Keith Weed spent nine years as chief marketing officer of Unilever, with sustainability and communications in the same job. He took it after running a business rather than a function, and the brief he was given was not a marketing brief: reinvent the way business is done.
He sets the marketing job against the finance job deliberately. The chief financial officer’s job was to count where the money was going and see it spent responsibly. His own was to work out where the money was coming from, and to bring the outside in and the future forward.
Key findings
- Weed is insistent that the record is commercial rather than reputational, and gives the numbers before the argument. Sales and profits grew every year of his tenure, the share price tripled, and he puts total shareholder return at 290 percent.
- Asked repeatedly for the business case for sustainability, Weed inverts the question rather than building the case. He says he would love to see the business case for the alternative, for destroying the planet everyone lives on and the societies the company is trying to serve.
- The plan’s first distinguishing feature was scope. Unilever took responsibility for the whole value chain, upstream to raw materials and downstream to how customers use and dispose of the product, which he notes most companies still do not do. He makes the scope concrete with an unflattering comparison: it would be like the car industry declaring itself responsible for the oil industry.
- The sustainability case was partly self-preservation, and he says so. Without sustainable sourcing there would not be enough tea in the world for the company that sells the most of it, so the point was to future-proof the business as well as to do the right thing.
- The movement on sourcing over the decade is the measurable part: from about seven percent of agricultural raw materials sourced sustainably to virtually a hundred percent, with suppliers given years of notice and a condition attached. Come with us, he told them, or stop being a supplier.
Set targets you do not know how to hit
When Weed took the plan to the Unilever board, the objection was that it set targets nobody knew how to reach. He conceded the point instead of arguing it: some would be missed, others would not. Fifty time-based targets gave outsiders a scoreboard, and the campaigning organizations never gave Unilever a hard time, because the direction had been stated.
Admitting a target was beyond them produced help rather than criticism. Weed says that when Unilever missed one it asked for ideas, and someone would step forward with a suggestion. He also defends changing a metric, which the company was accused of doing to duck a hard target, on the grounds that persisting with a useless one would be madness.
Who stands up with the bad numbers
The most transferable piece of practice is a division of labor at Unilever’s annual progress report. Paul Polman, the chief executive, presented the metrics that had been achieved, and Weed presented every target the company was missing. Owning the failures first, he argues, is what makes the successes credible, and he applied the same rule with his own chief financial officer.
His example is the palm oil premium. Eco-efficiencies funded the plan and saved money, but sustainable palm oil costs more, and the finance chief would happily take the savings and not the premium. Weed set against it the 1.8 billion he saved inside marketing, and told marketers to beat themselves over the head before the finance chief gets the chance.
Communications, and why he wanted it
Weed did not understand at first why communications was added to his brief, and now tells marketing leaders to ask for it. Two people on an executive cannot run the narrative in a joined up internet world, and an internal memo one day is an external memo the next. He found external communication the best way to reach staff: read in the Wall Street Journal, a claim becomes the truth.
Different messages for different people, on purpose
Weed’s objection to most executive communication is that it is unconsciously self-addressed. Speakers motivate people the way they are motivated themselves, and so reach only the colleagues plumbed like them. His remedy is explicit and slightly mechanical: one version of the message for people like him, another built for the people it would otherwise miss.
The audiences he distinguishes are recognizable. Some people want numbers, some want the legacy story, some want a picture of where the world is going, and some just want good prose and words. To extend his own range Weed hired a coach from the theater, an unusual line item for a chief marketing officer.
Ninety thousand people, face to face
Weed and his team met roughly ninety thousand Unilever colleagues face to face, which he still rates above any alternative. The repetition was deliberate and uncomfortable. Polman was bored of a speech after five deliveries, and Weed’s answer was that he would give it ten times, refreshed with different anecdotes for different rooms.
The reason he insists on the old-fashioned cascade is not coverage but what it does to the messenger. People believe they speak the truth because they hear themselves say it. Anyone made to stand up and explain where the organization is going is therefore brought on board in the act of passing the message along.
Where the plan came from, and what it grew into
Weed traces the purpose to William Hesketh Lever, who wanted to make cleanliness commonplace and built the world’s largest private port at Port Sunlight to do it, long before EY and McKinsey began selling purpose statements. The interviewer adds that this is not a European habit: Hershey was building a village with childcare, education, safety and health in Pennsylvania at the same time.
The plan began environmental and had to be widened. The social half brought in diversity and inclusion, and with it the fact that most of the 1.5 million smallholder farmers Unilever sources from are women, while most of the land they farm is owned by men. Helping them source sustainably also raised their yields.
The examples he gives of the plan operating are physical rather than reputational. A factory in a water-stressed part of India or Africa that ships water in by tanker past drought-ridden villages has a societal problem, so Unilever now builds plants sized to supply the surrounding community as well.
The orangutans on the roof, and what changed in eight years
Weed’s first encounter with campaigners was Greenpeace protesters in orangutan costumes climbing the front of Unilever House over palm oil, and an instruction from his executive colleagues to sort it out. Eight years later, facing the Kraft Heinz takeover bid, the defense ran in two weeks: the economic case first, then a values week, never used, in which Greenpeace would have come out publicly for Unilever.
Weed does not claim the campaigners thought Unilever had it right, and says he would agree with them that it did not. The habit underneath the change is one he states plainly: listen to understand, not listen to be seen to listen. He went out to meet Save the Children and UNICEF, and reported progress against the plan publicly every year.
What he thinks the job now needs
Asked what the job now needs, Weed puts curiosity first and treats it as a business trait rather than a marketing one, since a good business person is already a great marketer. Second is putting real people first. Consumers are not a head of hair looking for a shampoo or a pair of armpits looking for deodorant.
Third is brand love and differentiation, and his evidence is a video circulating that week which cut together the pandemic advertisements of many brands to show they were indistinguishable. Fourth is holding both halves of the discipline at once. Marketing is magic and logic, and he wants more of each rather than a balance struck by having less of both.
On himself Weed is modest. You do not have to be a brilliant marketer to be a brilliant marketing leader, but you must surround yourself with brilliant ones and commit to training and coaching. No football team eats chips and drinks beer all week and then plays at the weekend, yet in business skill-building loses to being too busy.
Manage your own energy first
Weed’s leadership advice starts with the leader’s own state, because low energy transmits no matter how good you are. Some people walk into a room and suck the oxygen out of the air, and all opportunity and possibility go with it; others bring possibilities in. He does not demand relentless cheer, and says you need not be a hundred percent Tigger every day.
His definition of leadership is small in scope and large in effect: help people be at their best more of the time, and across a whole business the whole business lifts. He closes on why anyone chose this work in the first place, saying that being a marketer is fun and that miserable people deliver miserable results.
Scope and limitations
This is a retrospective account by the person who led the program, recorded in 2020 after he had left the company. The financial and sourcing figures are his own recollection rather than audited disclosure, and he acknowledges he is describing a record he is part of.
Source
This page summarises HGS #16: Keith Weed (former CMO, Unilever) in conversation about the evolving role of the CMO, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-02-14.