Advice for FMCG marketing leaders

What I say when we have "10 to chat?"

I’ve written at length in the past about how no two businesses are the same, and that you have to draw up a unique marketing plan for your customer base, not one which resembles that of your category neighbours nor your closest competitors.

That remains the case. And yet at this moment there seems to be a point of convergence in the world of big consumer brands and their marketing functions’ problems. Almost everyone seems to be surfing the same of wave of internal questioning, hand-wringing, and (cue the buzzword!) “transformation”.

So what’s the red thread? Invariably these changes fall into four main buckets:

1. How do I structure our team and talent to move at the speed of culture and elevate our creative accordingly?

2. How do I wean us off the TV ad or the paid social addiction to find more organic content-driven ways to drive salience?

3. How do I maintain a degree of control and encourage internal leadership to sh*t the bed while we give away the keys to the brand to creators/influencers? (We’ve come along way since you could have your own name on Coca-Cola bottle and that was considered a risk…)

4. How do I do the cool new shiny, exciting, “we won at Cannes” thing while also protecting my team as the grim reaper of the “budget cuts” lurks around the corner?

Against this backdrop, if and when I have 10 minutes with any global FMCG marketing leader, here’s what I ask/tell/probe them about:

1. Are the best talent in the world working on your brand?

How the sausage gets made matters. You want disproportionately good results without disproportionately good, at-the-coalface talent working with you? I’d be radically demanding about knowing whose brain and which tools are going into the creation and execution of every idea and initiative across my brand.

2. Get to the edge of the centre.

The smartest folks I know, and I’m thinking of two women in particularly who work high-up at a very large FMCG business, have taken roles (whether geographical or in a brand) which is not at the absolute epicentre but still really matters. This gives them just the right balance between having enough free reign to enact necessary changes for this age of speed of culture/influencers/decline in paid social effectiveness/**insert transformative topic here** but enough prominence that those efforts will be picked up by the fine folks at C-Suite HQ or on the promenade at Cannes.

Above all, you create organisational envy (thanks Zach Duenow of Haleon for this pithy turn of phrase) by doing more with less and punching above your weight. It’s hard to get a big signature brand to truly push the envelope because, for instance, for Unilever, Hellman’s mayonnaise just needs to keep ticking over at $Xbn a year in sales. There’s no mandate or incentive for change. On the flip side, if you go and run marketing for a brand that is flatlining, or a country which isn’t the USA, suddenly you have scope to take everyone by surprise and elicit responses like:

“What do you mean they’ve got Germany to be the fastest growing market outside of North America?!”

If you want to transform a situation and be a change maker internally, the likelihood is you’ll have to demonstrate you can do it in the Petri dish before you get to do it in real life.

3. Show me the map of influence across your customer journey and community.

Control already sits outside the four walls of your HQ or your Zoom chat. As the great Jeremy Bullmore always reminded us, brand belongs in the mind of the consumer anyway… So your job is to not to try and take back control through your brand centrally, but to influence the influences of your buyers.

This might mean trying to tilt the tide of secular trends (eg we need more young women playing basketball), ingrain yourself in niche X (formerly known as Twitter) communities (eg more Vietnamese food lovers should know we exist) or partner with hidden gems of influential people (eg that rising star anime designer out of Seoul is going to be the new face of our brand).

Ultimately, you still need to make your marketing plan unique to you. At the same time, realise that right now most marketers are surfing the same wave of change, and the smartest people, no matter which brand they work for, will surf it in a similar way.