This is an episode of the Humanizing Growth web series, run by the Institute for Real Growth. The conversation is a personal leadership journey rather than a company story. Its stated purpose is that other growth leaders and CMOs can take lessons from it and apply them.
Debora Koyama’s guest account runs from Brazil to the United States to Europe, and from packaged food to beauty to beer. The repeated move is the same one. She takes the option other people call impossible, then builds the evidence that it works.
Key findings
- Analysis comes first and the heart decides last. She describes gathering all the information and the best data available, and then following her heart.
- The change method is a sequence. Find a cause you believe in and champion it. Build a plan, recruit allies, secure a leader’s sponsorship, and start small.
- A business case is not optional. Her advice is to build it, win small, show the result, and only then scale.
- Well-being is treated as a professional variable, not a personal one. She traces her own mistakes to moments when she was off balance.
The advice she did not take
The MBA was the first turning point. A consultant told her flatly, on her birthday, that she would never get into a top MBA program because of her background. A senior colleague told her she was too old and should stay in Brazil. She went anyway.
The cost was real and she states it plainly. She quit her job, ended her relationship, put her savings into the fees, and covered the rest with a scholarship.
One conversation runs the other way. A fifteen-minute exchange with an executive at a conference talked her out of moving abroad without a plan, and she credits it with changing her life. Her conclusion is about the responsibility that carries. Leaders rarely register the effect they have on the careers of people they advise.
The first sustainability platform
At L’Oreal she launched her first sustainability platform, on Garnier, with TerraCycle, a company that recycles packaging. The proposition asked consumers to send back packaging, including that of competitors. It launched small, as a public relations campaign in Times Square with the partner’s founder, and became a multi-brand platform.
That project changed how she saw the job. Marketers, brands, and companies have a large opportunity to have an impact on global issues. She has campaigned on that basis ever since.
Making the case in a performance culture
At AB InBev the question was how a water platform connected to the brand. The link was direct: water is most of what beer is made of. The partner chosen was Matt Damon’s organization, picked not only for the name but because his co-founder is a long-standing expert on global water access.
The research settled the argument. Testing showed the platform driving brand love and purchase intent, and starting to show it would drive sales and affect the business. That is the point at which she says she saw with her own eyes that purpose can drive growth.
Benchmarks are not always available. The circular economy platform Loop, piloted at Mondelez, was new enough to the world that the usual comparisons did not exist. Her position is that the business case is still required, and the pilot is how you earn the data.
Asked for the takeaway from those years, she gives two. Purpose can drive growth. Change starts somewhere small.
The sabbatical
The program asks leaders to tell stories of failure, and hers is about depletion rather than a botched project. She was working close to exhaustion. Taking a sabbatical felt at first like a failure and became one of the best decisions of her life.
Purpose, stated
She articulated a personal purpose in a workshop: to inspire people to achieve their full potential, on the belief that everyone has a gift to give back to the world. She describes living it through the work, including a roadshow to 500 marketers with purpose at its center.
On diversity she speaks from the position of the outsider. She says she always felt she did not quite belong, and that marketers have to champion diversity because the world is diverse.
Growth, and who it is for
Asked what the global growth operations role is for, she answers that it is about accelerating top line growth. The host puts the institute’s position against it: growth means value creation for all stakeholders, with the top line as a result. She treats the difference as semantic in this case, since the shareholders are one stakeholder among the others.
The pandemic shifted the balance of attention toward colleagues and communities. She confirms it from her own company: during the crisis the first priority was people.
She closes on a line she read out from a documentary about Joseph Campbell. Speak to the mind and you reach minds. Speak through your life, and the life is the story, and you change lives.
Scope and limitations
This is a personal account given in a live conversation. The results described are the speaker’s recollection of her own projects, and no figures or study data are presented for them.
The Unilever role was new at the time of recording. She says she is still shaping the agenda, so nothing here describes what the role achieved.
Source
This page summarises HGS #11: Debora Koyama (Global Growth Officer, Unilever) about marketing and her personal purpose, by Marc de Swaan Arons.