The power of the CMO+CSO connection
Clockwise from top left: KoAnn Skrzyniarz, Marc Pritchard, Virginie Helias, Amanda Nusz, Rick Gomez and Simon Lowden
Day 2 of the SB Leadership Summit kicked off with a series of intimate
conversations between Sustainable Brands™ founder and CEO KoAnn
Skrzyniarz, and CMOs and CSOs from two of the world’s largest consumer
products companies and a giant US retailer.
Virginie Helias, Chief Sustainability Officer at Procter &
Gamble, began by describing
the CMO and CSO connection as “twinning and winning.” When CMOs and CSOs work
together, everyone is winning — describing the great support she received from
CMO Marc Pritchard when she pitched the new role of CSO. The pitch was
essentially, “Let’s make sustainability an integral part of how we innovate,”
Helias said. At the beginning, there were skeptics, but initiatives such as the
Head & Shoulders ocean plastic
bottle
— the world’s first recyclable shampoo bottle made from up to 25 percent
recycled beach plastic; and later, the Fairy Ocean Plastic
bottle
made from 100% recycled plastic and ocean plastic, brought them round. “People
who didn’t want to hear about sustainability said ‘I want that!’, because it was
marketing at its best,” Helias recalled. Pritchard’s advice to CMOs was:
“Find
those big ideas and then shine a light on them —through PR, conferences, and
annual reports. Then it becomes truly built into how the business works.”
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“Having corporate responsibility right beside the business helps you create
bigger ideas than you had before,” said Rick Gomez, Chief Marketing, Digital
& Strategy Officer at Target. He
shares how when Target was developing a loyalty program, Marketing and Corporate
Responsibility teams worked together to create a scheme where guests could vote
for the charities they wanted to donate to. The program has now impacted over
115 different charities.
Simon Lowden, Chief Sustainability Officer at
PepsiCo, is marrying his
marketing career with a personal interest in sustainability and family farming
background. He has ensured that there are sustainability team members in each of
PepsiCo’s key function and sectors. An education program helps marketeers to
understand the societal roles that their brands play, while the company’s
‘Sustainable from the Start’ initiative allows them to judge whether an
innovation goes ahead based on both its sustainable footprint and financial
metrics.
A live Q&A inevitably turned to the emotional events of the past week — the horrific killing by Minneapolis police by George Floyd and the outpouring of outrage not only across the US, but around the world. The panelists discussed the role of brands in throwing their weight behind causes such as ending systematic racism and working to ensure racial justice and equity. Pritchard asserted:
“Because we’re in brand-building, our initial instinct is to say something – go out there and post something; [but] the days of ‘my thoughts and prayers are with you’ are over. Action is what’s required.”
Gomez then recounted a conversation with Target’s VP of Corporate Responsibility, Amanda Nusz, after the looting of a Minneapolis Target store during an anti-police brutality protest sparked by Floyd’s death, which he said illustrated “the importance of why Marketing and CR really need to partner.” When Gomez proposed having a local artist create a mural to beautify the boarded-up store, Nusz pushed back with “Is that what the community really needs right now?” Gomez said it helped him to arrive at much the same conclusion as Pritchard:
“I think we’re quick to want to take action, and that’s well-intentioned — but we need to make sure that we’re listening to the community and that we’re co-creating with them, and providing the solutions that are going to drive long-term progress.”
Brands for Good: Collaborating for culture change
The question of how brands can best use their influence to support consumer
behaviour change for a better world is at the very heart of SB’s Brands for
Good (BfG) initiative. Participating partners
came together in conversation with Brands for Good VP Etienne White on the
second day of the SB Leadership Summit to discuss some of the key lessons that
are coming out of this collaborative platform.
Cultivating breakthrough creativity in a world of purpose
Clockwise from top left: Etienne White, Phil White, Yumi Clevenger-Lee and Anna Lungley
“For the first time, we’re seeing real alignment between investors, governments
and consumers in calling for change; and brands have no choice but to respond.
We need breakthrough creativity for this — brands that embrace disruption are
going to be the ones that win,” said Anna Lungley, global head of social
impact for Dentsu Aegis — a London-based
global marketing services group and BfG founding partner.
Nurturing that level of creativity internally among teams is often easier if
sustainability has been successfully built into a brand’s ethos, rather than
bolted on.
“When sustainability is embedded, it has so much more power,” observed Yumi
Clevenger-Lee, EVP & chief marketing officer for Nestlé Waters. “It can be
the foundation on how we build the brand and that’s where creativity can come
in.”
Diversity and cross-sector collaboration were held up as two crucial levers that
can instigate change.
“The more you can bring stakeholders together, the better equipped you will be,”
said Phil White, co-founder & chief strategy officer for Grounded
World, a New York-based social innovation consultancy
and BfG founding partner.
Bringing people together with different backgrounds, experiences and opinions
can also foster a sense of empathy that brands can tap into to help their
campaigns resonate more. The importance of getting people to feel, not just
think about what brands are saying, should not be underestimated: “That’s what
really drives action,” Lungley said.
There’s no question that the COVID-19
crisis has heightened
the need for authenticity. Lungley said those brands that can pivot and change
their messaging are becoming more relevant, while Clevenger-Lee emphasised the
need to bring humanity back into the equation: “It’s not, ‘what does the brand
want to say,’ but ‘what do people need?’”
Lifestyle innovation: Harnessing the power of employee engagement as a driver of behaviour change
Clockwise from top left: Etienne White, Doug Sabo, Kirsten Allegri Williams and Ed Huber
Employees have the potential to be brand champions — they are not only core to
the company’s backstory and journey, but are on the frontline of customer and
consumer interactions.
“Employee stories can be such a crucial part of a brand’s fabric, we need to
harness this,” said Kirsten Allegri Williams, chief marketing officer for
SAP
SuccessFactors.
The point was echoed by Doug Sabo, VP and global head of corporate
responsibility & sustainability for
VISA, who said his company’s
workforce were very much viewed as brand advocates.
“We use employees as part of our delivery, acting as a force for good,” he said,
adding that there was also potential to utilise them as a testbed. “We’re
looking at ways we can use rewards and nudges to transition their behaviour when
it comes to sustainability.”
With many staff now working remotely, there is a danger that internal
sustainability communications can be sidetracked. VISA has pivoted its
engagement efforts accordingly, making actions more relevant for the home rather
than workplace. One example Sabo cited was an Instagram challenge, to
encourage staff to share how they were living their most sustainable life.
In these COVID-19 times, it’s becoming clear that cultural values matter more
than ever. Ed Huber, Chief Sustainability Officer for
Clorox, said that his company’s
focus on doing the right thing had become a key enabler for new ways of working
and communicating. “We’ve shared best practice and protocols at record speed.
We’ve empowered people to make shifts in marketing messages.”
Impact metrics: Marketing needs robust, shared tools to measure change
Clockwise from top left: Etienne White, Jennifer Betko and Manu Madeddu
BfG is creating the space and opportunity for brands to engage more
constructively with their competitors when it comes to sharing lessons and
developing metrics and solutions that are both meaningful, and can scale.
According to Emanuele Madeddu, former EVP of global brand strategy for
National Geographic, this level of co-creation is becoming critical for
success. “In marketing, we want to win and today it becomes more important to
win with your marketing narrative when it can create positive change in world.”
Jennifer Betka, chief marketing officer for Boston-based agtech startup Indigo
Agriculture, said that when it comes to developing
impact metrics, experiences matter — that means looking at the bigger picture,
and ensuring that any tools can nudge sustainable behaviour for the greater
good: “Our customer is primarily the farmer, but our mission is to improve their
profitability in line with sustainability and people’s expectations.”
Picking up on this theme, Madeddu said that consumers were allowing — even
urging — brands to step in and help guide them during these unprecedented times.
“One thing that COVID-19 has done is accelerated transformation in many sectors,
including marketing. Continuing to change and adapt will be the winning factor
after this.”
Embedding sustainability for the long term
In closing, Lynne Biggar, chief marketing and communications officer for
VISA, spoke of the importance of giving marketing teams the freedom to lead and
a comfortable space to operate within, where they feel they can take some
risks.
“You have to let people run,” she said. “So many of our great ideas come from
our local marketers that as a global company, we can elevate and move forward.”
Biggar spoke about some of the transformative trends being accelerated during
this pandemic, such as the “real desire” from both merchants and consumers to
move away from cash. VISA is looking into how it can better support touch-free
payments and is also developing more sustainable ways to pay, more details of
which should be announced in the coming weeks.
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Maxine Perella is an environmental journalist working in the field of corporate sustainability, circular economy and resource risk.
Published Jun 3, 2020 2pm EDT / 11am PDT / 7pm BST / 8pm CEST