Sylvia Lagnado led Dove globally when the campaign for real beauty was created, went on to be chief marketing officer at Bacardi and McDonald’s, and is now sustainable growth officer at Natura and Co. Her account of how the Dove positioning was approved is not about the argument. It is about a short, rough film of the daughters of the senior men in the room, talking about what they liked and disliked about their bodies.
The idea came out of a brainstorm with Daryl Fielding, then the account director on the brand. The film was made without the fathers knowing, and used strategically and tactically at the start of meetings to open the conversation about the positioning. Lagnado has been told that in the dark, tears ran down people’s cheeks.
Key findings
- The commercial problem the positioning had to solve was mundane and is usually left out of the story. Dove was a soap, shelved beside paper goods, and needed to be a beauty brand to succeed in hair and skin.
- The objection was a claim about how the beauty category works: that you cannot debunk stereotypes in beauty and also be a beauty brand, because the category runs on aspiration. Lagnado’s answer was that it can run on inspiration instead.
- Her definition of conviction is narrower than certainty. It is being sure that something can work, not that it is going to work.
- The creative breakthrough came from the same place as the internal film: someone’s own life rather than research. Klaus Arts told Lagnado he had talked to his wife about beauty, something they had never had reason to discuss, and that she should trust him to find a campaign now. Her conclusion is that it starts with you having your own belief, not with the consumer.
Ask more people than is comfortable
Lagnado trained as an engineer, and says her strategy tends to start as a ton of homework and a ton of asking people, with the aim of hearing as many points of view as possible. The failure she sees in others is self-protective. People stop consulting because they do not want to get confused, and cannot see how they will get moving once the views diverge.
Her advice to anyone whose mind does not work that way is to hang out with people whose does. Once she has heard everything and formed a view, conviction kicks in and she becomes, in her own words, a bit unstoppable. When explaining her reasons is not enough, she expands the box and brings in someone like Daryl Fielding, which is where the film came from.
Integrity and contentment
Asked for her purpose, Lagnado declines the tidy statement and names two things that guide her instead. The first is integrity and authenticity, which in practice means taking whatever she thinks is right and fair and true. That choice cost her something at some moments in her career and was the breakthrough at others, and she links it to why she fell in love with Dove.
The second is contentment, which she calls a practice rather than a temperament: she works at being happy with what she has, and changes something as soon as things start to shake her. That is why she is comfortable with change. She is equally direct about the cost, wishing for more compassion and admitting she gets task oriented enough to forget to bring others along.
A founder who wanted a competitor to succeed
Natura was founded 50 years ago by Luiz Seabra to make a difference, obsessed with environmental and social impact long before the world caught up. Its lines start from a philosophical position rather than a market gap. Chronos was built around what aging does to how women see themselves, and Lagnado says it was an incredible source of inspiration for Dove, which is not the version usually told.
Two days before this conversation, Seabra told her that seeing the Dove billboards in New York had given him profound happiness. Asked what he meant, he said he felt so strongly about the mission that he did not care who did it. If he could not get out of Brazil and Latin America to do it, and someone else could do it globally, fine.
Buying the forest standing
The Amazon program Lagnado describes is a commercial mechanism rather than a donation. The company buys ingredients straight from the communities there, so that they make more money than they would by chopping down the trees, and the biodiversity of the region is preserved. The continuing search for new usable ingredients is what keeps the arithmetic holding when someone else arrives with more money for the same land.
Buying companies for their convictions
The rationale Lagnado gives for the group’s acquisitions is belief rather than synergy. Of The Body Shop she says they probably overpaid and wanted it anyway, out of a desire to unleash its spirit of fighting for a more beautiful, fairer world. Her diagnosis of its years under L’Oreal is fit rather than performance: a brand meant to be an activist did not belong there.
Avon, completed this year, brought commitments on breast cancer, domestic violence and women’s independence alongside the obvious synergies, and the group now operates in about a hundred countries. Lagnado describes her own role in it as one with no authority attached. The companies are autonomous, so she has to invent what she thinks will create value and convince them, and if she does not, she has nothing to do.
The targets, and the one they chose to make harder
The group’s ten-year sustainability commitment, Commitment to Life, was launched in the same weeks as the protests in the United States and the rush of brands taking a position, and Lagnado says the decision she is proud of was not stopping it. Two of its three pillars are environmental and stated without hedging: net zero within ten years, and fully circular packaging and product within ten years.
The middle pillar is people, and the decision she describes is going further on inclusion than they would otherwise have gone, in the weeks when publishing what was already agreed would have been easiest. The company is largely 50-50 on gender already, with a small gap left on the board and in senior management, and had set a disability target of 10 percent and reached about nine.
Rather than write their own measure, they adopted B Corp’s, which requires 30 percent of people from underrepresented groups for the highest score, and applied it to management, where it is harder to reach. Who counts as underrepresented is left to each country rather than fixed centrally, so the makeup of the target changes market by market.
Nobody had to be told to put people first
Asked whether the crisis gave marketing a bigger role, Lagnado refuses the flattering answer. For two months it was crisis management, and what united everyone was that people mattered most, ahead of the bottom line and the debt covenants that came next. She does not think anybody was saying that marketing was responsible for bringing the humanity back. Everybody did it.
Where she does see the function take the stage is the second phase, when the question turned to what would be different afterwards and the insights team was asked to come and tell us how the world is going to be different. Her evidence that constraint helped is a Mother’s Day campaign created and shot from people’s homes on a low budget, the most successful the company had run.
What has actually changed about the job
Lagnado came into marketing by accident. She applied to Unilever for IT and logistics, was offered a marketing traineeship instead, and took it as the least creative person in her family. Two years of unfashionably basic training followed, on why the functional side of a brand matters and why the emotional side matters, and she credits it with everything since.
Her view is that the fundamentals have not moved: companies and brands get built by stories, and by products that manifest the story coherently and address a need. What has changed is the direction of control, which she puts sharply. The response you get now matters more than the stimulus you create, and opting out of data means someone else gets the better insights.
Learning communications by being bad at it
Lagnado took internal and external communications on as a side item and found it was neither, having done no crisis communications at all before. She is unusually plain about how it went: terrible at it, so much effort that she was exhausted, and by her own account less bad rather than good. The larger surprise of those months was pace, which she puts down to people showing their best selves.
Scope and limitations
This is a personal recollection of events from roughly two decades earlier, recorded in 2020, and Lagnado flags her own uncertainty about the details as she tells them. The commitments described for Natura and Co were targets announced at the time rather than results, and she says so herself: there is the intent, and we will see.
Source
This page summarises HGS #17: Sylvia Lagnado (Sustainable Growth Officer, Natura & Co) on what drives purposeful growth, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2020-10-22.