BONUS: Brand Building Live at Cannes Lions

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1:37Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So last month, I had the chance to attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which brings together marketing and advertising professionals and creatives from all over the world. While I was there, I was able to sit down with Jim Stangle, who's one of the most seasoned and knowledgeable brand builders out there. Jim spent more than 25 years at Procter & Gamble, where he eventually served as its global marketing officer. He basically helped establish P &G as one of the world's leading brand builders.

2:13Now, today, Jim runs his own consulting firm where he works with a bunch of different leading brands, and he also has his own podcast. It's a show, not surprisingly, about branding and marketing. Our conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Amazon's stage at Cannes and was supported by Wondery, and it was filled with insights on what it takes to build a world-class brand today. So I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed being there, and let's get on to the show. So Jim, welcome. It's great to have you. And thank you everybody for joining us. Jim, let me start by asking you about P &G.

2:53from what I've read you were actually rejected as an intern right like you you tried to get into PNG pretty early on and you you didn't get in. That's good homework guy that's nowhere on the internet to be found by the way. No I didn't not get in as an intern but I was sort of relentless I had a great counselor at Penn State where I was in school who was an advocate and I went for the interview you had to have a unanimous vote and I remember the Smokey rooms, interviewing behind closed doors, doing case studies. And then they made a job offer to me. The guy pulled a bag of cookies out of his desk and he said, this is a secret.

3:31No one knows about it. You can come here and work on it. Wow. All right. So you eventually get into P &G as sort of a trainee early on, very junior. And one of the first products that you work on, and this is really interesting. It's much more interesting than it sounds, was Duncan Hines cookies. P &G owned Duncan Hines at the time. They don't own food brands anymore today. But your job was to introduce this brand to America. Why was it special? Why was it a different product at the time? Well, Duncan Hines was a brand that had cake mixes primarily and brownie mixes. This was a baked cookie, a ready-to-serve cookie, if you will.

4:08So we were taking on Nabisco and Keebler and Frito-Lay, and we thought we had a better product. Yeah. And it was crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. We spent a lot of money in advertising and sampling. We put it in test market, got to a 25 share, and then decided to go national. What's interesting about it at the time was that the cookies that you bought at the grocery store, this is in the early 80s, they were like hard crispy cookies. Here you had, it was designed to taste like a fresh baked cookie. Correct. And it did. Yeah. And you had basically a budget to get this in the hands of every person in the United States.

4:44Yeah, I was a kid. I mean, I was 28 years old. I came into P &G and they said, here's$60 million. We want you to put this cookie in the hands of every person in America over the summer. So I had to work at the post office, refrigerate at truck companies, and design a program where every person in America tried them. And how did they do? I mean, your biggest competitor at the time was like Keebler, right? They were doing soft batch cookies. I remember those as a kid. I loved all the, any cookie I could get my hands on. How did you do against your competitors? You know, we got off to a really fast start.

5:16We built out a national expansion. We built a factory. And we expanded. And honestly, we were crushed, Guy. It was my first big failure at P &G. We underestimated our competition. And we underestimated the consumer's desire for massive variety in cookies. And we had like five flavors of chocolate chip. So we ended up exiting the business. And we just, it was not our specialty. Thinking we could come in there and these established baking companies and take away 25 share. Forget it. Yeah. You've written a few books. And one of the things that you write about is something that you really got into early in your career, which was immersion research.

5:57And we're going to talk a little bit more about this over the course of our conversation because I think it's critical. And one of the first places that you sort of tried this out was with peanut butter. You were assigned Jif. Jif peanut butter. Assistant brand manager. And so tell me what you did. How did you learn about consumer behavior at that time? This is like 1985, 86. Well, we were kind of pioneers within P &G. We kind of had a staff meeting. We said, you know, if we just try to sell peanut butter, we're going to trade share with Peter Pan and Skippy. Remember them? Yep. And so we said, we've got to go deeper.

6:33And we've got to be sort of a parenting advocate. And we've got to talk about nutrition and lunches. and we have to think about other flavors and make it even more nutritional. We have to talk to our farmers. So we did a lot of immersive research. Did you actually spend time with parents, moms in particular? We spend time with moms. We spend time with teachers. What were you asking them? What's important in their life and how can we help? Not what do you want in your peanut butter. And you know what we heard? You would hear it today, education, our schools. So we formed an alliance with parent-teacher organizations around the country and we aligned our sales with funds that we would give them to improve their schools.

7:10And it was a massively successful program. And at the time, I think right before, Jif had a slogan, and it was something kind of, you know, not particularly exciting. It was like, Jif peanut butter is healthy or something like that, right? But they had had another slogan, choosy mothers choose Jif, and they dropped that. But essentially, you said, let's bring that back. We brought it back. You want me to sing a jingle? Yeah, sing a jingle. There was no jingle. It was a declarative statement. Yeah. No, we brought it back. And it says, and they ran with that for decades. And what, I mean, what happened?

7:44I mean, was, I'm assuming Skippy, Peter Pan are the competitors. You've got GIF and this campaign. What was the result? Well, Guy, I mean, we still made a better product. I mean, that's a very P &G value. You always want to take, have a demonstrably better product than your competitive set. So we sold a great product. But we thought if we could align with our values, and if we could help in things that mothers and fathers and parents care about, we would have higher awareness, higher loyalty, and a stronger brand. And that's what happened. And what, I mean, so what did it do? I mean, did you see the needle moving?

8:16We had record share, record sales, record profit. In fact, the company had an annual meeting every November where thousands of people gathered in the Coliseum in downtown Cincinnati. People came from around the world. They asked me and my team to go on stage at that meeting and tell our story about how we immersed ourselves with consumers, changed our plans, and designed a program that resonated emotionally and built a share to record levels and it's actually a lesson I've never forgotten all right so another product that you work on this is again another example of immersion research which is this time it's in Europe I think it begins in Europe this is in the late 90s set the stage for us Pampers was a leading diaper brand and a huge business for P &G it's getting its butt kicked by Huggies, right?

9:03You've got a rescue or task to rescue Pampers to figure out what's going on. Huggies is just in the ascendant and Pampers is in the decline. What did you start to do? How did you start to learn about what you needed to do? Well, I was working in the Czech Republic at the time and my boss's boss called me one day at work and said, I want you to be at the Lufthansa Lounge in the Frankfurt airport that night. So I met him in the Lufthansa Lounge about nine o 'clock at night and he said, Pampers is a bit of a shit show. And I'd like you to leave the Czech Republic and come here sort of immediately.

9:39And I want you to unite our team internally because Western Europe and North America were fighting each other. And I'd like you to unite the team and figure out a way to stand for something more meaningful for our, for parents and to try to reinvigorate this brand. By the way, Huggies had just entered Europe and we're getting a lot of market share and that was just not acceptable. I mean, what was the problem? Pampers was, I mean, the assumption is it's diapers, right? And so what do diapers do? They keep babies dry. Like that's how you would market that product. But that wasn't what was resonating with parents?

10:17We spent a lot of time with parents, a lot of time with parents and about what's important to them. It's the same as the Jif peanut butter lesson. And obviously what's important to a parent is their physical, social, psychological development of their babies. So we said, what if we can be a help to that? Because by the way, we had people in almost every hospital in the world sampling Pampers when a baby is born. Often it was the mother's first conversation, which was with one of our samplers. We were doing nothing with that. So we said, what if we could be the parent's advocate for baby's development?

10:51And we could stand for that. And what happened is, I mean, to make a very long story short, That idea caught fire around the world. We united the Pampers global team. And within about 12 years, this was a big brand when we started, P &G's biggest brand. We tripled our revenue and improved the profitability and set an example, frankly, for P &G corporately. Essentially, you introduced this Pampers phases product line. And so as a parent, you go to the grocery store and you see zero to three months, three to six. And that's a game changer. And I'll especially design for that stage of development in a way that was better than our competitive set.

11:26All right. I want to ask you about one more case study before we move on to how this applies to today, which it does in many ways. But Downey Fabric Softener, I mean, it's amazing how many iconic products P &G owns and sort of has put out into the world. Downey Fabric Softener, particularly in Latin America, was in decline. And you wanted to figure out what was going on. and so presumably you start to talk to the people who use it most. Well, this is a good example of immersion research, getting out there and spending time in people's homes and in their lives. By the way, our executive team at P &G, we met quarterly.

12:05This is the top management. Before our quarterly meeting, we would always do an immersion. We'd go spend time with people who are not like us. And so we spent time with very low-income parents in Latin America. We spread out and did this in various neighborhoods. and what came out of that and some great research by R &D people is a new product that took the suds away after you did your wash. Now that sounds like it's maybe silly but these people are carrying water sometimes a mile, two miles, three miles to do their laundry. So if we can have them do laundry in one load of water and take the suds away quickly and have the clothes clean, fresh and not soapy, it was an enormous benefit.

12:45So that came out of the immersion research. We acted on it, we developed it, and it became a huge product around the world. So you essentially reformulate the product so it's not as sudsy, doesn't require as much rinsing. Correct. And you basically have a new product. Correct. Okay. So now we've heard about these three case studies, all the results of real ground research, right? And so now let's bring it to the present day and the present moment, right? We are in an era of massive data and it's just growing. I mean, you can measure everything now and increasingly everything more. In your view, do you feel like brands today rely too much on statistics and not enough on ground truth fact finding?

13:30It's an and guy. I mean, honestly, there's a lot of talk here in Cannes this week about this. In fact, I had a nickname when I was an assistant brand manager, of Data Man. So I spent my time in the brand group just scouring the data about the brand, the competitive set distribution, what's happening. And I would spend a lot of immersion time in stores with mothers, with parents. You've got to do them both because insights will pop out when you're using both sides of your brain. So I'm an advocate for both. But if you do one without the other, you will not be a world-class marketer or world-class brand builder.

14:09We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from my conversation with Jim Stengel live at Cannes Lions. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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16:57hey welcome back to the special bonus edition of how i built this here's more for my conversation with jim stengel live on the amazon stage and supported by wondery at can lions um so jim what what is a a marketing campaign that you've seen in recent years that that you've really loved that's really impressed you? Well, I can talk about things that affect my behavior, because then it gets very personal. I mean, I love that you've had this brand on your show. I love the brand Vori coming out of Encinitas. I almost, my wife will laugh. I almost only wear that now. Pronounced V-O-R-E, by the way.

17:34V-O-R-E, okay. But it's okay. Spelled V-O-R-E. But I was an early adopter. My daughter, I don't know, maybe eight years ago, nine years ago, bought me some of her Christmas. And they just had, as you know, had a massive investment a couple years ago and are expanding like mad. You know, and by the way, Viore is an interesting case study because when they started, they really struggled. You know, they had a... It's a good show you did with their founder. Thank you. It's a really good show. Thank you. Joe Kudla started that brand. Yeah. They didn't resonate. And the reason why is they tried to sell yoga wear for men in yoga studios.

18:07So they really kind of took the same product and just changed the way they marketed it. They basically said, hey, this is for hiking. It's for hanging out with your kids. It's for surfing, swimming, going to the gym, doing yoga. And somehow that clicked. That started to click with consumers, and it became this product and brand that first men and now women were buying because they saw it as an all-purpose, comfortable, activewear brand. I'm wearing it now, guy. Those are we already. Yeah, and there was nothing like it. Obviously, the landscape has changed in the time since you've left P &G. social media marketing has become much, much more important.

18:46It basically didn't exist right in 2008. And I wonder if you were still at P &G today, right? Or you were running marketing at a major organization in an era of social media influencers and AI, you know, the potential for AI to write ad copy, you know, what would keep you up at night? Or how would you think about positioning brands now? Well, what would keep me up at night is, are the brands relevant? Are they in touch? It's easy to be irrelevant today if you're not in touch. I think what I would do, the strategies would be the same guy. I mean, where are your consumers spending their time? How are they getting their information?

19:28Who's influencing them? And that's easy to see. Then you have to act on it. And you have to leave some of your old paradigms and frameworks behind. Kraft Heinz, who is well represented here at Kent, I don't know if any of them are in the audience, they're doing some super creative work because they're following the consumer. And by the way, they're unleashing their organization to enjoy the work, to have fun with it, to do things that are entertaining and engaging. And when you do that, good things will happen. But the same strategy, be close to your customers, understand where they are. It's just a different tactic today than it was 20 years ago.

20:03Speaking of Kraft Heinz, I saw an incredible ad campaign, and I think they did a year ago, and it's just images of people in restaurants pouring out ketchup. And in the back of the kitchen, you see somebody pouring off-brand ketchup into a Heinz bottle. And I think the tagline is like, it has to be Heinz. It has to be Heinz. It has to be Heinz. And it's such a powerful message. And it resonates because everybody's had that experience where you dip a hot french fry into ketchup. And it's not Heinz. And most of the time, I mean, Heinz, you know, Malcolm Gladwell has written about this, right? I mean, there's a reason why you come back to that product.

20:37I think they're going to advertise in the show, Guy. Yeah. Heinz here. Happy to have you. You know, there was a panel discussion the other day about the future of advertising. And this is windy here. This is nice, actually. It's very, very pleasant up here on stage. It feels pretty good. And one of the panelists said, it was a younger content creator. and this person said, look, I think that the future of advertising is not going to be mass market TV type spots. That's dead. It's going to be niche marketing. It's going to be influencer marketing. And I wonder what your take on that is. I mean, do you think there's some credence to that idea?

21:20I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk talks a lot about brands starting on social. That's largely right. I agree with that. That's where the energy is. That's where the people are. So the companies that are adjusting how they have, not their strategy, but how the strategy comes to life are the ones that I think are building big brands that are relevant. We talked about Kraft Heinz a minute ago. Those are big brands. They're in many ways mundane brands. But they are being talked about on social. They're doing things that gets attention and gets engagement. Getting attention today, you can't buy it anymore. You have to earn it.

21:52And earning it's a lot more challenging and takes a different kind of team and a different kind of work than in the old days when I was young, where you could spend$60 million and pretty much get 90 % awareness. It's a different world now. And the companies that realize that and are acting on it, and thankfully a lot are, are winning. Do you see influencer marketing as sort of the future of where this... If it's authentic. If it's authentic. I mean, we did a little workshop this morning with CMOs and that we talked about that guy. And I mean, influencer marketing was here when I started my career.

22:28What was it? And what did it look like? It looked like finding someone who is an expert. Or a celebrity. A celebrity, committing into your company, learning about your brand, honestly believing in it, and then advocating in their circles. So the strategy is no different. It's just it happens right now at scale more quickly because of the platforms. And it's changing. Someone who's an influencer today may not be next month. Yeah. And that's why you have to be very, very in touch. You know, Mike Cesario is at this conference, the founder of Liquid Death. And we had him on the show. I was with him yesterday.

23:02And we had him on the show a few months ago. And I think a lot of people went to his presentation and were blown away, but also feeling a little bit like, well, how can I do that in my company? Because essentially what he did was he took a tired, stayed category, bottled water, and he turned it on his head. You know, he turned it into a purple cow, what Seth Godin calls purple cows. It was so weird. Like you have to go into the grocery store and pick it up because you're looking at this can with a fiery skull and these old English lettering and it says liquid death. And you're like, what is that?

23:35Is that malt liquor? Why is it at Whole Foods? It's so weird that you're compelled to pick it up. But for a variety of reasons, big brands weren't or aren't doing that. And it's not that they can't do that. So why, you know, what is your, when you talk to big, big brands and they want to be scrappy, but they can't. How do you advise them to think about taking risks? Well, I think what Mike shared yesterday was it's about entertainment, right? And that's a different process than kind of advertising. So he's nailed that. I mean, there are brands like High Noon, which went from nothing to the leading brand in canned alcoholic beverages.