Weed’s account starts with a diagnosis. Businesses began by serving society and people, and if you served a person better than someone else your business grew. Somewhere in the 1980s and 1990s businesses lost that compass and started focusing on selling more stuff.
The mandate he was given was unusually broad. He was asked to be chief marketing officer, run sustainability, and run communications, with the aim of reinventing the way the business was done and putting environmental and social sustainability at its core.
Key findings
- The answer he gives to anyone asking for the business case for environmental and social sustainability is to ask for the business case for the alternative: for destroying the planet we live on and the societies we are trying to serve.
- He is equally clear that it was about making money. Over those nine years the company grew volume and profits every year and tripled the share price delivered to shareholders.
- The plan took responsibility for the whole value chain, not only the company’s own footprint but its suppliers and raw material sources, and how consumers use and dispose of the products. He notes that most businesses still do not do that.
- Sustainable sourcing moved from about 7 percent of agricultural raw materials to virtually 100 percent over the decade.
- Marketing efficiencies saved 1.8 billion pounds over the same period, which he says played an important part in giving the function credibility.
Decoding the world, and why it is not just consumer insight
The work began with a comprehensive piece of trends research. Weed contrasts his role with the CFO’s: the CFO counts where the money is going and makes sure it is spent responsibly, while his job was to work out where the money was coming from and how the company would grow.
He describes the marketer’s contribution as bringing the outside in and the future forward, which he calls a tremendous relief to colleagues on the executive. One trend was environmental. Another was digital, which he notes was not obvious to a company like Unilever ten years earlier, and which took him on early trips to Silicon Valley with the executives.
The stakeholder logic was explicit and ordered. The consumer came first, then retailers and employees, on the understanding that if all those are well satisfied, shareholders will be well rewarded.
He roots the idea in the company’s own history. The founder saw the dirt and squalor of Victorian England and felt he could do something about it by bringing soap to the masses, with a purpose statement long before consultancies recommended them: to make cleanliness commonplace.
What the plan covered beyond the environment
The plan began environmentally focused, with targets around renewable power and zero waste to landfill from factories, but ended up covering environmental, social and economic sustainability.
The social side included an inequality Weed describes as still striking. The company sources from over 1.5 million smallholder farmers, most of them women, while the vast majority of the land they farm is owned by men.
The sourcing argument was also about survival. As the biggest tea company in the world, the company faced a future where there was not enough sustainable tea to go around, which made growing agricultural materials sustainably critical not only because it was right but to future-proof the business.
Suppliers were given a long runway and a clear condition: come on this journey, and if you do not, you will not be a supplier in future. He notes you cannot change things overnight at that scale.
Communicating it, inside and out
Weed argues the CMO should take over communications, because in a joined-up internet world you cannot have two people in the executive managing the narrative, and an internal memo one day can be an external memo the next.
He also uses external communication as an internal channel, on the basis that people discount what you say yourself but treat the same claim differently when they read it in the press.
The internal effort was mostly repetition and mostly in person. He met roughly 90,000 people face to face, on the view that it is the best way to engage people and to get them to pass the message on, since the person giving the message is brought on board as one of the disciples.
His warning on storytelling is against unconscious self-selection. Most people communicate in the way that motivates them personally, which does a great job of motivating everyone wired the same way and nobody else. His advice is to be calculating and deliver the message several ways.
Metrics, and getting on with the CFO
His advice on finance is not to hold on to your own metrics and ram them down people’s throats, but to take on the metrics of the organization, and to own up where things are not working because it gives credibility.
That meant being transparent about costs as well as savings, including admitting the premium price paid for sustainable palm oil. His blunter tip is never to let the CFO own metrics they can beat you with, and to beat yourself over the head in front of them instead.
On targets, the approach was to set a bold ambition and be transparent, even when the board pointed out they were setting targets they did not know how to achieve. He confirms that was true, that some were never achieved, and that NGOs did not give the company a hard time because the overall intent was clear.
Fifty time-based targets were published and tracked, and when the company was missing one it said so and asked for help. His observation is that someone always steps forward with a suggestion, so you should not feel you have to come up with all the answers yourself.
From Greenpeace on the roof to Greenpeace on the defense
Weed marks the change in external relationships with two moments. At the start, Greenpeace protesters in orangutan outfits were climbing the front of the company’s headquarters over palm oil, and his colleagues told him to sort it out.
Eight years later, when the company faced a takeover bid, the second week of the defense plan, which was never needed, had Greenpeace coming out in support. He calls a campaign group supporting a multinational extraordinary, and reports their reasoning as wanting more multinationals trying to make a positive difference even while agreeing the company was not getting it completely right.
His summary of stakeholder engagement is a distinction about listening: you have to listen to understand, not listen to be seen to listen. Organizations were invited in and progress against the plan was reported to them, good and bad.
What a marketer should be good at
The first competency is curiosity, about what is going on in the world and how a brand or service can have a more positive impact. He suggests market research reports are necessary but not sufficient, and that talking to friends and family counts.
The second is being people-focused, and he puts it sharply: people are not a head of hair looking for a shampoo or a pair of armpits looking for deodorant, they are real people with real lives.
The third is building brand love as a mechanism for differentiation, illustrated with a clip that put all the COVID advertising together and showed zero differentiation between them.
The fourth is unlocking the magic, on the view that marketing is art and science, creativity and effectiveness, magic and logic, and that more of both is needed at once.
The fifth is capability. He argues you do not have to be a brilliant marketer to be a brilliant marketing leader, but you must surround yourself with brilliant marketers, and compares the reluctance to train with a football team that eats chips all week and then gives it a go at the weekend.
On leadership itself, his definition is helping people be at their best more of the time, on the frank premise that everyone is a bit brilliant, a bit mediocre and a bit worse than that, and that lifting the ratio lifts the whole business. He also insists a leader manage their own energy first, since low energy transmits to everyone around them.
He closes on the choice the audience already made: they chose to become marketers rather than accountants or investment bankers, the work is about curiosity and serving people, and miserable people deliver miserable results.
Scope and limitations
This is one leader’s retrospective account of a plan he led, given in conversation rather than as documented research. He acknowledges targets were changed when they proved too difficult to achieve.
Source
This page summarises Marc de Swaan Arons in Conversation with Keith Weed, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Keith Weed, May 22nd, 2020.