FMCG

President of family care, North America, Kimberley-Clark Before taking on his current role in August, Ori Ben Shai was vice-president and managing director of the UK & Ireland business, responsible for a roster of household hygiene brands, including Kleenex and Andrex. He faced some unique challenges over the past year, chief among them the surge in demand that accompanied panicked stockpiling in 2020. So much so that he was forced to reassure shoppers there would be enough of the manufacturer’s supplies to go round. With spells at Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Domino’s Pizza under his belt, Ben Shai brought years of high level experience to the table, and a huge breadth of international knowledge, having worked in Israel, Switzerland and the US, as well as the UK. That experience paid dividends when it came to both agile and forward-thinking decisions in the last 12 months, decisions that looked beyond the immediate horizon of the pandemic to the longer-term responsibility of the business. Last year, Ben Shai announced Kimberley-Clark had achieved 30% recycled plastics in its packaging, for instance, with a target of 50% by 2023. This broader plan for balanced and sustainable growth is reflected in the company’s K-C Strategy 2022 too – introduced to coincide with its 150th anniversary next year.■

B2B

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TOP100 hOME

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The top100 list

Ori Ben Shai

Chief marketing and digital officer, L’Oréal UK As Lex Bradshaw-Zanger has said himself: great marketing requires agility. Never was that more put to the test for the CMO than in 2020. Covid-19 led to what L’Oréal called a "crisis of supply" as the closure of high streets and hospitality resulted in an unprecedented decline in demand in the beauty industry. "There’s a lot of things changing and happening every day in terms of how we react," he told Marketing Week that May. By June, he had steered the company to focus its marketing spend on digital to reflect the sudden change in shopping habits, increasing share of spend for digital from 50% to 70%. He has also championed data-driven decisions, and explored new channels such as product placement. His aim is to balance the lessons of traditional marketing theory, with the opportunities of new emerging channels and technologies. These decisions are a reflection of the CMO's blend of experience and focus on innovation. A veteran of agencies – including WPP and Leo Burnett – Bradshaw-Zanger held senior client-side roles at Facebook and McDonald’s before joining L’Oréal in 2016. He’s passionate about passing on what he’s learned to more junior marketers too, coaching colleagues to understand their own motivations and goals.■

Lex Bradshaw-Zanger

fmcg

Regional marketing director, Essity Nicola Coronado isn’t afraid to take on taboos in her role as regional marketing director at Essity. As well as looking after household brands Plenty, Velvet and Cushelle, Coronado has been instrumental in developing the bold campaigns that feminine hygiene brand Bodyform has become known for over the past decade. Most recently, in March 2021, the brand launched ‘Pain Stories,’ a marketing campaign designed to highlight the plight of those suffering from endometriosis. It follows a raft of similar efforts by the brand, with previous campaigns including 'Blood Normal', 'Viva La Vulva' and 'Womb Stories' all addressing neglected feminine issues and picking up awards aplenty along the way for normalising menstruation. Coronado and her team have fought just as hard to keep the environment on the agenda post-Covid too. In July 2020, Essity launched its own green recovery report championing the need to continue the hard work in FMCG. Coronado describes marketing as a balance of art and science, and if her track record so far is anything to go by, a healthy dose of courage and determination too.■

Nicola Coronado

Category and marketing director UK, Mars Petcare Overseeing Mars’s portfolio of petcare brands, which includes Whiskas, Pedigree and Dreamies, Nick Foster has consistently championed the resilience and opportunity within the category. In 2020 he even went as far as to launch the supplier’s inaugural ‘Pet State of the Nation’ report, which set out the 2.2% revenue growth achieved in the 12 months to July 2020, and described the potential in ever more premium pet products alongside the heightened reliance on animal companionship during the pandemic. Foster has had a front row seat to these trends, working in a series of roles at Mars in the 15 years spent with the company, before his promotion to sales and marketing director in June. He has championed the "expandable" potential in the pet treats market and called on retailers to capitalise on this opportunity with clearer range segmentation and increased space in store, as well as seasonal sales events. Demonstrating its own agility and responsiveness, the company also launched a direct-to-consumer website for its natural dog and cat food brand James Wellbeloved during lockdown. Such is the confidence he’s instilled that Mars Petcare is now forecasting compound annual growth of 2.4% for the total category over the next five years.■

Nick Foster

Vice-president of Beauty Care and vice-president of marketing for Northern Europe, P&G Procter & Gamble has described its Covid strategy as one of "constructive disruption". It’s an approach that has undoubtedly fed through to its marketing in the past year, which has consistently challenged the status quo. Under the leadership of Katharine Newby Grant, the parent company of brands such as Always, Head & Shoulders and Olay, has actively championed diversity, launching a comprehensive review of its own representation of black people in 2020 and threatening to pull ad spend where its values on diversity aren’t reflected, as well as calling on both industry peers and consumers to take action against racism. A P&G veteran with 20 years under her belt at the business, Newby Grant has been a key advocate for this push for greater diversity, citing the need to better service its many millions of customers. Reporting a 5% revenue increase in April 2021, the company cited this doubling down on both marketing and innovation as a critical driver of growth, with Newby Grant’s own focus, beauty, the highest driver of sales, achieving a growth rate of 9%. Amid the challenges the cosmetic industry has faced during the pandemic, that’s a notable achievement.■

Katharine Newby Grant

Global chief marketing officer, consumer healthcare, GSK As the coronavirus pandemic swept through the UK last year, GSK’s Tamara Rogers was ruthless in her efforts to keep pace with ever-evolving consumer demand. The global CMO, who moved from a US-based role with Unilever to the pharmaceutical giant in 2018, put in place rapid decision making and empowered her team to work at speed. It was a strategy that ultimately kept the multinational ahead of the curve, and put its portfolio of consumer healthcare products in prime position to leverage growing awareness of health and wellbeing. To understand exactly what customers wanted, Rogers deployed live tracking tools to better dig into demand. Armed with this data she focused on search, improving search efficiency by 15% to 20%. She and her team also reassessed the company’s brand portfolio, which includes Sensodyne, Panadol and Tums, with availability of "treatment mainstays" like Panadol prioritised, and other SKUs scaled back to ensure they could keep up with demand. Under Roger’s leadership the company also tapped into heightened awareness around immunity and prevention to push its range of vitamins, minerals and supplements. It was this type of agility and resilience that GSK credited with a 12% boost in revenues to £10bn for its consumer health business in its latest financial results.■

Tamara Rogers

Vice-president marketing, Reckitt Prior to its decision to rebrand to Reckitt in March 2021, the group behind brands such as Dettol, Calgon and Nurofen had largely kept its corporate identity at a distance from consumers. But the overhaul earlier this year marked a change, strategically responding to a markedly more curious consumer, one that demands ever-greater transparency from brands if they’re to show loyalty. This decision to open up and deliver a "much more focused and targeted" effort in communicating its purpose and values was a smart move by Charlotte Schloesing, who was marketing director of UK health at the time. She has recently been promoted to vice-president of marketing, which reflects her vast experience, built up over 13 years with the company, and roles that span Australia and the Netherlands, as well as the UK. It was preceded by another smart comms strategy only a year earlier, with the launch of Reckitt’s new purpose for its corporate brand: to protect, heal and nurture in the relentless pursuit of a cleaner, healthier world. The focus on wellbeing and sustainability again reflected a marketing team with its finger on the consumer pulse.■

Charlotte Schloesing

Marketing director for laundry and home care, Henkel Having first joined Henkel in 2018, Nikki Vadera has spent the last three years actively challenging conventional stereotypes in the laundry and home care category, with a series of disruptive, targeted and innovative marketing campaigns. After only a few months as marketing director, Vadera launched campaigns that openly challenged what she deemed as sexist stereotypes within the category and featured a far more diverse range of consumers, from female footballers to drag queens. Vadera expertly balances this focus on greater diversity and inclusion with an equally keen eye on marketing effectiveness. Speaking at the Festival of Marketing earlier this year, she described ROI as "one of the sexiest tools available to a marketer" and one that can help boost the view of marketing within an organisation. But she warned it can be difficult to measure given the fragmented nature of media and data can be slow to collect. She believes marketing should be dynamic and campaigns optimised as they progress. It’s Henkel's agility and innovative outlook that helped the business bounce back quickly from the disruptions of Covid-19, with its laundry and home care brands reporting organic sales growth of 3.9% in the first half of 2021.■

Nikki Vadera

Chief digital and marketing officer, Unilever When Conny Braams took on the top marketing job at Unilever at the start of 2020, ‘digital’ was added to her title. It signified a strategic shift for the business, and a timely one too given the events of the past 18 months, as it has enabled the business to accelerate its end-to-end digitalisation. In particular, Braams said moving digital under marketing's remit has enabled the business to move quickly and with more clarity when it comes to the huge rise in ecommerce. Ecommerce grew by 61% last year and it now accounts for 9% of Unilever’s business. Braams has more than 20 years’ experience at the FMCG giant, having joined as a business unit director and rising through the ranks to work across its businesses in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and finally Europe in 2016. Now at the helm, she is on a mission to ensure Unilever is future-fit and prepared for growth. She believes it is Unilever's "value and values" that have seen it through the pandemic, alongside its ability to strike the right balance between short-term fire fighting and long-term growth. “In a recessionary environment of course we [must ensure we observe] what is happening now, but we must also build brands for the longer term. Because that is our way to navigate through this high volatility. You need to have an agile approach – and that’s what we’ve done throughout Covid,” she told Marketing Week.■

Conny Braams

Marketing director UK & Ireland, Shiseido Group (former) Marketing has been at the heart of efforts by the Japanese Shiseido Group to shake off a slightly ageing image and reposition itself as relevant to younger, more digitally-savvy beauty consumers. As well as undergoing a digital makeover and introducing a globally aligned ecommerce strategy, the business has invested in influencer partnerships. It is also able to respond quickly to trends in the increasingly competitive beauty industry thanks to its dedicated tech and innovation department in New York, known as the Digital Centre of Excellence. As UK marketing director for the past five years Alicia Grimes-Gibson has been central to these developments, while overseeing the likes of Dolce & Gabbana Beauty, Issey Miyake and Narciso Rodriguez. She stepped down from her role at Shiseido Group in July after nearly a decade and is currently taking a break to focus on her board role with the Ok Mentor organisation and other strategic marketing and branding projects. Prior to joining Shiseido she held senior marketing roles at Molton Brown and Selfridges.■

Alicia Grimes-Gibson

neW

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