Brian McNamara and Tamara Rogers were preparing to spin GSK’s consumer healthcare business out as an independent company, which put them in the rare position of writing a corporate purpose before the company existed. They started in December 2019, before the pandemic, and spent the next six months meeting sometimes twice a month for hours at a time. How long it took is the useful part of the account.
McNamara’s instruction to the leadership team was about the timescale the answer had to survive. The statement would be around for the next 50 years or more, so it was not something to settle in a meeting and lock. It had to be sat with, debated, and made real before anyone signed it off.
Key findings
- The wording the leadership team arrived at did not survive contact with the wider leadership. When McNamara and Rogers rolled it out to the top 140 leaders, the articulation was not crisp and clean, and the feedback was heavy. They took the feedback rather than defending the draft.
- Accepting that feedback was possible because six months of argument had already settled the substance. The team knew it was clear about delivering better everyday health and clear about humanity, so only the phrasing was still open, and the phrasing could be simplified.
- McNamara treats the redraft as the mechanism by which the statement acquired owners. Enrolling the top 140 leaders, hearing that it landed differently than intended, and then acting on that is what produced ownership and engagement through the company.
- Rogers rejects the idea that they are starting from scratch. The new company carries a large legacy forward: trusted science, brands known to pharmacists, and scientific backing under the GSK name. The work was deciding which parts of that to pull through, because those are what make the new company authentic.
- The distinction the brand teams then had to work with sits inside the phrase itself. The purpose is delivering better everyday health with humanity, not for humanity.
What the investors now ask about
McNamara had met hundreds of investors in the year before the listing, and reports massive interest in the environmental and social agenda. Investors expect a clear line from purpose to business strategy to growth. His condition is resourcing rather than language: it cannot just be words, and a company that truly stands for something has to put resources behind it.
For a consumer healthcare business the link is unusually short. Growth means reaching more of the 1.5 billion people the company serves, and McNamara argues that it is growth which earns the business the right to do good at all. The tie between the environmental and social agenda and what investors want, on his account, has never been clearer or tighter.
Asked whether investors have really changed, McNamara adds one qualification. The agenda should not sit separately from delivering shareholder returns, because it runs from purpose through strategy to growth, and the two are synergistic rather than at odds. The first place he intends to prove it is health inclusivity, after a pandemic in which underserved populations suffered more.
Health stopped being a thing to deal with later
Rogers compares how people used to treat their health with how the young treat a pension, something to put off until tomorrow. The pandemic moved it front and center, and she has the numbers. Health related searches on Google rose 25 percent in Germany alone, to 9 billion, and sales of vitamins and mineral supplements such as Centrum and Caltrate rose in double digits.
What Rogers draws from that is operational. Information hunger means the brands have to show up with the right information along the consumer journey, and holistic interest opens innovation beyond the treatment phase. To keep pace they ran a search project with Google called Covid Watch, and Voltaren, a brand about the joy of movement, started running at-home exercise classes.
The brand whose promise went tone deaf
Theraflu, sold in the US and much of Europe, was built entirely on helping people power through a cold. Rogers says the team saw quickly that this was massively tone deaf as the pandemic arrived. The last thing anyone with a respiratory illness should do is push on rather than rest, recover and hydrate. The brand’s purpose moved instead toward a flu safe world.
That took the brand past messaging and into a program. The US team joined up with an organization to help cover sick pay for people whose employers do not provide it, so that someone who cannot afford a day off can take one. Rogers points to the women it reaches, many Latina or Black, who keep earning and caring for their families while ill themselves.
Purpose is not an add-on because the budget will not carry one
Rogers’s test for whether a brand purpose is real has two sides. It has to align with the brand’s own values and with the values of the target audience. Her reason for insisting it be core is commercial. Purpose is an expensive add-on if it sits outside the business, and the advertising budget will not stretch to anything that fails to build the heart of the brand.
Voltaren shows the range she wants. The brand treats osteoarthritic knees and muscle pain, conditions that make people stop moving, and its purpose is to get them moving because movement aids recovery. It goes a stage further, to the valuable connections movement makes possible, a bike ride with a granddaughter or a walk with friends. Rogers is candid that other brands still have only a strong product promise.
The mechanism is internal rather than an agency brief. Teams go back to what the company calls a brand heart, a statement it rarely changes. They work with a small central group Rogers likens to an internal agency with a planner and experienced marketers. The question put to each team is concrete: what does a brand like Panadol actually do with humanity.
An investment, not a program
McNamara had always run leadership development in cohorts of six or seven, and now had to reach the 140 leaders below his own team at a moment when nobody could travel. Working with the coach Kevin Cashman, he built six group sessions of two to four hours. He insists it was not a program and not a course but an investment, and opened by telling the group his own purpose.
Between sessions the group split into home pods of ten, deliberately assembled from people all over the world so that many members had never met. Those pods turned into a support network and the format spread almost virally. Rogers says her own pod is still going, long after the arranged sessions ended, and now has a life of its own.
The reception was not immediate. McNamara reports people wondering aloud whether they really had to spend a couple of hours on this when they had work to do. What it became, at a point when personal resilience was badly stretched, was a moment of pause, reflection and recharge, and that is where the momentum came from.
His reason is a claim about multiplication rather than morale. If people’s personal purpose connects to the company’s, McNamara believes you create something rare in an organization, and Rogers calls that alignment a massive multiplier. He accepts the other outcome without dressing it up. Someone who cannot find the connection may need to do something else, which he frames as personal growth rather than failure.
Where their own purposes come from
McNamara’s purpose is bringing courage, energy and passion to inspire growth, and he dates it to a retirement party 25 years ago. His father was leaving a bank after 40 years, and speaker after speaker described how he had shaped their growth, their life and their family. That was the retirement party McNamara wanted, and the idea has widened since from people to businesses and communities.
Rogers traces hers to playing center midfield, the position that sets up plays. She liked changing direction in a game and making the pass that unlocked someone else, so her purpose began as being the wind beneath other people’s wings. In the CMO role that stopped being enough. She is not satisfied unless she sees change, so belief and landing change joined the unlocking.
She learned to build belief on Axe, the teenage body spray sold as Lynx in some markets. Every year the team took a crazy new idea to general managers who were not themselves teenage boys, starting from something fragile. Rogers also moved from marketing into sales, before category management existed, to bring the consumer and the shopper into the argument for doing things differently.
What a chief executive wants from a marketing leader
The first thing McNamara wants from his chief marketing officer is the consumer in the room. A leadership team faces every kind of demand and stakeholder, and he wants reminding that this is a consumer company whose job is to serve them. He also wants that understanding to go past the standard phrase, calling it deep human understanding rather than consumer insights.
The second is reach. McNamara dispenses with the adjective everyone still uses: there is no more digital marketing, only marketing in a digital world. The test is whether insight driven content reaches consumers when and where they need it most. The third is the least conventional: he treats the marketing organization as the holder of the vision, the dream and the purpose, which is why Rogers helped write the company’s.
Silos designed for a different decade
Rogers agrees her role has broadened, but says that in many ways it reaffirms what marketing always was. It has always been about growth, about understanding the consumer and about identifying growth opportunities. People were not born on this planet to consume, she says. They have a need, and if you serve the need you sell.
The relationship that has changed most is with technology. Her closest ally on the leadership team is the chief digital and technology officer, and the vocabulary is the evidence: she never used to talk about martech, customer data platforms or tech stacks. Whether a company appoints a chief marketing officer, a chief digital officer, a growth officer or all three depends on the company.
Her diagnosis is about organization design rather than seniority. There are too many silos, and they reflect how organizations were built 10 or 20 years ago. What she wants instead is collaborative agile teams that pull in the right ingredients at the moment they are needed. Part of her own job is joining the dots and watching for what could derail the company.
Experience runs from the cap to the exercise class
Rogers’s design team has always worked in design thinking, putting people at the heart of business problems, and is now broadening into experience design. The clearest case is smoking cessation, where the US team rebuilt what someone trying to give up meets online and when they meet it. The measure of success there is the same as the purpose, which is lives saved.
Experience runs the whole length of the product. It covers flipping open the cap of a Voltaren tube and applying it, a piece of design that won an award, then buying it in store, the content online, and the at-home exercise program. McNamara adds that none of it works without supply chain, regulatory, medical and R&D at the table, a far wider group than marketing and sales.
Two things they wish they had known
McNamara’s lesson, drawn from two integrations, a pandemic, a separation and earlier supply problems, is a reframe he applies to difficulty itself. When he feels overwhelmed or over challenged he treats the situation as the next leadership challenge and the next chance to grow, and asks who else gets to do this. Every challenge, on that reading, is an opportunity to learn.
Rogers’s is about how finished something has to be before anyone outside sees it. Going back 10 or 15 years, her teams crafted things to perfection before showing them outside, and the test came at the end of production. She would now get something scrappy out early so consumers can say whether they even want it, iterating rather than assuming you know it all.
Scope and limitations
This is a conversation recorded in December 2021 with two executives preparing a company for separation, so much of what they describe is in progress rather than complete. They say so directly, pointing forward to a capital markets day in March and a spin planned for mid-2022, and they decline to discuss the new company’s name or brand.
Source
This page summarises HGS #37: Tamara Rogers & Brian McNamara (GSK) about the power of purpose and the role of marketing, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-02-14.