Silvia Lagnado talks with Marc de Swaan Arons in July 2020. She was Unilever’s first global brand director on Dove and was instrumental in starting the Campaign for Real Beauty, later went on to lead marketing at Bacardi and McDonald’s, and is now chief sustainable growth officer at Natura and Co.
The title of the role was chosen deliberately. The chief executive wanted a chief growth officer, and they decided to call it sustainable growth officer because the founding company was built on the belief that brands and companies can make a difference.
Key findings
- Her biggest learning from the crisis is about pace and capacity: how much is possible, at what speed, quality and intensity, when people show their best selves.
- The company was founded fifty years ago by a man who said he did not want to talk about EBITDA or share, but about the difference the company was going to make in the world.
- Ingredients are bought directly from local Amazonian people, on the logic that helping those communities earn more than they would from chopping down trees keeps the forest standing.
- Her account of courage in brand work is precise: you convince yourself that something can work, not that it is going to work.
- On the CMO role she argues that so much has changed but at the core very little has, because companies and brands are still built by stories and by products that manifest the story.
A company built to make a dent
Lagnado had been on the board for about five years before taking the executive role. With the acquisition of Avon the group became the largest personal care company in Latin America, ahead of the other large players on market share and value share.
She tells a story about the founder that captures the company’s attitude to competition. Seeing the Dove billboard campaign in New York made him profoundly happy. He told her he feels so strongly about that mission that he does not care who does it, and that if a competitor does it, fine.
The acquisitions were chosen for the same reason. Aesop is described as a company with incredible principles and values. The Body Shop was wanted because of a shared spirit of fighting for a fairer world. Avon brought a commitment to women, to fighting breast cancer, standing against domestic violence and promoting women’s independence.
The film that changed the room
The Real Beauty work began as a repositioning problem. The existing testimonial campaign had been very successful but had started to become wallpaper, so the team went looking for a refreshed position that stayed true to the brand’s history but resonated more.
The commercial reason was to move from the soap shelf to the beauty shelf, which the brand needed in order to succeed in skin care. Plenty of people thought it was crazy, on the grounds that you cannot debunk beauty stereotypes and be a beauty brand, because the category works on aspiration.
The tactic that unlocked it came out of a brainstorm about how to convince senior people. Someone suggested filming the daughters of the senior men in question, asking what they liked and did not like about their bodies. The result was a rough short film, made without the executives knowing, used strategically in meetings to open up the conversation about positioning and intent.
De Swaan Arons sets the scene for what that meant in practice: an executive committee of a company with $50 billion in revenue and more than 200,000 employees, judging a new positioning intellectually, and then watching the people they love most talk about the parts of their bodies they dislike.
How she works
Two beliefs guide her. The first is choosing what she thinks is right and fair and true, which has cost her at moments in her career and been the breakthrough at others, on the reasoning that sticking with your principles helps you stay at peace. The second is practicing contentment, which is also what makes her comfortable with change.
Her working method as a global brand leader is homework and listening. Trained as an engineer, she does a great deal of preparation and talks to a lot of people, because she is curious to hear as many points of view as possible. She observes that many people avoid asking questions because they cannot handle diverging views, and her advice for those people is to keep company with people whose brains work that way.
Listening is not indecision. Her formulation is to hear why it would work and why it would not, and then always to have a point of view. Once she has one, conviction takes over.
The role now
What has changed, she says, is mostly technology. You cannot build brands the way you used to, the response you get matters more than the stimulus you create, media is complicated, and failing to use data well means falling behind. What has not changed is the theory of how brands and businesses are built.
She is notably unwilling to claim the humanity of the crisis response for marketing. Everyone put people first, everyone asked what about the people, and it was not HR alone or marketing alone. What she does claim is the second phase, where the question turned to what the future looks like, and where the CMO and the insights team now sit center stage.
On diversity she describes commitments being finalized at the time: net zero carbon and protecting the Amazon, full circularity of products and packaging within ten years, and a people pillar named as defending human rights and being human-kind.
The targets are specific. The company is already at parity on gender across the workforce and close on pay. It had already set a target for ten percent of the workforce to be disabled workers and is close to it. For broader diversity it adopted the B-Corp metric of 30 percent of people from underrepresented groups, and then set a harder goal on top: the same 30 percent entering management within ten years, with underrepresented defined by whichever groups are relevant in each country.
Scope and limitations
This is one leader’s account, given in conversation in July 2020. The company figures and targets she cites are her own, and the diversity commitments described were being finalized at the time of the interview.
Source
This page summarises Silvia Lagnado in conversation with Marc de Swaan Arons, by Silvia Lagnado, Marc de Swaan Arons, July 17 2020.