of CRM at Snoonu. Aligned with Qatar’s vision for a diversified, knowledge-based economy, Snoonu drives innovation across delivery, q-commerce, last-mile logistics, and B2B solutions, seamlessly connecting customers, merchants, and partners nationwide. We spoke to Juan about his background and what they’re working on at Snoonu. Let’s dive in.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Juan Florez, Head of CRM at Snoonu in Qatar. I’ve spent more than nine years working across CRM, lifecycle, retention, and growth, with experience across Latin America and the Middle East, including companies such as Rappi, iFood, and now Snoonu.

I did not start my career thinking I would eventually lead a CRM function. What pulled me into this space was the combination of customer behavior, data, technology, and creativity. I have always been interested in understanding why people come back, why they stop engaging, and how you can use data to make communication genuinely more useful rather than simply sending more messages.

Over time, I became increasingly focused on CRM and lifecycle, and my role became more technical and strategic as well. I moved from executing campaigns to designing lifecycle strategies, building automation frameworks, and working closely with product and data teams. At Snoonu, that evolution eventually led me to Head of CRM, where I now focus on how CRM can influence retention, engagement, loyalty, and the broader customer experience across a super app with many different use cases.

How do you see Braze as a career accelerant?

For me, Braze has been a career accelerator because it pushed me to stop thinking only like a campaign marketer and start thinking more like someone who builds customer engagement systems.

To get the most out of the platform, I had to become more technical while staying focused on the customer and the business. I learned how data structures, APIs, Liquid, experimentation, and custom experiences fit together, but just as importantly, how to translate those capabilities into better lifecycle strategy. That combination helped me become much more comfortable working across marketing, product, data, and engineering.

That shift has had a direct impact on my career. I moved from thinking primarily about individual campaigns to thinking about customer journeys, incrementality, personalization, and the infrastructure behind scalable engagement. Developing that mix of strategic and technical skills has been a big part of my progression into a Head of CRM role.

What has your experience been like working with the Braze team and community so far?

What has stood out to me is that the relationship with Braze has always felt collaborative rather than transactional. Our account team takes the time to understand what we are trying to build, challenges our thinking when useful, connects us with the right people internally, and encourages us to share what we are learning with the broader community.

Alannah Higgins and Orlando Beakbane in particular have been very supportive of the Snoonu CRM team and have consistently created opportunities for us to go deeper, whether through product conversations, community initiatives, certifications, Forge, or the Torchie Awards. I also value how practical the Braze community is. Seeing how other teams solve similar problems often sparks completely different ideas for our own business, especially because there is rarely only one way to use the platform well.

Have you taken any of the Braze certification exams?

Yes. I completed the Braze Certified Digital Strategist certification in 2023. It gave me a strong foundation in the platform, but most of my learning since then has come from applying Braze to increasingly complex real-world problems. I also encourage my team to use Braze Learning and certifications because having that shared foundation makes it much easier to move into more advanced use cases.

What is one campaign or initiative you have worked on in the last 1-4 months that you’re most proud of?

The initiative I’m most proud of is our World Cup 2026 activation, built after Snoonu became the Official Delivery Partner of Qatar’s National Football Team. It is also the work we submitted for the 2026 Braze Torchie Awards in the Creative Excellence category.

Instead of treating the sponsorship as a traditional awareness campaign, we asked ourselves a different question: how could Snoonu actually become part of the World Cup experience for fans? We built an engagement platform in Braze that connected real-time football moments, personalized communications, commerce, loyalty, and gamification throughout the tournament.

For Qatar matches, we created a Braze Content Block that combined creative assets for 26 national-team players with 11 different goal scenarios in English and Arabic. A live sports API gave us the match context, and we could activate a prepared campaign almost immediately while Braze resolved the right player image and message for that exact moment. After matches, we used a single campaign to personalize communications for more than 40 nationalities based on each customer’s nationality and language. Some users even shared screenshots organically on social media because they were surprised that a delivery app was celebrating their team with them in such a personal way.

We also built three interactive games entirely inside Braze In-App Messages using custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Match the Cards, Predict & Win, and Match Day Challenge. The games lived completely inside the Snoonu app and connected with our Royal Club loyalty program, while Liquid and custom attributes allowed the experience to change based on each customer’s state and previous interactions.

PREDICT & WIN

MATCH THE CARDS

TRIVIA

During the first 18 days of the activation, the three games generated approximately 136,000 plays from more than 75,000 unique participants and over $1.19 million in attributed revenue. A celebration campaign after Qatar earned its first-ever World Cup point generated $1.237 million in revenue over 48 hours, while one of our pre-match “Winning Flavors” activations generated more than $437,000 from a single send.

What makes me proudest, though, is not only the results. The activation changed the way we think about CRM internally. It showed us that Braze can be much more than a messaging platform. It can become a real-time experience layer where customer data, content, loyalty, and interaction come together inside the product.
Interested in collaborating to build the future of customer engagement? Join a collective of experts to forge connections, share ideas, and accelerate your career at the Braze Bonfire Community.