Marc Pritchard has spent thirty nine years at Procter and Gamble and is its chief brand officer. He frames the multi-stakeholder argument as a pair, force for good and force for growth, and is precise about what each half collapses into on its own. Good without growth and value creation makes a public company a philanthropy, and growth without good reads to consumers as mercenary.
His answer to the pressure that strips this work out in a downturn is architectural rather than motivational. Anything bolted on gets unbolted the moment a quarter turns bad, so P and G builds its citizenship priorities into how the business is run instead. Once equality and inclusion, sustainability and community impact are part of the business model, a downturn has nothing separate to cut.
Key findings
- The clearest built-in example is cold water laundry. Most of the in-use carbon emissions from laundry detergent come from heating water for the machine rather than from the product itself. Washing at 30 degrees Celsius or lower cuts the energy load and carbon emissions of that load by 80 percent. It is also gentler on the clothes, because there is less heat to damage them.
- Automatic dishwashing works the same way, and the arithmetic runs against intuition. A dishwasher uses less water than washing by hand, because its four gallons are recycled, while hand washing pours out four gallons every two minutes.
- As the world’s largest advertiser, Pritchard treats portrayal as a mechanism rather than a message. Images in advertising embed memories in people’s minds, so how people are portrayed can create bias, particularly where they are stereotyped, objectified or diminished. The standard he sets is accurate portrayal rather than flattering portrayal.
- He applies that standard across a list he recites without hesitating: gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or ability, religion, body type and age. Accurate portrayal, on his argument, helps eliminate bias rather than merely avoiding offense.
- The commercial case comes from the Gender Equality Measure study, which found that accurate portrayal of women and girls raises trust and purchase intent by 20 percent. That figure is what moved the standard from a principle to a working part of the business.
Twenty five years inside before anything outside
Pritchard dates the internal work to 1989, when P and G president John Pepper persuaded the then chief executive John Smale to write a diversity policy. The management ranks were then largely white cisgender men. Pepper treated it as a generational project, because the company recruits straight out of university and promotes from within. Changing the senior ranks meant waiting for a new intake.
The company did not use its voice publicly until 2014, twenty five years later, with the groundbreaking gender equality message of Always Like a Girl. By then 48 percent of P and G managers were women, and the marketing organization Pritchard runs was even at every level bar the very top, a few promotions short. The rule he derives is that the inside work comes first.
Aspirations rather than quotas, and what happens when someone misses
Asked directly whether P and G uses forced quotas, Pritchard says no and sets aspirations instead, meaning a stated goal the company is openly shooting for and has not reached yet. His argument is about what each produces in people. An aspiration with a case behind it makes people rise to the occasion, while a quota forces compliance that walks out of the door as soon as conditions change.
The aspirations are still concrete. Chief executive David Taylor set equality goals for 2025 and now 2030, broke them down by business unit and made the expectation explicit. A leader who misses is asked for the analysis first, like any other business goal. Where the cause is the leader rather than the circumstance, consequences run from a blocked promotion through compensation to removal.
Strong values and diverse views
Pushed on whether a strong shared value set crowds out diversity of perspective, Pritchard argues the values contain the requirement rather than compete with it. They drive respect for differences, and the operating principles run through to developing a diverse and inclusive workforce that drives innovation. Disagreement is therefore valued rather than merely tolerated, on the grounds that differing opinions produce better outcomes.
When two positions harden, the company reaches for a question rather than a process. Roger Martin of the University of Toronto, a consultant to P and G for roughly thirty years, gave them the better third way. Instead of treating two options as right and wrong, ask whether a third exists. Pritchard calls that the definition of innovation.
The advice for someone in a company that was never like this
His advice to a marketer inside a company run on short-term financial targets starts outside the company. Begin with the consumers you serve and what they actually want. Nine in ten now feel better about a brand that supports a social or environmental cause, and the share rises past seventy percent among millennials and Gen Z. More than half expect brands to take a stand.
The second step is fit, working out what your own business can credibly do, and the third is proof. Pritchard says P and G had to make the growth case repeatedly before anyone was persuaded, then proved it with Always Like a Girl, Olay Face Anything, SK-II Change Destiny and Ariel Share the Load. Told it sounds easy, he says it is not, and that it takes time.
The minister at the ranch, and the campaign he changed after it
The moment Pritchard names as most decisive came over twenty years ago, at a Colorado spiritual retreat he attended with his wife Betsy and their three daughters, all under ten. The minister leading it told him that business would someday be the greatest force for good, ahead of governments, clergy and laws. He calls it a blinding moment of clarity.
He was running Cover Girl, whose Easy Breezy Beautiful campaign was drawing feedback that its spokespeople were too young, too thin and too white, a stereotypical and somewhat objectified standard of beauty. Looking at his three young daughters, he decided they could not grow up believing that was the definition of beauty. The brand moved to inside and outside beauty, casting more diverse faces including Queen Latifah and Ellen DeGeneres.
The most liked and the most disliked at the same time
The setback Pritchard chooses is Gillette. It had run The Best a Man Can Get since the 1980s, work he describes as very stereotypical and, over time, as objectifying or even diminishing women unintentionally. He pushed the team to modernize. After the MeToo movement they returned with a film called We Believe, arguing that men can be the best they can be and should step up rather than merely avoid harm.
The ninety second film spent its front half setting up the problem, naming the MeToo movement and toxic masculinity and showing bad behavior. The result was a storm. The video was simultaneously the most liked and the most disliked, and around 110 million people saw it. Objectors said it depicted men in a negative way, which Pritchard says was not the intention but was how it came across.
The team stepped back and asked two questions: were the intentions right, and were they genuinely trying to do the right thing. Answering yes to both, they kept going, pushed their own narrative out and donated to organizations working with men and boys, then modified the next generations of the work. Pritchard says the campaign changed how people thought about Gillette and built the business among millennial consumers.
Three lessons came out of it. The film did not need to spend so long on the negative and could have gone straight to the better part. Toxic masculinity and a MeToo framing aimed at men are trigger words that call for care. And the first instinct, to reject the people rejecting the work, was the wrong one.
Pritchard calls the reversal the best learning of his career: always listen to someone who holds a different point of view. What he concedes to the objectors is substantive: the men who said they are not all like that were right, and should not be depicted that way. P and G now takes anything it thinks might be controversial to the people it could upset, so they can give input before it runs.
The loneliness, and the way he inverts it
Pritchard’s diagnosis of why senior roles isolate is about the office rather than the person in it. Position power attaches to the chair whether or not its occupant has real power, and it moves a leader further from other people. Taking over from Jim Stengel, asked how he would fill those shoes, he answered that the position is what matters and the individual in it is fleeting.
His remedy is to flip the problem and make the job about being useful to other people. He treats the role as a privilege that represents the work of the 5,000 brand builders around the company, on the grounds that they are the ones who do the work. Commiserating with other chief marketing officers helps, but the rule he keeps is never to read his own headlines.
The eighteen-month reset
Asked how he stays current after four decades, Pritchard describes pretending to fire himself every eighteen months and then rehiring himself. The interval is Moore’s law, since computing power doubles on that cycle and the change around him compounds as fast. The point is to arrive fresh and unencumbered by the past, so he does not fall in love with his earlier work or treat it as sacred.
The standing instruction he gives his team holds both horizons at once: win today and invent tomorrow. Some things do not move, and he lists them as irresistible superiority in product, package, communications, retail execution and value, plus productivity to fuel growth, who the consumer is and what the brand stands for. Those are foundational and do not change, he says, but how you do them does.
A hundred and eighty startups inside a company of a hundred and eighty years
Pritchard’s term for the strategy is constructive disruption, and the qualifier carries the weight. He lists what is in play: digital still growing while privacy arrives, linear television declining as streaming rises, data analytics and technology maturing, and brand building merging with commerce as e-commerce takes over. Since you can disrupt and destroy value or disrupt and create it, the aim is to lead the disruption toward growth.
The operating change he cites is adopting lean startup and lean innovation methods about five years ago, inside a company holding 180 years of knowledge about its own products. P and G now runs roughly 180 startups on a much faster cycle: iterate, fail, pivot, fail, pivot, then eventually scale. He reckons the past year pulled things forward by five years and expects the next five to be exponential.
Put the phone to bed
The boundary advice Pritchard passes on comes from a P and G partner whose Thrive program is built on micro steps. The one he took was to decide a time each day when the day is done, then put the phone to bed and keep it out of the bedroom. His reasoning is physiological rather than aspirational: resilience is driven by recovery, and recovery by setting boundaries.
He is clear that the past year made this harder, because working from home became, in the phrase he repeats, living at work, and the boundaries blurred. He does not claim to have solved it, and says he wishes he were better at staying in the moment. The daily practice he does keep is a prayer for the strength to be useful to whoever he meets.
The chief marketing officer is not a machine
Asked whether he brings any of this to his teams, Pritchard says the occasions arrive on their own. A team member faces a divorce, a death or an illness, and that is the opening to show humanity rather than a topic to schedule. What he values about the company is that people rally around each other when it happens, as they did for him after a bereavement of his own.
His example is from that same week. Announcing the retirement of a colleague of forty one years, he began on the man’s accomplishments, choked up and cried in front of the team. He admits he is an easy crier and that it always feels a little strange, but says people read it as proof that he is human.
That matters, he argues, because a chief marketing officer is often seen not as a human being but as a machine, so a periodic expression of humanness goes a long way. The interviewer closes on the pair the conversation has produced, that it is not about you and that you must not forget you are human, and Pritchard accepts they belong together rather than in tension.
Scope and limitations
This is a long-serving executive’s account of his own company, recorded in 2021, and the representation, emissions and purchase-intent figures are his statements rather than independently reported. The campaign outcomes he describes as successes are assessed by the company that ran them. Two passages are summarized rather than quoted here because they concern the personal circumstances of named third parties, a bereavement in his family and a colleague’s retirement.
Source
This page summarises HGS #31: Marc Pritchard (Chief Brand Officer, P&G) shares P&G’s growth journey, by Frank van den Driest, 2022-02-14.