Alison
Lewis
2023 Winner
Presented by
Chief Growth Officer
Kimberly-Clark
Traditionally, the CGT CMO of the Year Award has been bestowed upon chief marketers, but as leadership roles flex and adapt to new business needs, so does the role of marketing and the purpose of this award. This year, CGT is proud to recognize Alison Lewis, chief growth officer for Kimberly-Clark, for her significant contributions to the company’s overall growth strategy that fuels their purpose of Better Care for a Better World.
Lewis was appointed in 2019, tasked with reimagining how Kimberly-Clark innovates, markets, and sells its brands. It is a mammoth effort that we want to honor, involving continuously breaking down silos and working in partnership with the many diverse teams, leaders, and stakeholders across the business. As she builds the company’s global growth strategies, Lewis says she’s
“joined at the hip” with the heads of R&D, technology, digital, and many others. She’s shifted the marketing
narrative within the organization from transactional to relational — encouraging global teams to pursue
consumer-led opportunities, solve business problems, and accelerate growth in an integrated fashion.
We’re excited to showcase the evolution of her role, which has allowed Lewis to stretch and innovate in new ways, advancing commercial capabilities by simplifying the four P’s (product, price, pack, promotion) of marketing and linking them to growth. Now, it’s
about building an ecosystem of growth around innovation, marketing, digital-first
approach, superior in-market execution, revenue growth management, and more.
For Lewis, this means elevating the team’s capabilities across the board to drive accelerated growth.
When I started in my career more than 30 years ago, marketing was very much
top of the funnel, and it was about awareness and reach. What's really transpired, particularly during the last five to eight years, is more of a whole-funnel view of marketing, from brand image work to performance marketing, where you have to think about the top, all the way down to the bottom, and make sure you understand those points of interaction, influence, and conversion.
Things have changed …
Embracing Purpose-Led Brand Building
Lewis is most proud of the marketing campaigns she helped launch that align with the company’s core values and purpose-led brand building. “This is a brand that has value for consumers.”
“This goes back to World War I, where nurses on the frontline sewed cotton together into pads so that they could keep helping the injured soldiers without missing a day of work because they didn't have a product that provided the absorbency they needed.”
Let's Normalize Normal
This initiative aimed to normalize menstruation and combat misconceptions. The ultimate goal was to drive real change while linking it back to Kimberly-Clark’s purpose. It had a measurable impact on consumer audiences and helped shine a light on access to products that help women manage their periods without shame.
Kimberly-Clark launched another initiative during the FIFA World Cup, where for the first time in history a female served as a referee in the event. Ogilvy São Paulo produced a short film telling the story of the first female referee in Brazil in the 1960s, Lea Campos. The short film won a Golden Lion at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year.
“We had millions and millions and millions of views and lots of chatter in the marketplace, because we were putting something out there that was culturally relevant, but also very relevant to standing up for what we believe in, which is that a period should never get in the way of progress and that we support the advancement of women.”
Alison
Lewis
Alison
Lewis
Powering Growth With Robust Technology
Of course, more complex technology requires more involved processes. In digital-first marketing, for example, Lewis says personalization is critical, and that involves a lot of data, along with the infrastructure to support it.
“You have to have the right technology stack to execute well,” says Lewis. “We've done a lot of work around using data lakes and getting all the information into easy-to-use dashboards so that you can track your execution metrics consistently and easily around the world.”
This cascades down to search functionality and distribution, where data is needed to scale on a global level. Lewis says a big part of that is getting access to the data through convenient tools and being able to extract insights and build platforms.
Within in-market execution, Kimberly-Clark is piloting automation in the sales cycle. Data will help inform associates where their time is most wisely spent in order to deliver the most value for the business overall. The next level, says Lewis, is machine learning and artificial intelligence, which the company uses in its mobile app development.
“We're using [AI] with something called the Huggies Poop Scanner app, which originally launched in Australia. It's basically your best friend in the middle of the night when you change your baby's diaper and, all of a sudden, you realize ‘this doesn't really look normal,’ and you're sort of freaking out. You quickly scan the poop, and artificial intelligence tells you what it means and if you should talk to your doctor about it.”
The company is also leveraging product technology to solve for consumers’ unmet needs. For example, Kimberly-Clark is using innovative technology to address the diaper rash problem, leading to a Huggies Newborn diaper product launched in Australia with a built-in cream that Lewis says “really resonates with consumers because they intuitively get that if they have a diaper with zinc oxide, it’s going to help.” Up until the launch, there had never been a diapering product with zinc oxide embedded into the diaper.
Though Lewis isn’t formally in a tech role, technology plays a starring role in her day-to-day — intrinsically tied to driving commercial capability because it directly relates to growth.
But while some CPGs focus on the bright and shiny, Lewis has honed in on a tech approach that is more sustainable: achieving innovation using what’s already out there.
She points to an overnight Kotex innovation: essentially a T-shaped pad. The idea came directly from TikTok, where Kimberly-Clark saw women filming a period “hack” by taking one pad and layering another one in the back, so they didn’t leak at night.
“That came through existing technology, but it's technology that's enabled a level of insight that you never had before,” she says. “So, if you think about innovation, and the way that you might find insights on where there are gaps in the marketplace, it actually might be through scraping the internet, scraping ratings and reviews, scraping posts that are on TikTok.”
Social listening is a simple but pragmatic approach to leveraging technology across marketing strategies.
The Importance of Self-Service Insights
“I think, often, companies overestimate the value they're going to get from technology and underestimate the people and process side of things. It's technology, it's people, and it's process — and they all need to work in tandem.”
Analysis is a core component of marketing innovation, and what used to take a week to do, is now near instantaneous with the use of analytics platforms.
Kimberly-Clark has done some heavy lifting in this area, particularly in elevating its RGM to produce self-serve platforms for employees to access data and be more strategic with their actions.
“We have a lot of self-service and analytic platforms that people use for revenue growth management to find the biggest opportunities: whether it's price elasticity or looking at your price pack architecture, etc.”
CGT asked Lewis to share advice for emerging marketing or growth leaders who are looking to advance their careers. The first step, she says, is to always think with the business in mind — marketing, for example, needs to be looked at from an end-to-end standpoint.
“Think about marketing in terms of the value that it creates for the business.
I think marketers get themselves into trouble when it's something that looks great in a boardroom or great in a PowerPoint presentation, but the value that it actually creates for the consumer or for the business is weaker.”
The only way to understand that value is to understand the end-to-end nature of the business, she emphasizes. And what is it going to take? There needs to be a strong growth mindset, pushing to see what might be possible.
Human beings are a lot more limitless than we imagine, but sometimes our minds limit us, Lewis notes. Emerging leaders need to get a little uncomfortable if they want to succeed.
Shaping Future Marketing Leaders
For better or worse, I have a ‘never satisfied’ mindset. I can’t help but look at what might be ‘good’ or even ‘exceptional’ and try to find ways to elevate it. When we stretch ourselves to go places that maybe aren't quite as comfortable or familiar, that's actually when we learn and grow the most – and also when the business thrives.
On the Horizon
Lewis believes that marketing needs to be part of an ecosystem for
Kimberly-Clark’s growth approach. She consistently asks herself:
Fun
Facts
Favorite Place to Travel
“It’s Latin America. My teenage and early-20s boys, and my husband and I, went on an amazing trip last December to hike, bike, and kayak in Patagonia in Argentina. It was just beautiful.” Her favorite places are where she can have a lot of adventures and be very active.
The Biggest Inspiration in Your Life
“My husband is my biggest inspiration. He's a great example of being more than completely supportive of my career and whatever I needed to do. As crazy as it was, he was there as my biggest cheerleader. And then, beyond that, provides such amazing support for my three boys.”
Favorite Annual Tradition
Ski day with the family. “My husband got me skiing pretty aggressively in Banff, Canada. From the time our boys were 2 years old, we taught them to ski, and we ski as a family.”
What Colleagues Don’t Know About You
“I'm a diehard Toronto Maple Leafs fan. Go Leafs! They're a tough team to be a fan of, though, because the last time they won the Stanley Cup was in 1967.”
We are good at digital marketing, but what digital products could complement this to create more stickiness?
We have good content, but could we personalize further through more automation to connect better?
Are we linking our awareness-driving activities to what people see in-store and online for top to bottom of funnel connections?
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Presented by
There’s no crystal ball, so what the future holds is anyone’s guess. However, Lewis remains steadfast in the strategies she is setting for continued growth to support Kimberly-Clark’s goal of continuously raising the bar.
“I don't believe in flip-flopping an organization. I believe that you should stay consistent with your strategy and your direction. You might have done a 1.0, but now we’ve got to get to 2.0, right?
So now what's that 2.0?”
It’s building stronger brands by transforming our commercial capabilities and improving integration across how we innovate, market, and sell — and, of course, deliver more growth.
This requires asking questions like, “What are the spaces where there are unmet consumer needs that we haven’t tackled yet?”
From a stakeholder perspective, buy-in has been easy, she says. “We've proven that as we put more against these things that create value for the consumer, and put more pressure in the market, we're seeing the return.”
KPIs diligently measuring mix analysis, ROI, and engagement, are standard, she says, but as long as there is value creation, Kimberly-Clark supports continued investment in advertising and promotions.
A subset of the Kotex She Can initiative is “Normalicemos lo Normal”
(Let's Normalize Normal), launched by Kotex Peru, in partnership with Plan International, which included digital executions across social media, billboards, radio and television interviews, press releases, videos, and a social experiment with a television spotlight reaching thousands of people across the country with critical information about menstruation.
Under Lewis’ leadership in 2020, Kotex launched the Kotex She Can Initiative, which champions women’s progress by fighting period stigmas and the barriers they cause, promoting access to education in schools and communities, and helping to open doors so women have more equitable access to opportunities. In 2022, the Kotex brand directly impacted 21 million people globally through its efforts around menstrual hygiene management, access, education, and fighting stigmas.
Lewis emphasizes, however, that the true power of technology lies in human collaboration.
By Liz Dominguez
