Paving the Way with Church & Dwight

Hey everyone, good morning, welcome to Jersey. Uh, so we're going to do quick introductions, but I'll tell you why I'm so excited. Um, my nickname is actually Jersey Joe because I've grown up here, I went to Rutgers, I live in Princeton, so I'm so pumped that Brand Innovators brought a show to New Jersey, to your backyard, and yes, to the backyard in Church & Dwight is hosting, so thank you very much to everyone. A quick intro on me: founder, CEO of Mobile Fuse. I found the Mobile Fuse before there was an iPad, so it's been a while. We essentially what we do is, whether you buy programmatically or managed, one out of every impressions across the apps is powered by Mobile Fuse, so we work with 350 accounts, and that's that's us. So I'd like to turn it over to Sarabi to do an enjoying yourself. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, so nice meeting you. Is this thing on? Thank you. Thank you so much guys for coming. It's heartwarming to see so many Church & Dwights, so many leaders from the industry. I want to say the average marketer IQ in the zip code must be rolling off the charts today if anybody has kind of a blurb on that. So that is fantastic. I do want to acknowledge Ken, thank you for being a moderator, but also thank you Laurie Kirschner, Don Pushcast, please stand up, who single-handedly have made this happening partnership with Veto Sydney and a ton of Brandy Reuters folks, so acknowledging their amazing effort that's been on for more than six months. I want to say, right calendars and everything else not really easy, but looking forward to a brilliant lineup of a lot of CPG brands today. So answering Ken's question, now my name is... growth officer, what that means is I think I'm the chief troublemaker in you know where the company pays you to create trouble and disruption in the company, that's what they sign up, and Barry was like 'did I really sign up for this?' but it's okay. So I lead all things digital, e-com, marketing and sales cross-functional, and elevating you know what digital should mean in the current consumer context for Church & Dwight. In my past life I have played a lot of CPG bingo, starting with Procter & Gamble, on to a lot of consulting firms, and working for Estee Lauder, L'Oreal, and Korean beauty, and then Johnson & Johnson and Colgate most recently. So yes, I have a decent amount of CPG network, and I'm super proud to say I am a believer of 'your net worth is your network'. It makes a... use on to... any great quotes, right? 'Your net worth is your network'.

Right, great. So, uh, one recommendation: we have a lot of folks in the room. I've been to so many Brand Innovators events, and he knows this, um, and Philly Cindy is like part of the family. So, ask questions, make sure you ask questions. That's what you're here for. You're here to learn, you're here to network. So, there's a lot of people, a lot of... I know a lot of speakers later. So, talking about learning. Who wants to answer a question? How do you emphasize learning at Church & Dwight? Take it first, then you take a step. Sure.

Barry covered most of it, but that's the problem of being the secondary. You have to find something. So I'll just say from a tactical perspective, some of my team who's here, you know, they bear the brunt of it. Every meeting we start, we say we spend five minutes of mindful meditation of sharing on the chat: what did you learn this week? Or what did you unlearn this week? That could be anything, not work related, right? It could be like I found a new hack to book flights using Flights.google versus Hopper, and Hopper is better on Tuesday nights versus Friday nights, and that's okay, that's a learning. Or I spoke to our peers at Lindt, which is a chocolate company, and we discussed how to manage summer shipping of vitamins, which suffer the same fate as chocolate sometimes, right? So it could be anything, but it just makes our people pause and start the meeting with a non-agenda kind of way where it forces you to be ready to provocate each other and share something. So that's practical. Right? I'm also a firm believer of 'learn it all, not know it all'. Right? And that speaks to what Barry was saying about how we groom our talent, you know, rotating in different functions. Because I've played a ton of CPG bingo, I can confidently say the type of general management acumen that is our... graciously, awesome people in sales can speak eloquently to category share and shopper insights as a market researcher might, and vice versa. Right? That happens because a, we are super lean. I'm sure Church & Dwighters in their seats are squirming, yes we are lean, we need more people, but there's a positive outcome of that where you become so sharp about learning it all and not necessarily knowing it all. And finally, I'll say our people, and many people who are good learners have a good growth mindset. Those of you who have young kids, you know, kindergarten, this is a big concept of Angela Duckworth's work: grit and growth mindset. You just want to say, 'I don't know it yet', and yet is a big word, right? It's not like 'I don't know how to make, hypothetically speaking, direct-to-consumer more profitable', I just don't know it yet. Right? So that's the kind of reinforcement that we try to be more conscious of. Don't take any ideas on how to make DTC more profitable? So I'll give it back to you.

So obviously emphasizing learning is really working here. Dude, sorry, you could go first. What, what examples has it led to success? So it's great to learn, but then just to tie it to to success, like where have you seen that you know?

I mean, there could be so many practical examples. Like the example I was giving of shipping vitamins into the summer, that's the same fate chocolate has. So talking to a candy or chocolate company, that's a tactical example. But I'd say more than that, it's the habitual focus on learning and making sure you're able to execute it in some way, big or small, because it cannot be so academic in nature that it's a good provocation but you're not able to influence it. I know there are tech companies like Google who do a brilliant job saying everybody gets a 10% passion project time. That may not be as viable in many companies, I'm not saying which one, but if that is not viable, how do you find your passion points of learning something and bringing it back to the organization? Sometimes lean organizations also give you autonomy to try new things that are super hard in large matrix organizations, right? So if you believe, say, and I'll give you practical examples from my side of the world here, if you believe ratings and reviews drive consumer decision making and you believe that's not just an online influence, it's a freaking motor influence, this company allows you to experiment that and figure out how might you make that happen, right? So those are a couple of things. But at the core of it, I think it's for people to find the right sources, like Barry was saying. They keep sharing articles and learning and keep tagging each other. Sometimes that just means putting an hour each week to say, 'This is my quiet Friday afternoon learning time' where all the articles that Barry sends and tags, we have to read up and reflect on it. So plus, we are a big acquisition-oriented company, so part of that learning just comes by virtue of where you have the brilliant, say, Hero folks. I see some of them in the room, Allen and others. You just understand to learn more, to know more from the companies you have acquired.

So can you give me a pause? No, no. So, uh, we only have two minutes and I definitely need to, uh, staying with opening up for questions. So this is your course, this is your time to ask your boss a question and be safe. It sounds like here you can ask any question and every question is great. So, um, what questions are there in the audience? Okay, so.

In asking this question, um, can you talk a lot about learning and the importance of just staying aware of what's going on around you? And we've talked about this, it's hard for for to for all of us to find the time. How do you personally find the time to stay up to speed with the latest and greatest?

That is gonna hate me for this because you like stop sending me and telling me to do courses at 3am. So there are two things. I don't think, Stacy, I have a soul for it. I just want to say I try to be intentional about it because I genuinely enjoy it myself. Right? I don't do it as a chore, so to say, but I try to combine it with chores. I'm a young, I'm not a young mom anymore, I'm a mom but young kids, and I listen to a ton of podcasts. I like because, you know, listening and multitasking is easier for me than reading or watching a video. So when I do laundry, I do the dishes, I do lawn mowing, which I love, which is my meditation, yeah, which my husband is like 'yeah, go for the students'? So I do really loud podcast listening while doing this chore sort of saying. So that's one of my productivity hacks, and I listen to them at 2x the speed, and you jump around if you don't like it. Right? That is one. Second, I'm an early person usually, so 4 to 6 a.m. is me time where I'd like to reflect and read and walk and just collect my thoughts. I won't say that's for everybody, but I just want to say if you make learning intentional, even if it's 30 minutes a week, it's almost like meditation and exercising. It's just like building that mental muscle. It's sometimes doable.

We have time for one more question. All right, here we go. Here we come around. And probably trip over this now. Uh, it is.

So this is for either of you. What is the thing you've unlearned as part of our acquisitions recently? Unlearned is part of our acquisitions. I think.