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- Welcome to another edition of "Taking Stock Live"
where we do just that.
We take stock with really thought leaders, inspiration,
and people who I love to follow
and I know you all love to follow all over the world,
and today's going to be super fun.
This is someone who was brought to me by my team.
Her name is Nina Holdaway.
She is the managing to director of Accenture interactive.
And as I was looking at Nina's background,
I thought wow, there couldn't be a more relevant person
for me to learn from
and for all of you to listen to
than what we're going to hear about today.
So I'll tell you a little bit about Nina
and then I know we'll hear directly from her.
So over 25 years of developing, managing,
and marketing leading global, regional, and local brands.
So Nina, you started out with Unilever in Sweden
in the Nordic region in the 90s.
Later on worked at the headquarters
for Unilever in Rotterdam
and you set up one of its first innovation centers
for spreads and the cooking category.
Then you moved over to Kraft Heinz
or Kraft I guess it was at the time maybe and the UK,
continuing your marketing journey
and you had the opportunity to sharpen your commercial edge
by taking on broader commercial
and cross-functional capabilities.
Then you moved over to the client side.
So you and I will have a lot to talk about
of what it's like to go from brands
to different sides of looking and working with brands
and started really in the consultancy world,
and then found yourself at Accenture.
Now impressive, for all of those of you who don't know,
being a managing director at Accenture is a big deal.
And you've been there for a about five years
and really been focusing on the frontline CMO work
and really particularly marketing and relationships
and partnerships I should say within marketing.
Is that a decent summary of your background?
- That's a very good summary, Shelley,
of the 25 odd years it's been
and it's been an absolute pleasure
throughout client side and consultancy alike.
So yeah, thank you for that introduction
and thank you for having me.
I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.
- Well, it's a incredible background
and like I said,
I think there's a lot to be learned
even just as you migrated in your own career
from being sort of client side
to then being part of the consultancies
or the technology providers that serve those clients.
But just looking at your background,
you obviously have a passion for CMO and for brands
and I'm curious if you could just share with our audience
first, where do you think that passion comes from?
- So yeah, that's a good question
and probably something I've thought about myself
over the years given it's been a very consistent theme.
So the first thing I think that lies behind that passion
is definitely my passion for fellow human beings.
So I have always been fascinated by people
and at university I did business degree.
But quite early on I started flirting with psychology
and did a couple of extra courses,
really getting to understand human beings
and to get under the skin of desires, and their needs,
and their sort of inner motivations.
And I guess related to that then
once you thoroughly understand your consumer
or your customer and the people around you,
that's when I think you can do
some fantastic things with brands.
You can create the most amazing brand experience
or consumer and customer experiences.
And I think relatively early on actually in my career
when I was with Unilever,
I had a taste of that.
So I worked in the margarine area
and most people think margarine,
it's only so exciting as a product.
But what I had a pleasure
in my first sort of brand management role to take on
was the heritage of a brand
that had been around in the Swedish market
then for many years,
that was very much associated with cooking,
and was positioned as the helper in the kitchen.
So very early on,
it was all about actually what can we do with our brand
and what experiences can we provide?
And we did things like developing cookbooks
and we launched those books,
and we provided services around.
We did cooking events
and provided services around actually helping people
succeed with a dinner party, et cetera.
So and that was very early on,
the first few years of my marketing career.
And that's always stayed with me
and in 2022 when experiences is very widely,
that's the focus for many brands,
I think that still holds true.
So yeah, I'm very passionate.
Could talk on the topic for a very long time.
Absolutely love the world of brand and CMOs.
- I love that, and I love where you started
which is just it starts with your curiosity about people.
I was someone who always liked to look
at people's shopping carts or baskets in the supermarket.
I don't know why, maybe I'm nosy,
but I think that somehow that's in you
and then it's how do you extend that
out to the products that you work on?
And having a cookbook to help with dinner parties,
I know that's something I could still really use.
So it's wonderful to put
that curiosity put to work in that way.
- And I think you're spot on, Shelley.
I think if you're going to be good as marketeer,
that closeness to your customer or consumer is so critical.
So being with them
which we did a very good job of I think in Unilever.
Shopping with them, cooking with them,
and being in their homes.
Opening their cupboards to see what's really going on
often on the back of perhaps having had
a conversation with them beforehand
that might have pointed you
in a slightly different direction.
It's just absolutely fascinating.
So with a curious mind and an interest in people,
I think that sort of leads you down a certain path
and I've been very happy there for many years.
- It is, you're reminding me of sort of when we used to do
sort of shop belongs and closet studies,
and we say don't say that for us.
We want to actually see how you live.
But it's just so much fun to kind of get to see
people in their natural element.
- Absolutely brilliant.
- So now I mean, obviously the agenda for a CMO today,
it is not an easy world out there with technology and data
and in some ways maybe the tooling has gotten better,
but I'm sure you're hearing
a lot in terms of what's on their mind.
So maybe share just some of those top themes
that you're hearing from marketeers
and CMOs as you're talking to them.
- We hear a lot
and again, in the same in way as if you manage
and develop a brand,
you want to be close to your consumers
in the same way we need to be
close to our clients and our CMOs.
And one of the things that happened
if we dial back a couple of years
at the start of the pandemic
was that my colleagues and I found ourselves
with a hotline pretty much.
Just as COVID hits,
people were feeling really unsure
and uncertain about what was going on.
Actually they had lots to do,
lots in their personal lives that were shifting
and changing, lots at work.
Not really sure how to move forward necessarily.
So there was a lot of conversation
and quite quickly what we realized
there was a need for people to come together.
To come together to make sense of things.
To come together and safety in numbers, to share ideas.
To in amongst everything that was difficult
inspire one another, to have someone else
saying oh, that's really interesting.
That happened to me last week
and do you know, here is what we did.
What do you think?
So we created and brought together both current clients
and other people in our networks,
CMOs specifically in a CMO community
that's been running for the last couple of years now.
And it was in terms of back to your questions around topics,
what we found was that early on in the pandemic
there was so much going on
that actually what was topical shifted by the week,
if not by the day.
So it was impossible for us
to actually plan topics ahead of time.
It had to be done in the last few days
before the actual sessions that we ran.
And then of course what's happened
is that there are probably now about 100
or so CMOs in the UK that belong to that community.
We are still meeting every three to four weeks
and a lot of them have found their own ways
of having conversations with each other,
so we're not always part of that.
And of course the topics have become more consistent.
There isn't as much change
and perhaps turbulence as we had early on.
Things that we are hearing right now
that people are asking about is we talked about experiences.
So a lot of discussion around how do I stay relevant?
How do I make sure my brand
and my company is relevant at a time
when consumers, customers are changing
so much and so quickly?
So actually getting under the skin of that topic
and then helping our clients create those experience
and being quite agile in terms of how that can shift
and change over time is a huge topic of conversation.
Another one would be purpose.
So I think that's something
that's been part of the conversation.
It feels like a very long time.
If you look again, back to Unilever.
An organization like Unilever,
they have done a lot of work for their brands
around purpose for many years.
However I think now it's widely recognized
that you can't actually function
without a very clear purpose that is meaningful,
that it's not just gimmicky,
and that is also underpinned by values
where people like you or I,
if we wanted to join an organization,
we could paint ourselves into that picture
and feel that actually what I'm going to be
contributing here
is well aligned with who I am, what I'm all about,
and what I want to bring to the world.
So I think that's a huge topic of conversations
and we've run many sessions around that.
And then back to what you were saying,
the tech and the tooling.
So yes, as a CMO,
you fully recognize that there is a huge amount
that you need to know about technology.
But this world that we live in,
do we always get it fully?
I think probably the answer,
we've come a long way
but the answer is still no.
So again, we're trying to host some helpful sessions
where they can have those conversations with each other
and where they can check in
in terms of data and analytics
and different things that they need to be put in place
to be able to run with an operating model
that is more appropriate for 2022
than perhaps it was in even early 2000s.
So a lot around the whole tech landscape
as well that we are trying to bring to this community
and that it is a community by CMOs and for CMOs,
and I love that.
So it's all guided by what is it
that they want to talk about?
What's on their minds?
And it's lots of story sharing
and the more they get to know each other,
the more it's sort of open and honest
and saying it the way it is.
It's by no means all the shiny, glossy success stories.
It's a lot of and we tried this
and we went down this way and it didn't work,
and actually here is how we thought differently about it.
So it's been absolutely fantastic, absolutely brilliant.
But those are some of the topics that we're talking about
but there are many more as well that go beyond.
- I mean, I love what you said
for a lot of different reasons,
but even just sort of the mental model
of going from 100 topics early in the pandemic
to now maybe more sort of the ones that you might anticipate
but that of the kind of real benefits
is actually not knowing exactly what the
agenda's going to be, but creating that community
where people could sort of be in a gray area together.
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