CMO World Tour: Jim Stengel, former CMO of P&G

Company ideals will be increasingly important in the success of companies determining both the passion of staff as well as consumer loyalty, argues Jim Stengel, former global CMO at Procter & Gamble and author of Grow.

Stengel, who now runs the Jim Stengel Company, says that the business of the future needs people who are “passionate about what the brand is about, why it exists, its ideal, its purpose”.

It’s this that he says differentiates company such as Google and Apple.

“Ideals need to be expressed in your entire business system. So it has to be expressed in how you approach culture, how you approach your innovation and your brand experience, your communication strategies and your evaluation systems. All of that has to be one system that begins with the idea and you can’t pick and choose,” he says.

Stengel argues that companies with ideals are the ones that are succeeding today. “If you look at the companies that are growing disproportionately now, in general they are extremely ideals-based and purpose-based. The energy in the company and the commitment to what the company is doing is at a very high level.

“You get tremendous passion from their employees and these companies are, many of them, have new business models; Netflix, Apple continues to try new business models and disruptive business models. I would even say Red Bull, which has been around a while now but it’s a CPG brand that changed the business model for how CPG brands go to market.”

Stengel is a formidable traveller due to his multiple roles as Professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management California, as a consultant and as a director of AOL and Motorola Mobility.

Being so mobile, he runs his business from his Mac Book Pro, he has two iPads as well as two Droid phones. He regularly flies across the US, to Asia and Europe, plugging in his Bose headphones to listen to iTunes ensure he gets four or five hours sleep. Digital has he says improved his travelling experience.

He admits to having trouble splitting his personal and business life between Facebook and LinkedIn. “ I sort of went into it thinking I keep LinkedIn for my professional life and I’d keep Facebook more for my personal life. It doesn’t work, I mean there is too much cross over. There is actually a lot professional friends who are personal friends too but [Facebook] is extraordinarily nice for sharing and scheduling and talking in an intimate way with my children, with my nieces and nephews, with my extended family who are not in the same city I am in. “

Digital is also a great way to keep up with the news from Coronado, a regular destination near San Diego in California, which uses AOL’s Patch platform to keep residents and visitors up with the local news.

“It’s a wonderful idea about digitalizing communities and putting everything on there; the police information, schools, happenings, retail, so it’s sort of replacing the community newspaper. So when I’m not in Coronado I’m checking on what’s going on. You know what’s happening with the police, what’s happening on my street, what’s happening with the movies, what’s happening with the restaurants, how’s the weather, how are the waves. A passion of mine is spending time in that place because I love to be in the ocean and, I love to be active and so I can keep in touch with what’s going on there no matter where I’m in the world.”

Although he admits to googling himself in the past, Twitter has become an increasingly important platform.

“There are 2,000 plus following me and that happened just sort of quietly and I follow, I probably, I follow about 100, I probably should follow more. But I un-follow certain people who are tweeting every two seconds. But Twitter is how I’m getting most of my news now.”

Frédéric Colas: Does digital help brands promote their ideals?

Jim Stengel: Well I think digital enables you as a brand or a person or a company to get very quick reactions and I think if you are well intended, if you’re good, it gets shared. It gets shared, people like it and they want to tell people about it. I think the potential for sharing who you are, it’s just obviously much greater, much faster and much, much more powerful.

Obviously you can learn about people in a different way... when I went to Google for the first time which was 10 or, 11 years ago and I went in there and said, ‘Oh my,’—this was before we probably spent any money in advertising – ‘these people understand a lot about consumer behaviour and about what turns people on.’ And I think now Facebook has that and many of these companies because they’re interacting with people in their passions, in their interests, in their behaviours all the time brands have to use that.

FC: What are the two things that you think summarise marketing in the digital age?

JS: I think it’s about the community and it’s about caring. So I think those are the two most powerful words. It’s much easier to be part of the community, to tap into a community or find a community.

… if companies are not caring, it's seen through quickly and I don’t think they attract people who want to make a difference who want to take the brand to a higher level.

So to me, if you're going to be successful today you better understand how communities behave and form and operate because that’s how opinions are made and habit's change. It's always been that way. It just happens with more scale now and you better care about what you do and about the impact you're making and that’s to me the two most important ideas right now.

FC: What are the key challenges facing brands in the digital age?

JS: I would say the challenges I'm seeing are structures. Companies and agencies are not designed for the way people need to behave and do work today. So structures should follow strategy and strategy now should be about engagement and community and reaction and making friends and building a lot of affinity for the brand. And that’s not silo-ed. So I think companies need to be real clear about who’s the director of the brand, the artist of the brand and I think they need to integrate everything around that person.

FC: How does being ideals-based change the marketing function?

JS: I think marketing will benefit hugely from a bit more standardisation about the kind of deliverables, what they are accountable for, areas of expertise. I mean when I consult companies, the questions I ask: What's the work of the organisation? Where is the competitive advantage? Where are they adding value? What are you trying to do? How do you build expertise? And a lot of companies can’t answer that. So that’s where you start. And also it has to start with what you are trying to do, what's your aspiration? As a company and then how can marketing help realize that? I think there’s an enormous potential to do that and too many companies have sub-optimized that.

FC: How would you define the CMO today and in 10 years’ time?

JS: I think a lot of CMO’s today are hired as market experts. And you know some of them come over from the agency world and have great expertise in communications may be not great expertise in leadership and strategy but I think, I think a great CMO 10 years from now is going to look an awful lot like the fantastic CEO’s today. I think the companies who realize that will track great people and marketing will be important and not a goal in itself. Marketing is important to help you be an extremely ideals driven, customer delighting organization.

For more interviews visit CMO World Tour.