This episode of the Humanizing Growth series, run by the Institute for Real Growth, is a conversation with Jim Stengel, formerly chief marketing officer of Procter and Gamble. He states his own purpose as helping leaders be happier, more productive, and more fulfilled by finding their organization’s purpose and their personal purpose and bringing both to life.
His central claim is about an unfinished job. Purpose is scaling because it works, but the link between activating it and business metrics has not been built. That gap is what keeps the skeptics in the room.
Key findings
- Purpose comes in three steps. Find or rediscover it. Activate it. Measure it and link it to business metrics. Stengel’s assessment is that the industry has done the first two adequately and barely started the third.
- He has put money behind the measurement problem. His team piloted purpose measurement with a five-year-old company called Bera and then invested in it.
- At Pampers the brand tripled in size within ten years and became more profitable. Organizational engagement moved from the lower end of the company’s range to the top. He believes that work is why he was named CMO of Procter and Gamble.
- The measure that matters to a consumer is not product superiority. It is whether the brand cares about what the consumer cares about.
Jif, and the first version of the idea
The story starts with his first brand manager job, on the peanut butter brand Jif. The brand was stuck in a share fight and had a better product, which was not moving anything. His team concluded they had to align with the values of the consumers they served.
What followed was concrete rather than expressive. They ran the largest donation program the brand had made to parent teacher associations, tied directly to sales. The more the brand sold in a zip code, the more money went to the local PTA. Market share started to rise, and the brand began to differentiate on values rather than on product alone.
Pampers, and the insight that was sitting in plain sight
Stengel describes the brand at the time as short of empathy. He quotes the company’s chief executive, A.G. Lafley, saying that the factory was the boss and not the consumer.
The insight was simple and the brand had been sitting on it. Pampers is present at the moment of birth more than any brand in the world. It was sampling in hospitals and running a large direct mail program, touching the lives of mothers and doing nothing with it. That reframing became the purpose the brand is still activating two decades later.
Scaling it past one brand
The question of how a brand-level success becomes a company-level framework gets a plain answer. Great organizations have always been consumer-centric, and staying that way is never finished. Stengel points at a ritual rather than a doctrine: under Lafley, global leadership meetings were preceded by immersion with consumers the leaders did not know well.
His advice to any multi-brand company is to codify how it grows brands and keep refining that codification. Without it, a lesson learned on one brand stays on that brand.
Asked about technology companies, where marketing was often never the center, he answers the same way. The CMOs who succeed there are the ones who represent the customer inside the company and organize it around what the customer needs.
Storytelling, including to analysts
The example Stengel gives for storytelling comes from a finance chair rather than a marketer. PepsiCo’s chief financial officer opens each quarterly earnings call with the story of the company and only then turns to the quarter’s numbers. His reasoning is that if you talk only about the quarter, the analysts will talk only about the quarter. He has had quarters with poor results where the stock rose, because the story was strong.
Being challenged from outside
Stengel has used a challenger board on his own firm. At an offsite, one outsider told the company it had been a good vitamin and needed to be a painkiller, meaning it had to tackle something harder. The purpose measurement work came directly out of that session.
What a CMO should do in a crisis
Asked what marketers should be doing amid the pandemic and the inequality it exposed, he starts inside the building. The biggest thing CMOs need to do is be in touch with their employees first, listening to people of all types and to what they are going through. His argument is that the ideas are already in the organization.
He rejects the framing of a return. There is no back to normal, and the moment should not be wasted. The CMO is placed to be the catalyst, because in most companies the CMO is the most externally facing officer across all stakeholders.
On the role of business, he is blunt about where he thinks change now originates. It is not coming from governments. He closes on a line an old sales leader gave him about accountability: if it is to be, it is up to me.
Scope and limitations
The measurement claim comes with an interest attached, and the speaker discloses it in the conversation. He and his team invested in the company whose purpose measurement platform he recommends.
The Jif and Pampers results are recalled from the speaker’s own career rather than documented here. No figures are given for the share movement, and the growth numbers are stated from memory.
Source
This page summarises HGS #12: Jim Stengel (former CMO, P&G) talks about leading transformations and purpose, by Marc de Swaan Arons.