Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble and a 39-year veteran of the company, describes a philosophy of brand building built on being a force for good and a force for growth at the same time. He is clear that neither half works alone.
His argument for holding them together is commercial. Good without growth and value creation makes a company a philanthropy, which it is not, while growth without good makes it look mercenary to the consumers it serves.
Key findings
- The values arrived on day one. His first boss told him the company does what is right and focuses on the consumers it serves, and he still carries a badge listing integrity, leadership, ownership and teamwork.
- Purpose survives a downturn only if it is built into the business rather than added in good times. If it is a separate, bolted-on effort, it will never last.
- The examples are product innovations that carry both. Washing at lower temperatures cuts energy use and carbon emissions for a laundry load by 80 percent while being gentler on clothes, and a dishwasher recycles four gallons that hand washing pours away every two minutes.
- Accurate portrayal in advertising is treated as a business measure as well as an equality one. A gender equality measure study found accurate portrayal of women and girls increases trust by 10 percent and purchase by 20 percent.
- Consumer expectation supports the position. Nine out of ten consumers feel better about a brand supporting a social or environmental cause, and more than half expect brands to take a stand, rising well above that among younger consumers.
The four stakeholders, including the one he left out
Asked why he had not mentioned capital markets, he accepts the point directly and notes that superior results do deliver superior shareholder returns, while the order he starts from is consumers, employees, customers, communities and then shareholders.
The company purpose he cites is improving the lives of the world’s consumers with superior products and services, in a way that is good not only for shareholders but for employees and communities.
The core priority areas are equality and inclusion, environmental sustainability and community impact, with ethics and corporate responsibility as the foundation underneath them.
He argues the good and the growth reinforce each other, and that reducing energy, waste and water in operations saves money as well, because the company is spending less on resources.
Advice for a leader in a company that starts with the numbers
His advice is to start with the people you serve and understand what they want, then work out what your business can do that most makes sense for your product or service.
The next step is proof and then visibility. Once the company began proving that humanized growth also grew the business, it started shining a light on those cases, people became excited, and it turned into a creative exercise.
He does not pretend it is quick. Asked whether he makes it sound easy, he says it is not, and it takes time.
The example he gives is the diversity policy written decades earlier by leaders who knew progress would take a generation, because the company recruits from university and advances people internally.
Internal progress came before the external voice. It was not until 2014 that the company went out with a groundbreaking gender equality message, by which point enough internal progress had been made.
His summary of the sequence is blunt: do the work inside before you go outside. He reports that 48 percent of managers are women, and that the brand marketing organization he leads is evenly split at nearly every level.
Aspirations rather than quotas
The company sets aspirations and goals rather than quotas. His reasoning is that a quota forces compliance, and something can change in the company that sends the objective out of the door.
When the expectation is set with a case for why it is right for society and for the business, he argues people rise to the occasion because they see the reason and they see the expectation.
Accountability sits with leadership. Goals were set by the chief executive, broken down by business unit, and where they are not met the first question is for the analysis, with consequences following if the cause is a lack of leadership or action.
Asked whether strong shared values sit at odds with diversity of perspective, he says the opposite: the values drive respect for differences, and diversity, equity and inclusion drive the innovation the company depends on.
The tool he cites for disagreement is a better third way. When two options are on the table and people are at odds, the question becomes whether a different way exists, which he calls the definition of innovation.
The moment that changed his mind
The most profound intervention he describes came more than twenty years ago, when a minister at a ranch in Colorado told him that business would someday be the greatest force for good in the future, ahead of governments, clergy or laws.
At the time he was running a cosmetics business whose campaign was drawing feedback that its spokespeople were too young, too thin and too white, presenting a stereotypical and somewhat objectified standard of beauty.
Looking at his three young daughters, he decided they could not grow up thinking that was the definition of beauty, and the brand was changed toward inside and outside beauty with far more diverse spokespeople.
That campaign in turn inspired the work that changed the meaning of a phrase from a negative into a positive, after which the company declared it would use its voice as the world’s largest advertiser as a force for good.
Other work followed on laundry being shared by men, on the conversation Black parents have with their children about the prejudice they will face, and on the daily racism Black men encounter.
The pandemic response was deliberately unpublicized. Decades of disaster relief product donation were converted to help people in need during COVID, amounting to tens of millions of dollars with no headlines.
What a public backlash taught him
The setback he describes is the reaction to a razor brand’s film, which the company made to modernize a campaign that had become stereotypical and had over time diminished women, though not intentionally.
The film was simultaneously the most liked and the most disliked video, sparked organized objections and consumed a great deal of time, while being seen by 110 million people.
The immediate response was to check the intent and carry on. The company kept going, put out its own narrative, demonstrated what it was doing, and modified later work.
Three lessons came out of it. The film spent too long showing the negative before reaching the better part. Certain phrases act as trigger words and needed sensitivity. And rejecting the people who rejected the work was the wrong instinct.
He calls the resulting lesson one of the best he has had: always listen to someone with a different point of view and learn something from it. He is now far more respectful of all views.
His practical advice follows: when something might be controversial, go and listen to the people who might find it so, and let them give input first.
Position power, and making the job about other people
On the loneliness of leadership he points to position power: authority that comes from the role regardless of the person, which grows as responsibility increases and removes a leader from other people.
His answer is to invert the job and make it about being useful to others, and he tells the company’s leaders never to make the success or failure of anything about an individual.
He treats the role as temporary and as a privilege to represent the work of thousands of brand builders and partners, and offers a simple coping mechanism: flip it and focus on others.
Innovating innovation, and staying fresh
He calls the approach to disruption constructive disruption. Disruption can destroy value or create it, and the way to deal with it is to lead it in a way that builds markets.
In practice that meant adopting lean startup and lean innovation methods about five years earlier, with around 180 internal startups now operating on much faster cycles that iterate, fail, pivot and eventually scale.
The personal method is deliberate detachment from his own past work. He pretends to fire himself every 18 months and start over, choosing that interval because computing power doubles on roughly the same cycle.
The point of it is to arrive unencumbered by the past. He honors what came before but stays objective about what is working, and does not treat previous work as sacred.
The team brief is two-sided: win today and invent tomorrow, with a set of brand building fundamentals that do not change even as the way they are done does.
Recovery, and being visibly human
The self-care habit he passes on is a boundary. Decide when the day is done and put the phone to bed outside the bedroom, which he found particularly hard during the pandemic when people were not working from home so much as living at work.
His reasoning is that resilience depends on recovery, and recovery depends on setting boundaries.
He describes choking up while announcing a long-serving colleague’s retirement, and notes that showing that side matters because a CMO is often viewed as a machine rather than a human.
His daily practice is short and outward facing. He prays for the strength to be useful to whoever he comes into contact with, and is thankful for what he has.
Scope and limitations
The document states that the conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity, and the results described are one executive’s account of his own company.
Source
This page summarises Humanizing Growth Series: Marc Pritchard & Frank van den Driest in conversation, by Marc Pritchard, Frank van den Driest, June 2021.