Cultural innovation: how global brands remain fast-moving and relevant

Cultural innovation: how global brands remain fast-moving and relevant

Fast moving consumer goods and the food and beverage sectors anchor themselves in consumption habits, it is therefore key to understand audiences and their behaviours to design innovations that actually respond to a need, and to market them effectively. Unfortunately, traditional segmentation methods aren’t enough as they don’t give brands this granular understanding of behavioural and cultural drivers and their constant evolution.

Not only are audiences, communities and subcultures becoming more diverse and complex but standards of segmentation are also ever-evolving and following more complex cultural shifts than ever before. This is when context and granular insight is paramount – in other words, the understanding of all the layers of culture: geographical, regional, at a community level and subcultures all at once.

On the 3rd March 2023 Creative Culture had the pleasure of hosting Magdalena Szumna (Former Nutricia / Danone) and Katie Moran (Kimberly- Clark). Our expert panellists shared their insights and experiences of leading successful cultural innovations for global FMCG brands that anchor themselves in culture, moderated by Creative Culture founder & CEO Mélanie Chevalier.

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Watch the key takeaways from the webinar below

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Transcription

Mélanie Chevalier:

So hello everyone. Good afternoon and welcome to our webinar on cultural innovation and how global brands can remain fast and moving as well as relevant. It is my great pleasure to have today with us two incredible women, both having worked many years in the space of FMCG globally. First, to Katie Moran, who is EMEA regional lead for personal care, Kimberly-Clark. Katie will give us a bit of insights on her roles in the last few years and on the value that local insights bring and how they shape global innovation to help her brands remain agile and relevant in a very fast moving environment. So very much of a product, a focus sorry, on product and brand innovation. Alongside her, we have Magdalena Szumna, who is an interculturalist. This, I shouldn’t struggle to say this, and DE&I advocate, former global healthcare strategy lead at Nutricia, which is part of Danone, and Magda will give us really a focus on the value of cultural intelligence in cross cultural and very complex matrixes. And she’ll share her experience in a sphere that included both healthcare as well as food. And she will share some thoughts on process innovation as well, and her experience at a global level and multi market level in that space.

Mélanie Chevalier:

So, before I move on to Katie and to Magda, just wanted to share a few thoughts of why we’re having this conversation today and where it stemmed from. I think it’s very important in the FMCG space to highlight the fact that the world is getting bigger. It’s also becoming much more complex with audiences that are more and more fragmented. Those audiences are much more driven by purpose and more than ever before, and they expect so from brands as well. But in parallel with this, a lot is happening and things are shifting very quickly, whether it’s the marketplace or the consumers. And so the FMCG brands are always sort of taken in both directions, trying to remain relevant at the heart of their brand, their products, authenticity. But they’re asked to pivot a lot quicker than they ever had to before. So how do they keep up? How does innovation remain agile? We feel that some answers may lie in cultural intelligence, but not only. And we’ll explore this in a minute with both Katie and Magda. So, without further ado, please, can I ask you to both introduce yourselves, give us a bit of background and tell us what culture means to you and how it’s impacted your work over the last few years.

Mélanie Chevalier:

I guess I’ll ask Katie to open the floor, if that’s okay.

Katie Moran:

To a good start. I started speaking on mute. Sorry about that. Hi, thank you so much for having me today. So, as you mentioned, I am the regional sector lead for Kimberly-Clark for our personal care businesses. During my time at Kimberly-Clark, I’ve spent most of my career working on our personal care businesses across kind of our baby care portfolio, our feminine care portfolio and our adult care portfolio played lots of roles in kind. Of our global organization, which is really, again, when you talk about culture and you talk about diversity of thinking and of thought. Obviously I love working on global roles because you get that opportunity to really see how different our world is that we live in, but also in these categories. And I’ll talk about it today, how similar there are so many similarities in these things that are so intrinsic to kind of our way of life, of having babies and menstruating and stuff like that. So it’s been a really interesting journey. I come from my background and really where I started my career was in the advertising world in strategic planning, which was all around insights and being closer to our consumers and figuring out kind of what is it that drives people’s purchase and what makes people love brands.

Katie Moran:

So that’s kind of been at the core of me and what I’ve been focusing on for most of my career. So just really thrilled to be here today. And again, what does culture mean to me? Again, I look at that as a very interesting question, but culture, I think, is how you define who you are and who you are around in yourself and your presence. And then that definition, then it becomes the people around you and the community that you create, that creates the culture. But yeah, it’s great to be here today. So thank you.

Mélanie Chevalier:

Thanks Katie. And it’s interesting that you refer to it as a community as opposed to not necessarily just geographical boundaries, which at a global level is always also very important. Great Magda. Would you like please to do the same?

Magdalena Szumna:

Yeah, sure. Well, welcome everyone. Thank you so much for introducing us already, Melanie. My name is Magdalena Szumna. I am an intercultural trainer and facilitator, which basically means that I strive to help people with developing their intercultural competencies. And I guess in terms of my journey and the reason why I’m here today to talk to you about innovation, I like to think that I now preach what I practiced for many years. In a way, until quite recently, I was a global healthcare strategy lead and indeed one of the biggest medical foods companies. Nutricia, Nutricia, specialised nutrition unit, which well name already gives you an indication of the area in which I spend a lot of my professional life to date. It is indeed part of the wider Danone group which is obviously a huge FMCG fast moving goods manufacturer. So indeed the topic of conversation today is very much connected to my experiences and I think with both marketeer or global marketeer hat on and the interculturalist hat on, I hope to bring some perspective to the table. So excited indeed to be here today. And I guess reflecting on the question you asked about culture and what it is for me.

Magdalena Szumna:

For me it really defines the ways, well, different groups of people do things. It’s as simple as that. It’s of course, driven by the rules they may follow, the values or the belief that they hold, but also the roles that they assign to different members of that community to tag on to what Katie said and of course, not less importantly, the symbols and the references that they communicate with. So it is a little bit of something that we all experience in every moment in our lives. And from my perspective, obviously, the national cultures you alluded to. Well, in my case, as a cis woman born and raised in Poland, being an expat living in a very cosmopolitan city of Amsterdam, I obviously interact with those aspects of many different cultures on a daily basis and on the organisational culture level as well as an employee of a given organisation that has its culture or as a consumer. Right. So basically it stems across both your work and personal interactions.

Mélanie Chevalier:

Amazing. Thanks, Magda. I think that’s very all encompassing in the world of culture in general. So that’s really, really helpful. Thank you. So, in terms of your experience with innovation, what realms of innovation have you been involved in and how have you seen the meaning of innovation evolve over the last few years?

Magdalena Szumna:

Well, my experience specifically sits in a broadly understood healthcare space. I worked for many years in Pharma before joining the medical food space, if you like. And for those who might not be familiar with it, it is a kind of a hybrid category and an intersection of pharmaceuticals and food. So these are quite specialised nutritional solutions that are used in different medical conditions. So if you haven’t heard some of those brands, that means you have been healthy and good and please keep it that way. The innovations, I was mostly involved with a product innovations, but equally so. And that starts answering the second part of your question about evolution, service innovations as well. And it’s true to say that over the past years in healthcare overall, we saw quite a big evolution of quite a big shift since the innovation became more and more of a service innovation became more and more sought for, in a way to kind of complete the product innovation. So think of different apps or med tech solutions that help with, for example, diagnosis or adherence programs. So this kind of more holistic approach to the product offering. And with that, I think a lot of medical companies, and that goes for both pharma and food companies, started also to innovating in terms of channels they use nowadays to reach their audiences.

Magdalena Szumna:

Moving from your typical, I would say 15-20 years ago, promotional channel of calling on healthcare professionals via your army of medical representatives to obviously now leveraging much more the variety of different channels, social media and so forth. So from that perspective, I think that in itself is linked to quite big cultural shifts we have all experienced in the past 10, 15, 20 years. And from that perspective there’s audiences of healthcare professionals and patients are just like everyone else and every other consumer out there.

Katie Moran:

It’s so interesting as you say that because I’m just nodding my head on everything that you’re saying and going it’s interesting that you’re talking about it in the context of healthcare professionals because I would say consumers are the same. Like when you look at channels, we’re talking to TikTok recently and going how is TikTok going to soon become an ecommerce channel that we’re going to be leveraging and we’re not going to just be consuming media in these forums. And if you think about channels like Amazon where today is much more of an ecom and kind of a purchasing channel, but we also have prime where we consume content and when those two things start to merge, that type of innovation that is the channel innovation I think you were talking about Magda. That is stuff that you go that is going to change the way that we consume and we interact with brands as consumers, but obviously as for healthcare professionals as well. So it’s really interesting. I would say from an innovation perspective, where I spend probably a majority of my time is in product innovation but it’s also the packaging that wraps around the product.

Katie Moran:

Obviously from a sustainability perspective that’s huge, but also just a consumer experience of how do we want to deliver the products that we want people to consume. So packaging ends up being a big innovation area for us as well. And then obviously what you were just talking about from a channel perspective, we focus on that and then the brand and how we evolve the brand. I always struggle with how to call that innovation but it is almost like the promise that you make that you are constantly evolving and innovating. And so we sometimes call it promise innovation. But how do we continue to make people aware of the benefits of our products and the things that we can offer? So yeah, it’s probably in those spaces of product innovation, channel innovation, promise innovation that I spend most of my time.

Mélanie Chevalier:

We always go about how cultural intelligence has to be the foundation to innovation as opposed to just the tick box exercise. And I guess I’m looking at you and the experience that you’ve had in health and food. There’s a lot of talk around customer and patient centricity. How much focus do you think there is at the moment on culture centricity and understanding those behaviours? I think you both raised that really rightly. Culture is about behaviour, right among a group of people who share common values. And what do you feel are the current limitations in this space?

Magdalena Szumna:

It’s a very interesting question. Well, in my view, you simply cannot separate those two. So you cannot be patient centric and not culture centric. And when you talk about patient centricity or customer centricity you talk about looking at them as a whole human being, right? Like as people with indeed their behaviours, their beliefs, the wider context they live in and that is all shaped by culture. So you can look at it as culture is the what are we all swim in and yeah, talking of limitations, just to address that you said of course what are the limitations? There’s plenty I guess and we could have a whole discussion about that topic in itself. The example I’m about to share, it’s not of course flawless in that way but that was one of the attempts of trying to shift the thinking. So I think it could be interesting to share. And it was indeed about a group of patient group segmentation exercise using our traditional way of looking at market, of course, but really looking at a more attitude and behavioural insights, cutting across the more traditional matrix that we used to use and that allowed us to be much more relevant and kind of innovate in a more tailored way.

Magdalena Szumna:

So we used a term of looking at different tribes of patients they could actually go across the traditionally looked at groups of age related patients. I worked specifically in a category of products which addresses the needs of people who actually live life long with particular conditions. So we talked to the parents and cares of babies all the way through up age segments to adults. And we applied this particular de-averaging exercise to previously quite heterogeneous group of patients that we used to look at. As simply adults living with a certain lifelong condition and by deep diving deeper into the attitudes towards the condition the adherence and certain drivers for that adherence or lack of, for example, understanding the stigma they might be facing because of having to eat different foods, which again coming back to how culture or the region they live in or they are born with the condition and would of course hugely impact that with looking at that we could be much more relevant in our communication. So how do we bring the innovation to them? But also, of course, come up with specific insights for those innovations that take those cultural sensitivities into consideration.

Magdalena Szumna:

And by the way, we also started looking the same way into healthcare professionals groups as well, to look more holistically into their reality.

Mélanie Chevalier:

Looking into behaviours and anchoring cultural intelligence in the process. I guess one starting point is audience segmentation and obviously that is at the heart of innovation because businesses are designing products and services that need to respond to different needs, different aspirations. Pamela mentioned something about intersectionality and that’s true, this is where the complexity is lying at the moment is how are you able to define this intersectionality and respond to it? Obviously and we often see obviously the traditional approach was a lot more demographic whereas it seems like we’re shifting to much more of a psychographic approach that englobes culture and behavior and behavioural science and so on. Katie, do you have experience with some psycho metrics and those sorts of approaches that have been really positive and create an impact?

Katie Moran:

Yeah, no, I think it’s a great question and something that we definitely spend a lot of time thinking through. And I have one example, I think, of when we went from kind of a traditional demographic segmentation, which was on the Cotex brand, where you would look at kind of women of menstruating age and then you’d break down the demographics. And you’d see kind of and I think when you look at that, that’s what led to years of a category that was pretty stale on innovation. And I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had where people said if men menstruated the category would be very different because they wouldn’t accept the products that we had had for many, many years. So it was interesting as we stepped back and we looked at it from a different way, where we looked at it from a fashion segmentation. So we said if we looked at these things because women care about fashion and if we had a totally different approach on this and we said we’re going to look at it from a style perspective. We did this segmentation and we found out that women of younger menstruating ages, when they are selecting their period brand that they would end up using, were very fashion forward and not just in the clothes that they wear, but pretty much in all aspects of their lives.

Katie Moran:

And that segment and that kind of population was a significant portion of women that we could target and then we could really differentiate our products. So it led really interestingly to like, how do we innovate our product? And that led to the total restage of Cotex from being like a pretty I don’t want to be too harsh, but old fashioned, definitely still in the UK, a fairly matronly brand, to a very progressive. You buy Cotex, the first black box in the category, very responsive products. We brought fashion and design into every single element of the product from the packaging that we use, the wrappers that we use, the actual pads themselves, and designing the graphics on them. And it was amazing. It led to the largest share shift in the category that fem-care has ever seen in the US. And then it was scaled around the world and took Cotex from a brand that had seen very little share gains to market leadership in China, in markets that you just go, how did that happen that quickly? And again, I really do think it was grounded in looking at the category different from a segmentation perspective.

Katie Moran:

And if you start to look at what women want in a broader context of their lives and what drives purchase versus the category and focusing it on the category. It definitely gives you a completely different angle and how to approach things.

Mélanie Chevalier:

That’s amazing. And were you able to localize slightly from some markets or did you have a bit more of a blanket approach? And it proved to be successful because it was a common aspiration sort of thing.

Katie Moran:

So I think obviously, fashion, which is really interesting, is completely different market by market, but the segment. So we started with the segmentation done in the US. And then we said, okay, now we have this hypothesis that this could scale in more markets, and then we’re able to kind of do that at a broader level. And so I think actually the segment which was called the Stylista was the leading segment of what we would call this, like, point of brand adoption period of when people are picking their products around the world. But then how that actually executed becomes very different because culture by culture, what is style and fashion is a different thing. So, again, I think that you were able to take some of the learnings to scale them, but also then you had to adopt them to make sure that it was relevant for the different areas around the world. And again, when you talk about it, it’s not just like, oh, Asia has one culture and EMEA has another. Like, actually, Australia has a lot more in common with the UK and some of the US. Than Russia does. You have to look at it more as sub clusters than you do looking at it as geographic clusters, which is another thing that I think that we’ve unpacked and really helps us.

Mélanie Chevalier:

Yeah, so innovative in your approach, but also nuanced and agile. Right. Sounds so easy on paper.

Katie Moran:

Exactly. If it could always be like that, it’s easy to find case studies. It’s hard to do it every day.

Mélanie Chevalier:

Yeah, exactly. I think consistency is key, obviously. So I guess Magda looking at the cultural element, obviously, as we know, anchoring a brand into culture is what a lot of brands are trying to do. And even outside of your segment, this is something that is happening a lot at the moment. And as we know, it’s not just about looking at key cultural moments, setting a calendar, trying to be there at the right time, at the right place with the right people. There’s a lot more analysis, framework building and sort of foundational work that needs to be put into place. Authenticity is really important. Authenticity to your brand, but also to your audience, obviously. Do you have some best practice approaches that you’d like to share in some of the work that you’ve developed throughout the years?

Magdalena Szumna:

Well, what I can share is definitely the work that I’ve initiated a couple of years ago within the product innovation process that really tried to look at certain cultural drivers. Like we said, that may impact the way the product basically is or isn’t accepted. Right. That’s what we talk about in a nutshell and that stretch from a flavour development where in the specific elements of the category award in the taste is a huge driver for preference. We’re talking about products which people are they need to take them because of the medical condition, but they need to take them quite frequently and quite in big amounts and it is really key that they can adhere to it. So it almost becomes a bit of a fight for success of treatment rather than just a preference conversation. So of course, having that in mind, people are willing often.

Magdalena Szumna:

To treat that category different occasions for my health, I’m sick or I need to take it. But there’s a very quick bandwidth to that, especially when adherence is key, that flavour development became quite a big element of how we would look at what sort of ingredients we would put, what sort of flavours we would present patients with.

Mélanie Chevalier:

I guess it’s a matching exercise, right? We were talking about complex matrixes, sorry, that you’re working on. And if you look at culture in itself, you can divide it into four pillars norms, values, language and symbols. And effectively from all the elements that you both described from the beginning, they really fall under these four pillars. And how perhaps it’s a methodology, right? It’s an approach that you try at every sort of innovation stage and process to go through and make sure that you’re going to be matching the brand or the product versus what your audience and the cultures that you’re targeting are relevant towards like and are aspiring too. So that makes sense. So in the title of this webinar, I think we made that quite clear. There is really a tension between fast moving and longevity and obviously fast moving has been labelled as such, looking at the sort of short lifespan of the product historically. But we also like to look at it, as I was saying before, the sort of fast moving context, whether it’s the marketplace, the consumer, the audience, the behaviours. So I touched upon it a little bit, going how do brands keep up?

Mélanie Chevalier:

And I guess Katie, the first question is for you in this area, what are some of the key and radical changes and trends that you’ve seen that you’ve had to adjust to and particularly in the baby care segment over the last few years? And have you found that there were noticeable differences between different cultures and countries that on top of that you had to sort of mitigate as well?

Katie Moran:

Yeah, so I think everything is constantly evolving and changing, but there’s two kind of key things that I would look at. So the first one is something that is not the most proud moment, but the number one contributor to landfill globally is absorbent baby diapers. So with the environment that we are in today and the commitment that I think we all have, especially that our consumers and these kind of younger mums that are coming and have to make sure that we leave the planet a better place than where we showed up on it today. The demand to move into plastics that are more bio based plastics or biodegradable plastics or what does collection models look like, all of that kind of thing will fundamentally change and reinvent the diaper category. And I truly believe when you look at by 2030 the diaper category that we have today, it actually can it’s not sustainable for it to look the way that it does today. So I think that what’s really interesting about this one to me is it doesn’t even take just Kimberly-Clark who’s probably the second largest nappy provider in the world, it will take the entire industry to kind of commit to this together to change these types of things.

Katie Moran:

And so that this type that I think is radical change that I do believe it has to happen and it will and consumers will demand it. And I always look at it and I say like god, today is such a horrible situation. I’m saying to mom we know that using an absorbent nappy is by far the best health and hygiene for a baby, which is critically important. But we also know that we’re making her choose between the best care for her baby and the right thing to do for the planet and really we should get to a place where that isn’t a choice that a parent has to make. And so again, that to me is the big thing that is going to change and reinvent the diaper category. I think we’ve already seen it starting to happen in baby wipes and so if you go into Tesco today, you won’t see a single product on the shelf that has plastic in it and we’re seeing that more and more. And so look, that’s the beginning but diapers will be there very soon. So that’s one the other thing that is just like an interesting other reality is that it used to be that kind of you had two major players in the diaper categories.

Katie Moran:

You’d have Proctor and Kimberly Clark. And I almost say today, like anyone that has a really good idea can have a diaper brand because of the capacity in China and the reality there is now we have places where there’s 40 diaper players. Again, the influx of insurgent brands that we’re seeing and celebrities wanting to create brands, it completely changes the dynamic of what fast moving means. By the way, when you talk about that culturally relevant, all of those types of things, you really have to work much harder in a way than you had to in the past of going it’s just the two of us fighting with each other or actually building off each other hopefully to going. There’s a lot of reinventing in this category. So those are the things that I think and again, that I’m seeing in the diaper category, but the reality is it’s across everywhere. Sustainability is a core disruptor in fast moving in FMCG. And also the insurgent players are definitely keeping us on our toes, I would say. And it’s been made it a really fun area to compete in. And then the other thing you had asked me about is kind of what are the cultural differences that we see?

Katie Moran:

And I alluded to this at the beginning, but I think it’s really interesting because in the babycare category and the fem care category, there’s nothing more kind of basic humanity than having a baby and wanting to care for a baby. So it it is amazing to me when we do do kind of all the research that we do globally, basic core needs are exactly the same. For a mother that is raising her baby with almost no medical care in Nigeria, to a mother that is raising her baby in, you know, the most advanced region of Japan, like there, it’s unbelievable. The core needs is health and wellness, safety, care for your baby, all of those things. How they do it is completely different. And that is kind of the area that we have nuances in. So we are in places trying to convince people on why they need to use an absorbent garment and what the value is of that. And then we have places where you go, there are 40 players. Why would you ever choose us as an absorbing garment? So I think that those that’s the start that you go that starts to really differentiate the strategies, but the actual fundamental needs are completely the same. It’s just the context in which people live in.

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