Jim Stengel spent seven years as global marketing officer of Procter and Gamble, leading a marketing transformation there. Since leaving he has worked on growing business through higher ideals and purpose-inspired leadership. He spoke with IRG founder Marc de Swaan Arons in July 2020.
His own purpose is stated simply: to help leaders be happier, more productive, more successful, and more fulfilled by finding their organization’s purpose and their personal purpose and making it sustainable.
Key findings
- Stengel breaks purpose into three steps: find or rediscover it, activate it, then measure it and link it to business metrics.
- His assessment is that the field has done well on the first two steps and little on the third, which leaves purpose vulnerable to personalities and to individual leaders.
- He names measurement as the reason skeptics remain, and calls cracking it his legacy.
- The Pampers turnaround is his proof point: within ten years the business tripled in size and became more profitable, and employee engagement moved from the lower end of the company to the top.
- His view of where change comes from is blunt. Business is our hope, because it is not coming from governments right now.
Measuring what has never been measured
Stengel says his team spent an off-site reviewing ten years of work and asking what the next five or ten should look like. The answer was purpose measurement, and they set out to find who was working on it around the world.
The company they found is a five-year-old business called BERA, recommended by the global CMO at Walgreens Boots. They piloted purpose measurement with it for about a year, liked the results, and then invested through a venture capital firm.
Challenger boards
Stengel sat on a challenger board himself and has reapplied the idea repeatedly. When his own company ran an off-site, they brought in around ten people from various fields to poke at them and push them.
The line that changed his direction came from that room: that the company had been a good vitamin and needed to be a painkiller, tackling something more important. That session is what led them to purpose measurement.
De Swaan Arons describes the same mechanism at Dove, where the brand needed outside expertise because it was moving into beauty, female empowerment, and services it knew little about. The board members were called collaborators and met every six months for twenty-four hours.
Where the story starts: Jif, then Pampers
His first brand manager job was Jif peanut butter, stuck in a share battle where the advertising claim was product superiority. The team asked how to make a bigger impact and went out to talk to mothers, parent teacher associations, farmers, and magazine editors.
The conclusion was that the brand had to play a bigger role in people’s lives and align with the values of the consumers it served. They built the largest donation program to parent teacher associations, tied to sales by zip code, and talked about the farmers they worked with.
Share started to rise, and the differentiation came from values rather than product alone. The metric he took from it is one question: does that brand care about what I care about.
Pampers was in worse shape. From a brand equity perspective it was terrible, with no empathy and no compassion, and he says the factory was the boss rather than the consumer.
The insight the team started from was that Pampers is present at the moment of birth more than any brand in the world, and that the company was doing nothing with it. That question produced the purpose the brand was still activating twenty years later.
Never stop being customer-centric
Stengel argues the great organizations have always been consumer centric, spending time, energy, and money making customers’ lives better, and that a business that does not do that will not end well.
He describes it as work that is never finished, because behaviors and habits keep shifting, and says a major job of a leader is to stay inquisitive and set the standard for closeness to customers.
The ritual he cites is a chief executive who began every global leadership meeting with an immersion among consumers the company did not know well, before any business was discussed.
His advice to multi-brand CMOs is to codify how the company builds brands and keep refining it, because that is how learning from one brand scales into a company-wide capability.
Storytelling, and the technology CMOs
Stengel relays advice from a chief financial officer who always begins a quarterly earnings call with the story of the company before the results, because analysts focus on whatever you lead with.
The claim attached to it is striking: quarters with terrible results where the stock price rose because the story was strong, though you still have to deliver against the story.
In technology companies, he says the effective CMOs are the ones who represent the customer, know their needs, desires, and frustrations, and coalesce the organization around them. Ann Lewnes at Adobe is his example of strong cross-functional relationships.
The mindset that distinguishes them is not arrogance but collaboration, cooperation, innovation, and inspiration around making the lives of the people they serve better.
He ties it back to how people decide. People decide with their whole brain, and one reason P&G is where it is now is that it became more emotional, more caring, and more whole brained.
What CMOs should do now
His first instruction is to be in touch with employees: listen to what they are going through, how they see the world, and what they think the company should be doing.
The theme he sees in the leaders he interviews weekly is time spent listening, learning, and asking what they can do to help their companies and their people. His summary is to be in touch with consumers but with employees even more, because the ideas are already there.
On the wider role of business, he says leaders have to prepare for a world where they must care about the planet, society, inequality, and racism, because if business does not do it, it will not be done.
He closes on a lesson given to him as a young man about accountability: if it is to be, it is up to me. He says marketers are well positioned to be change agents and cannot blow it.
Scope and limitations
This is one leader’s account rather than research. The purpose measurement work he describes was a pilot at the time of the conversation, and he discloses that he and his team had invested in the company doing it.
Source
This page summarises Virtual Fireside Chat about Purpose and the Role of the CMO in Driving Multi-Stakeholder Growth, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Jim Stengel, July 10, 2020.