Marketing is the boss

JUDIE LANNON: Let's start by talking about how you got into marketing in the first place? Was it by design or by luck?

ROISIN DONNELLY: At school you tended to be classified as either good at maths and science, or creative and good at English. But at university I did both and also did a general arts degree and then did economics. So I was looking for a career that was quite business driven but with lots of creative flair. I came across marketing by accident – working part-time at a restaurant that was struggling and needed marketing. I then applied to P&G and have been here ever since.

JL: I think everybody has a kind of eureka moment where you know that you're in the right career and can be a success in it. How did that happen to you?

RD: The day I visited Newcastle for interview I thought this is where I want to be. But specifically, as far as the job is concerned, it was probably my first launch. It was in 1988 and the brand was Wash & Go. We designed everything from scratch and installed it on the shelf.

We had huge sampling which was 95% positive, we had massive TV and got 99% awareness. In two weeks we were number one. So I thought this is fantastic, I can make a difference, and it was all so fast and such fun.

JL: What about mentors? There is always someone or maybe several people that you instantly know have something to teach you.

RD: Yes, there have been a couple over the years, and they're both from P&G. One was my first female general manager, who was a Mexican woman. She had three daughters, like myself now, and she was so good at balancing being a great general manager and being a great mum. More recently, AG Lafley, who is our CEO and who is a real inspiration. He manages to combine being a brilliant business brain with being a motivational coach and people person. He is an excellent role model.

JL: What are the kinds of things you learned from him that you've found most valuable?

RD: He is very personal. He sends you handwritten notes on things that you've done. He walks around the company and is always very accessible. He's more in the style of a servant leader and he sees his job as serving the organisation rather than being at the top of the pyramid. It's a very different style from lots of other leaders who dictate.

JL: I'm interested in both the structure and culture of the company that support what you are doing in your job.

RD: Although P&G is a very big company it's run in small teams. Every brand has a team that's run like a little business. When I joined there were three of us running bar soaps and it was like a small company. So I think the way that we devolve responsibility, the way we delegate and let go, makes the company successful. I think people have always felt that P&G was a good place to work, but especially so now.

The other thing that's different about P&G is that marketing is the boss. Marketing leads and 90% of our General Managers come from marketing. Half of our UK board is marketing too, so we're clearly a marketing-driven company. It seems strange when I hear people debating whether marketing should be on the board. In P&G UK, marketing is the board. This is a subject I am passionate about and I have spoken at the Institute of Directors to urge a greater role for marketing.

JL: This inevitably makes the company automatically more consumer focused doesn't it?

RD: Yes, absolutely. The consumer is at the heart but it doesn't mean we don't make smart financial decisions. We've developed a lot of tools to measure the effectiveness of our marketing and that, of course, is critical to everything we do. If we understand our customers better than any of our competitors do, we'll be that much more successful. As evidence of that, currently in many of the fields in which we operate we've got majority shares. In fem-care we've got over 70% share, in blades and razors over a 70% share, and in nappies it's a 60% share. In laundry it's about a 50% share.

JL: How do you manage the kinds of trade-offs that are inevitable to meet financial or operational criteria? RD: One thing we've found in hair care, for instance, was that people wanted everything. When you ask them what they want, they say a great product with every benefit under the sun. Obviously that's not possible so we've developed a portfolio of brands. We've got Pantene, which is all about hair health, Head & Shoulders, which is the best anti-dandruff shampoo, and then Herbal Essences, which is a great fun brand but also very good value. In fabric care we have four brands that are very different: Ariel, which is all about cleaning; Bold, which is much more focused on conditioning; Daz, which is all about whiteness; and Fairy nonbio, which is a much softer brand.

JL: Are all your markets segmented that sharply?

RD: Not necessarily. It depends on how complex consumer needs are. In nappies, for instance, all babies' needs are essentially pretty similar so we can cover that with one brand: Pampers. Whereas in hair or beauty or fragrance we need a wide portfolio of brands to cater for different needs.

JL: P&G used to be very quantitatively oriented in its research. How has that changed?

RD: I've been in this job seven years now. Before that P&G was much more rationally focused. We understood the rational side of people's behaviour but not so much the emotional side. So, over the last decade, we've taken advantage of the huge opportunity to become much more emotionally in touch with consumers, to understand them in more depth and detail.

We do an enormous amount of both quantitative and qualitative research. We research products blind, we research consumers, we look at their whole life and their needs. We do a lot of online surveys, we do a lot of postal surveys and a lot of face-to-face surveys. But, in addition, all the marketing people meet consumers at least once a week. We encourage people to watch focus groups, but you really have to spend more time so we go out shopping with people – join them for the entire day to see what they buy and how they make choices.

This attention to consumers is in the DNA of this company, so it's something we do all the time.

JL: How did that happen?

RD: I think some of it came from looking at the what the competition did so intelligently. Why did the British housewife want Persil? Why did she prefer L'Oréal brands? As we looked at the competition and then looked at other segments as we got more into the beauty market, we realised how important emotional connections were and not just in the beauty industry but across the board. It has made a huge difference to all our brands and is reflected in the advertising for them.

JL: What are the big issues you are facing in the company now?

RD: The main issues we have now are to do with relationships with other functions. Some of the other functions are not as in touch with consumers as they ought to be. So we've made sure they do go out and meet people and have the same kinds of experiences our marketers do. There was a board meeting where AG took all the function leaders out to shop for a couple of days with consumers. Our board goes out every three months and shops with consumers, so they have all been to discounters, to the big superstores and to convenience stores. The brand team also has a finance manager and a product supply manager, and they will go to people's homes, to shops and talk to consumers about various issues – and that's different from other companies.

Of course, sustainability is a key issue for the whole industry and poses an interesting set of new challenges for marketers. Sustainability has been at the core of what we do as a company for a long time, but until recently, it has not played a big role in our marketing strategies. Consumers still value performance over sustainability – they won't compromise in this respect. However, as we showed recently with 'Ariel Turn to 30', when you can demonstrate the benefits to the consumer in an accessible way, it can enhance brand trust.

JL: What are the biggest difficulties you have from a marketing communications standpoint?

RD: The biggest difficulty is measurement. We've gone into new media and, as everyone knows, it's very difficult to measure them. We knew how to measure the big mass campaigns but it's much more of a problem for niche campaigns. So we do have challenges from finance – is this paying out? That's something we're working on: how do we measure the kind of reach and effectiveness of the many different elements of an integrated campaign? We can see the effect of the total campaign, but what is online adding, what is word of mouth adding, what is PR adding to this campaign, and so on.

JL: Have you figured out how to do it?

RD: Not yet, but we're still working on it. We should be pioneering new tools and new territories, and we should be finding different ways to measure them as we go along. But that's the challenge for everybody I think.

JL: This makes working with suppliers more complex, doesn't it? How do you work with different kinds of agencies?

RD: We've got five above-the-line creative agencies, most of which have been with us for a long time. There are a couple that have come with new acquisitions, so we work with Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Grey, Publicis, and we now work with BBDO globally.

Then, as well as the above-the-line agencies, we've got some excellent direct mail agencies, some excellent in-store agencies, some very good digital agencies and some outstanding media agencies.

JL: With all these different types of agency, how do you manage the integration of a campaign?

RD: We do the integration. We're at the centre but we do encourage everybody to sit round the same table. So we'll have a team that works on Ariel that includes the PR agency, that includes the digital agency, but the brand manager will be at the hub of the team.

JL: What would you say was the thing you're most proud of in your career?

RD: Well, funnily enough, what I'm most proud of is the people, I've been here 20 years and I've hired a lot of people, I've developed a lot of people, I've coached and trained a lot of people. Many of them are still in P&G all round the globe, in the States and China, and many of them have left and are doing incredibly well in other businesses or running their own businesses. But when I look back over my career I think the difference I've made touching people makes me feel really proud.

JL: Looking back over this 20-year period, are there any decisions you've made that you wish you hadn't made, or you wish you'd made them differently – either in terms of your career or in terms of marketing?

RD: From a marketing standpoint, I think we probably stayed too rational too long. Wash & Go was a big success but it was very functionally based – it was just a two-in-one product, it didn't have much of an image. That was a mistake that we saw and kept in mind when we launched Pantene.

I think I made a lot of mistakes through the first half of my career by being quite rational, thinking a better product was enough. I know now that, yes, we need great products, but we also need fantastic marketing.

JL: Apart from your own journey, how well do you think P&G as a whole understands the importance of brands and the distinction between brands and products?

RD: I think now we understand this distinction better than our competitors. A brand is holistic, it's got to be bigger than the sum of its parts and everyone working on the brand has to understand and buy into that. Historically there were different parts of the company that simply didn't talk to each other. We had research and development who didn't talk to marketing in the early stages. Now we work much more holistically looking at the brand together as a team.

I think also we launched a lot of new brands that were really just new products. Today we're concentrating on trying to leverage the values in the brands that we've got. So this month we launched a new range of air care called Febreze, because Febreze is a freshening brand. We're taking it into many many other sectors without launching new brands. We've added Febreze to Ariel, we've added Febreze to Lenor.

I think today, as a company, we understand much more clearly how the financial value of the brand is tied to the brand's equity.

JL: What are the three most important pieces of advice you would give to someone who wants to make their company more consumer focused?

RD: The first one is lead from the top, if the management is going out and spending time with consumers, that sends an important signal and others will follow. As I've said, in P&G AG and his board spend a lot of time with consumers and so everybody else does too. It shouldn't just be the responsibility of the most junior person in the company to know the consumer.

I think the second thing you have to do is to measure it. You have to know the value you're getting from your marketing activities and learn from what hasn't worked as well as what has worked. We've done a lot of work with case studies where we got it wrong.

That also extends to how you staff the teams. With Pampers for a while, we had a team that had no parents in it. We were focused on products and not really on consumers, and during that period our share went down quite dramatically. Over the past four years we've made important changes and gone back to clear market leadership.

And the third thing is that you have to recognise the importance of rewarding people for the time they are investing. We have awards for people who recognise the importance of consumers. We have programmes where we'll give prizes in recognition for people who bring new insight to the business. We'll celebrate some of the simple examples as well as some of the break-through ones. We've gained insights into all aspects of our marketing from listening to our customers and watching how they use our brands and how they shop.

JL: What about the next steps in your career: what are you going to be doing next?

RD: I've been in ten jobs in P&G and I've worked all around the world but in this job I've gone through four acquisitions now and the job keeps changing. So the biggest one was July recently and we did Wella and Clairol before that. I'm still learning and marketing is changing so quickly. So I'm being challenged all the time.