Procter & Gamble is a force for good and a force for growth

As I think about my time at P&G, like many people, I started off focusing on one or two brands and one or two geographies. I started off my career working on Tide and Downy here in the US, as well as supporting our Canadian business. Over time, I think we've seen the appeal of our brands grow and the complexity of our business grow. As it relates to purpose, CSR used to be the job of a few people, and it's really transitioned from the job of the few to the job of the many. It's really core to the work that we do, whether you're in an office, in a lab, or in one of our manufacturing plants. It's transformed into a fundamental part of our employee value proposition. People now want to work for a company that operates transparently and ethically. So it is not just a nice-to-have. We view purpose and transparency as table stakes. It's what enables us to serve consumers well, and it is what enables us to retain employees as well as grow and develop.

For us, citizenship is what we call it. We define it as part of our business. It's not something that's extra or comes on top. When we look at going beyond just doing good things in the communities where we live and work, there's a direct link with building trust and equity with our consumers. And when you do that, you can drive growth and value creation for your shareholders. So it is the yin and the yang. You need both. If you're all about good and not necessarily growing the bottom line, then you're charity. We know that sustainability of the great work that we do in communities, and sustainability of the great work that we do for our consumers and for our employees, all need to happen day in, day out, year in and year out. For us, it's not just about a program here or there. It's about finding the model that benefits our consumers because we're providing great products that they want and love, and that provide a great impact to communities, but doing so in a way that everyone benefits. When we have a more equal and diverse society, for example, that's good for not just our business, it's good for the cities that we live in, it's good for society broadly. So we take a view when we think about citizenship and purpose that we're always going for a win-win-win. It's not about just what is good for one audience. It's got to be something sustainable, something that has long-term benefit, because that is how we do it year in and year out, and it's how we sustain it and how we bring others with us along that journey.

I think there have always been elements that were there. There were times when we might have had a little too much focus on one element or another. But to go back to the force for good, force for growth, I think over the past three or four years we've really found our stride. Frankly, how we've been able to articulate and show that doing the right thing is good for the bottom line, and what's good for the bottom line benefits the communities. For us, it really is about trying to find those integrated links. We look at even on our brands, we look at what we call four brand fundamentals that take it from a nice-to-have to a must-have. P&G makes its mark in the market by providing truly superior performing products. That means the product has to clean and smell good and do everything better than its next best competitor, or we won't have a business very long. But beyond just doing that, we're looking at how do we build innovations fundamentally into the products. Yes, it'd be great if Tide came in a recycled package, but what we've elevated it to is to say, how do we make Tide in a more sustainable way and how do we make using Tide sustainable? The fact that we've innovated and made Tide able to work effectively in lower temperatures means that every time a consumer uses it, they're having a positive impact on the environment through responsible consumption. We've also pursued areas when it comes to our brand communication. Yes, it's great when companies do PSAs to drive awareness of a specific topic, but diversity and inclusion is also an important part of that. So we don't go off and say we need to do a commercial just about diversity and inclusion. Every time you see an ad from our company, we want to make sure that it not only reflects all people, but it reflects them accurately and positively. There are big things and little things that we can do in the course of our day-to-day business that are having a positive impact. I think that is what separates what we're doing from companies who are throwing lots of money at a big program and then moving on to a different program the next year. It's got to be fundamental, it's got to be a part of your DNA, it's got to be rooted in the foundations in order to work.

Yeah, and that's the difference between telling your story and living your story.

What I say is we're really clear that we can't talk the talk unless we walk the walk. I'm fortunate enough to have great partners with Mark, but also all of our business unit CEOs that really realize that this is what is going to help make us a sustainable, in fact a superior company versus our competitors. I don't say that to say that we do it strictly to be better. We do it because it's the right thing to do, but it's got to be fundamental and core. A lot of the discussions that relate to the programs that we talk about don't actually start off as program discussions. They start off as business or strategy discussions. Communications becomes one way and one tactic in which we achieve some of these. I think that keeps us honest. Like many PR people, there are times when you probably get asked by your multi-functional colleagues, 'Hey, I've got a shiny new widget, can you go off and get me some impressions for it? Can you get me an article in the Wall Street Journal for that?' And what I say is the first question shouldn't be, 'Well, that's a good story or that's a bad story.' The first question should be, 'Tell me more about your strategy. Why is that the right strategy for a business? Why is that the right strategy for your brand? Are we really doing this in a meaningfully distinctive way? Are we having meaningful impact?' And if you spend enough time in the core strategy of what you're trying to achieve, the communication slip for that becomes a hell of a lot easier. So it's not about the communication, it's about the strategy number one. And number two, I think we're really clear on the impact that we want to have. There are times when it is appropriate for the brand or the company to be the hero, but what we've found is increasingly, the more we can provide context for how the programs and efforts that we do benefit everyone in our ecosystem, we find much better receptivity for the program and much better communications and receptivity among media and among people in social media. You've really got to focus on getting the meat right, because that's what leads to some of the great communication. A great example of that would be some of the work that we've done in trying to increase the diversity in the creative ecosystem. P&G has long been an advocate of saying we need to be doing more in gender, race, and LGBTQ. But one of the things that we recognized is when we were looking at even our own advertising, we had to have that man-in-the-mirror moment to say, 'Are we doing anything right?' So it started with a hard look and saying, 'When we're talking about doing the dishes, are we only showing women in those commercials? Are we only showing women doing the laundry?' We had to get real honest about the stories that we were telling. And one of the ways in which you get true and authentic stories is by having the right diversity of people behind the camera. So we recognized that we didn't have nearly, and we still don't have nearly as many people of color, nearly as many women directing the ads that we put on TV every day. Great, let's fix that problem, because if you fix that problem at the core, you'll get better stories at the end. You simply can't write a good script and then fall down in all of those areas. That's another example of where the ecosystem that you're operating in has to be great. And by the way, our most representative ads, some of our ad campaigns that have been directed by women, are some of the best performing ad campaigns that we have. So it's not about an element of charity. When you do the right thing, the right thing will happen to your business.

Well, I think anytime you have a diverse set of people bringing lots of ideas to the table, you're going to get a better outcome. When we sit around and do any piece of advertising, we try to deliberately look around the room and say, 'What point of view is not represented?' That can be a gender, a political leaning, a geographic leaning, it can be any nature of those things. You've got to step back and say, 'Who's not represented?' And where that point of view is not represented, you've got to find a way to go off and get that and build that into your ecosystem. We've even had that on some of the diversity-themed work that we've done. We did a project called 'The Look' last year, and it was interesting. We got into a discussion as we were working on that, and we looked around the room and it was only Black people in the room talking about this. And we said, 'Wait a minute, how can we get this right if you only have the Black perspective represented?' So we had to do some deliberate things to make sure at the very fundamental levels we had the right diversity. It cuts all ways. But to answer your question, Carol, I think you get more robust insights, and then you've got to have people that are willing to say, 'Hey, I'm not sure this is the reflection of my life,' or 'Here's a different way to look at that.' I think we've taken steps to ensure that people know that that type of perspective is not just okay, but it's welcome.

I think it's a both/and. To be clear, we are still incredibly data-driven. But it's not data only. Data complements insights to get to great communication. What we recognized is that A.G. Lafley was a big proponent of the phrase 'the consumer is boss,' and really trying to think through what is the perspective of the consumer that's in the room. For each of our brands, as you're thinking about who the consumer is you're trying to solve for, we really had a prototypical consumer. She might be a mother, a family of two with young children at home, working in a job or whatever it might be. But we try to look through everything and say, 'What would that consumer think of this?' In many instances, we actually created a cutout of a consumer, put it in the room, put some notes up, so we immersed ourselves not just in her functional role as a person doing laundry, but her role as a mother, as a family member, as a businesswoman. And then try to get the balance in that right. Yes, we want to know how many times she does laundry, what are the loads, when does she shop, how does she shop. But when you can be contextually relevant and understand everything going on in her life, you'll get better insights and your communication will have a higher bar. So it's a complement to the data, not a replacement. And then number two, I think we just have to have a culture that's committed to learning and committed to continuing to ask the question, even when something is working well. We will spend as much time dissecting why it's working well, not just spending the same amount of time on something when it's not working well. Understanding what are the core drivers. We have internally what we call a brand building framework, which is the set of questions that we ask ourselves to make sure that we're paying attention to the right insights and the right data. So really using that rigor as well as the insight and combining them through a diverse organization, I think leads to breakthrough.

It is... I mean, what I would say, particularly in the purpose-driven work that we do, we are also mindful of what are the short-term impacts and what are the long-term impacts. If you think back to the Gillette campaign that we ran a little bit more than a year ago, we received an intense amount of negative or critical feedback. People said, 'Oh wow, P&G just shut up and sell razors.' You could look at, for a large part of their campaign, the amount of negative thumbs down that we got on YouTube versus the thumbs up. And what we recognized is those were outcomes, but it wasn't the data alone that we were looking at. We went and looked at a barrage of data, four or five different studies, to really understand that the social media sentiment was not necessarily reflective of the broad consumer sentiment. Some of those lessons we've known over time, some we had to learn the hard way. So what I would say is not every piece of data in and of itself is conclusive. You really need to look over a body of evidence to say, 'Hey, what's the long-term impact?' And you need to look at that impact within your target market and beyond your target market, both short-term and long-term. What we later learned on that campaign is that we actually made more friends than foes, even though the social media dynamics and the typical things that you look at such as sentiment monitoring didn't tell that story. I think some of this is when you're really clear on the why, you're able to hold true and weather some of those storms. We had similar issues when we did 'The Talk' a few years ago. We got a ton of negative impact, but what we recognized is that was driven really out of a handful of communities that people got riled up from a semi-political perspective. When you talk to most consumers and you say, 'Let me tell you this story about a mom who wants to do the best for her child,' and you tell them the story, everyone almost universally agrees with that. Then you put an issue of race on that, and then you get into some slightly different metrics because everyone approaches that somewhat differently. But when you can find the commonalities in those stories—a mom that wants the best for her child, a consumer who wants the best for the environment for a future generation—when you can find out what it is that drives people and then make sure that you're linking your campaign to those core common drivers as opposed to where the social media mob is going, you'll develop the institutional fortitude to withstand some of those storms and come out better on the other end.

Absolutely. Look at the state of the world and you could find few things that people agree on. The fact that you could have one politician say something, and it can be something as simple as 'the sky is blue,' there are going to be some people who are going to take issue with that. Keeping everyone happy has never been the goal. I think we look at this as a journey of progress. We want people to engage, we want people to reflect, we want people to come away from our programs and our communication better, or at least more reflective than they perhaps started. And that is the goal itself. We are one of the world's largest advertisers, we have a unique position to spark conversation, but we want to do that in a constructive way that leads to dialogue, that dialogue leads to understanding, and that understanding leads to broad behavior change. I think you can look at any large-scale movement, whether you look at a topic like environmental sustainability or gay marriage, it's taking people time to get through the funnel. Part of what drove that change here in the US is the ability for people to relate to someone who was on the LGBT spectrum and then say, 'I want that person to be happy.' And if you can say, 'Hey, I want Damon to be happy' or 'I want Mary to be happy,' then guess what, it takes a little bit of the sting out of whether this group of people should have that right. That's a little bit of the journey that we're on. We do think at the end of the day we want a more equal world: equal voices, equal opportunity, equal representation. We're not going to get there in a straight line, but a lot of what we're doing is taking small chinks out of that armor time and time again that is going to open up minds and eventually change hearts.

Yeah, well, it's that we can both accomplish that broader goal and engage consumers in ways that grows our business. You go back to force for good, force for growth. Two-thirds of consumers say they're more likely to buy a brand that shares their values. The numbers go even higher when you start engaging Millennials and Gen Z consumers. 'Hey, if I'm going to buy your brand, I want to know what's the company behind it. I want to know your track record. I want to know how you act in moments of crisis.' All of those things hold true. These are moments of truth for P&G and for P&G brands. So we look at every opportunity that we have as a moment of truth for us to live out our values, because that's what our consumers are telling us they want. They're not necessarily saying, 'Hey, I want to agree with you on every single thing,' but 'I want you to have a point of view. I want you to express a point of view, and I want you to engage with me in a meaningful and constructive way.' Again, not 100% of consumers and not on every topic, but what are the topics that certain brands have a right to play in? And making sure that we're having that authentic voice each and every time that we do that. And let me tell you, there have been programs and ideas that we've thought of that we've not pursued because it wasn't right. We didn't have an authentic point of view, and consumers may not have been receptive to that. So another important part of this is doing the sensing, doing the data, and having enough conversations with potential adversaries, stakeholders, and influencers to know that you've got a right to play. These are topics when you look at areas that we have done campaigns over the past year—race, gender, people with disabilities—we just don't pop up one day and say, 'Hey, we want to do a gender campaign.' We've been doing the work for so long that gives us the right to talk about it. Not because we're perfect, but because we're making progress and because you're engaged. You're not shying away. You're deciding whether or not you have a voice on a particular thing, but you're not shying away from it in any case, which is great.

Exactly.

There has to be harmony when you think about moments of crisis and what your enduring values are. If I think about the priorities that we've set out during COVID-19—protecting the health and well-being of our people, serving consumers around the world who count on the brands that we provide, and then serving communities that we're a part of—part of the reason I think we've been able to move clearly, quickly, and confidently is because those are outgrowths of our company's values and principles. Every time you go into a P&G building, you'll see our PVPs up on the wall, you'll see them on the back of the badge that you get when you walk around our buildings. So there's a harmony. The immediate crisis response therefore becomes a 'how' and not a 'what.' We've always said the most important aspect that we have in our company is the people. What's our number one priority in a COVID response? Protecting the health and well-being of P&G people. So we immediately moved to work from home and we immediately started giving our people in the plants PPE because that was consistent with their values. So it simply became the next thing in a chain of things that we were doing. We were able to mobilize support through a number of NGOs very quickly. Why? Because those were relationships that we've had for decades. They knew who to call. We already had the shipping lanes open for the products that we needed to do. So it was more 'connect the dot now' not trying to figure out what pipes therefore need to exist. And it even comes down to the consumers. Consumers trust P&G brands because we do what the product says it does on the label and we do it better than anyone else. We started from what I would call a high-trust relationship which allowed us to move quickly and very confidently in what it is that we needed to do. And I think it helped build the trust that we were a company that wanted to support people when they needed the most, because we were there yesterday, they know we're here today, they know we're going to be here tomorrow. As it relates to a lot of the purpose work, one of the things that's not helpful and what you won't see from us is a lot of what I call 'program hopping.' 'Oh, this brand is after orphans this year, after the environment this year, and after race next year.' Finding those areas where we can make a difference, and sometimes that means admitting what we can't do and making some of those choices. But again, moments of crisis reveal underlying character.

Yeah, we've activated more than 30 brands in 30 different countries to respond in some way, shape, or form to the COVID-19 crisis, and we're partnering with more than 200 different organizations around the world. We operate off of a set of core principles. We understand what our priorities are: people, consumers, communities. But we're really clear on what the principles are. To the degree that we can leverage our expertise, our marketing, and our manufacturing facilities, that's what we're doing. In a matter of days, we were able to transform and set up lines to manufacture hand sanitizer. We have a plant here in the US in Kansas City that's shutting down at the end of June, but instead of making that plant idle, we've moved it to start manufacturing surface disinfectant that's being shipped out to hospitals around the country. Our China organization, recognizing that we make diapers and we have filtration technology, immediately began to modify that equipment to make masks given the need for personal protective equipment. I think what it reveals to me is when you set up the right principles, when you have united values, it's something that you don't have to have someone in the C-suite saying 'go do this.' The vast majority of our response has been enabled by people who are on the front lines, people who are in our plants and our distribution centers, in our subsidiaries around the world. Their ideas that they're saying, 'Hey, I've got an asset, I've got a resource, can we put it to good use?' What are the principles by which we need to do that? And we're very clear on the decision authority, and people can move very quickly. Certainly we're making sure that we're not doing every possible thing, that we're doing that in balance with serving our core consumers and protecting our people. But I think it speaks to the quality of people that we have and the environment that our leadership has created, that people want to step up and that they know they'll be rewarded for the ideas and for the execution.

We've not stopped working. I think what COVID-19 has challenged us to do is to work in different ways. If you think about it, we've got upwards of 150 different manufacturing facilities around the world in our network, and in force most of them continue to operate. If anything, we've actually had to increase production of P&G products around the world to meet the demand and the need, particularly for cleaning, health, and hygiene products. Our people at the plant have found really innovative ways to do what they need to do. We've moved to around-the-clock shifts so that we could have appropriate social distancing. We've moved to different ways of packaging and doing certain activities so that again we can increase production without creating additional risk for P&G people. We've had to find new ways to get our products out. In some parts of the world, normally products travel from a plant to a distribution center to a distribution center of a retailer to the store. We've cut out a number of those steps in the process to speed up production. So a return to work is actually probably something that less than half the P&G people are thinking about in terms of returning to a workplace. Obviously for people like me who could do my work from home via the benefit of technology, then that's what we're doing. And over time, as local laws and regulations loosen and as we can do it safely, we will return more people to some of our workplaces, whether that's a plant, a lab, or an office. We'll do so safely. But the chassis on which we've built—mass temperature checks, screening, giving people great benefits so they know they get paid leave—one of the things that we've made very clear is, 'Hey, if you don't feel well, there's no pressure for you to come into this place because it's not good for you, it's not good for your family, it's not good for anyone else.' So some of those long-term core values we find are benefiting us in a time of need like this.

Yeah, well, Gillette Treo is the first razor designed to shave someone else. If you think about Gillette being a brand that's been around since 1901, King C. Gillette's original safety razors are still actually used in many different parts of the world. But I think the insights come not only for Treo but for many of our products because we spend a lot of time in consumer homes, and we spent a lot of time talking to people not just about what they can do and how they can do it better, but why they do it. Whenever we're in consumer homes, we're getting all of these insights. The insight that 'Hey, I love this product and I want a product if it could only do this'—what we found when we were in some homes of our target users for Treo is that there was such incredible passion for being able to serve consumers. I think that's the inspiration that the Treo team took back. The technology, if you will, is very simple. The technology in Treo has been around in the cupboards of Gillette for some time. It was the combination of putting them together in a way in which we were very clear on who we wanted to serve, and that was caregivers. That can be elderly, it can be people with special needs, it's a wide variety of things. But when you empower people to come up with great ideas, I think that's the power. When you look at people who say, 'Give me a roadmap, give me some guardrails,' and if the guardrails are to serve consumers and to create as many ideas as we can, a business model will follow. We don't start with 'What's the business model and how many of these can we make?' We start with serving consumers and then getting those product ideas into the marketplace. A lot of P&G products that you know, whether it's Gillette Treo or any of the new products that we've introduced over the past many years, they start in small scale tests. We give it to 20 consumers or 100 consumers, and we just talk to them about how they use it, why they use it, what they'd like to be better. That's where a lot of the insight came from. Then you take that inspiration back to a very small team split between Boston and the UK, and the rest is history. But again, at the core of that was a real focus on serving consumers, putting together the right technologies, and then the storytelling is a bonus on top. Trying to create an emotive ad that heroes the caregiver and the product is a strong supporter. I think that's sometimes something that we in our industry don't always get right. We sometimes want to be the hero, and what we've realized in a lot of this work is the hero isn't a brand. The hero is not P&G. The heroes are the consumers whose lives that we can make better. We really center those heroes, and that enables us to think about the proposition in a very different way. It's how the brand makes you feel ultimately that wins the consumer over.

A few years ago, we launched a program called Ambition 2030. Ambition 2030 laid out a number of broad areas where P&G and P&G brands wanted to have an impact. One of the unique things about that is we asked every employee to think about what was the difference that they can make in their area of responsibility. If you're a brand manager, it might look one way. If you're an engineer, it may look another way. If you're working in our plant, it looks another way. I think this is a testament again to our supply chain people who think day in and day out about the facilities in which they operate. We've long had a commitment to it. I think what we find is that the creativity and innovation of our people kind of come out when you empower them. The job and the task to figure out how do we operate more sustainably isn't held in a single department. It's everyone's job at that plant. A lot of our ideas for how we've applied things to our operations have started from people on the floors of our plants around the world. When they can figure out a better way to do something, then those ideas get funneled up and around management. If we figure out something that's really working good at our plant in Beijing, we're going to reapply it to our plant in Bangkok and then eventually to our plant in Boston. There's no pride on idea creation, but there is a lot of desire to have the broadest impact possible. When you look at it, energy, water, waste, and climate are all areas that we focus on from an environmental standpoint. We make some progress. I think one of the other things that helps us in this space is we are very target-driven. We've set some very bold goals in terms of what it is that we want to achieve. We have an aspiration never to send another piece of plastic to the landfill ever again. That's going to lead to a lot of discontinuous questions. How do you think about packaging like that? Your liquid Tide has got to go into something. That just unleashes people to a variety of possibilities. We've now created a technology in the plastic space that takes impurities, odor, color, other imperfections out of plastic so that they can be recycled again in almost virgin-like quality, because there's a lot of recycled plastic that doesn't have a market today. More recycled plastic isn't the answer. You've got to create a circular economy. Those are the types of challenges that we talk very openly with our people about, and then again we put multi-functional teams on it. It's not just a supply chain person. How do you connect someone that's an expert in business models to a scientist in a lab to someone in the supply chain, really with the goal to say, 'Hey, let's eliminate beach plastic'? That's when we get more of the innovation and breakthrough. So a lot of it is the combination of various fields of expertise that we're able to bring together against some big, audacious challenges or goals.

When it comes to purpose, the most important thing is that you begin that journey. When I think about successful organizations and inclusive organizations, they're created by leaders who are in touch with really where they're at and what their blind spots might be. So really understanding and pursuing your blind spots, because then you get to ask the question, 'Who can help me achieve those blind spots? Who can help me address them?' That would lead to point number two: finding partnerships, even in potential adversaries. I can tell you I've learned a lot from organizations that have applied pressure to P&G, be it in the animal rights space, be it in the environmental space, in a number of spaces, because we find where that common ground is and we find common purpose in that. We share a common purpose to end animal research. Where we differ is in the how. But now that we know we're on the same team, we're going to get there a lot faster. So that would be number two. And then I think number three is progress, not perfection. There is no perfect company, there is no perfect individual. But I don't want people to think that a fear of shortcomings in what you have in your own house should stop you from getting in the game. Be honest about where you're at, be honest about where you go, set some goals, and don't be afraid to learn along the way. We're all trying to get better every step of the way. It's about progress, not about perfection.

One of the people that I learned a lot from was Reverend Leah Daughtry. Leah was the CEO of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. When I left P&G to work on that campaign, what I admired most about Leah was the way in which she integrated faith and politics, which can sometimes be a very tricky combination. I thought she was a leader who always did the right thing but had a gift of explaining why that brought people together. I think about applying that to the business world. We all want many of the same things. We differ in how we get there, but I think a unique role of leadership is to inspire people as to what can be achieved together even in very difficult situations, and then bringing the right groups of people together, sometimes not letting them out of the room until they can figure it out. So Leah is someone who I learned a lot watching up close in years past and from afar. But to me, people who can bring their whole selves—whether your faith, your values, your belief, however you define that—bringing that to your purpose work and really being grounded in that, I think helps us, particularly in the communications field, become a rudder for our organizations, ensuring that we're making the right decisions and executing them in the right way that builds trust. And I think that's what I try to do every day.

Thank you both for what you guys do and for telling powerful stories, bringing people together. This is an area where I think there is a significant amount of benefit from cooperation and not competition. The opportunity to share stories and lessons learned really does make a difference along that journey. So thank you.