On Kindness in Marketing and Being a Brand Innoventor

With Marketing Trailblazer, Stéphanie Vilner-Sheppard

Stéphanie Vilner-Sheppard, a marketer who achieved record growth for L’Oreal, demonstrates the powerful economics of kindness. She also outlines what it means to be a brand innoventor.

What’s the most formative project or client in your career that helped define how you think about what brands can do in the world?

There’s no short answer to this, yet I do need to step back to childhood. Mark Ritson, global marketing guru, would have me in his sights for not having formal marketing training, because I hold a masters in mathematics and multiple sciences from Cambridge University. And so I started out applying scientific theory to marketing. That worked out really well for me, and it wasn’t until six years into my career that I enrolled in formal marketing and business studies at INSEAD.

Back to those formative childhood experiences: I spent the day with Sir David Attenborough when I was 10, and my father was interviewing him. Attenborough and I made a handshake promise that I would help him lifelong to save our world. Whilst it’s trendy to speak of sustainability, I’ve been acting on that handshake for 30 years, which is how I invented world firsts in sustainable solutions (first circular [recyclable or reusable] products in beauty and toy packaging). Secondly, I was gifted a first issue Swatch by the founder when I was 9. He said I was to always make time to invent new solutions, so I’ve kept in mind that invention is key.

In terms of work influences, I had the good fortune that my first boss at L’Oreal is today the CEO of L’Oreal, Nicolas Hieronimus, and my second boss became the first female CEO of a major pharmaceutical company, Dame Emma Walmsley. Emma’s a phenomenal leader, who fully backs her team to try brave new things, and always embraced my left-of-field ideas. This was a time when L’Oreal was world number one—but really only in Europe. The UK team was essentially carrying Anglo expansion on its shoulders, so I was given insane responsibility at just 22.

L’Oreal then would let you try and fail, then not make the same mistake again, but luckily, I didn’t fail. Instead I ran brands with the fastest growth top and bottom line globally for seven years straight. The Global VP twice offered me any job in the company to stay. What I was doing (and wasn’t transparent about as it wasn’t a thing) was running my own profit and loss (or brand P&L) to different metrics than the company’s. I was aiming to minimize waste and anything that was planetarily destructive, as well as upweight kindness, internally and externally.

I was holding true to my handshake promise with Attenborough. This is because marketing creates and design and forecasts products. In essence, it can be the most destructive influence planet-wise on a P&L. I guess that’s why as an eco-scientist, I chose that marketing seat: maximum eco impact.

You’ve used the term “brand innoventor” to describe yourself. What does that mean in practice, and how does it differ from a traditional brand strategist?

“Innovention” is a portmanteau of two words: innovation plus invention, so essentially it’s first-to-world innovation that I’ve invented. Today, most brands de-risk by doing line extensions. Take a biscuit brand, they might invent new flavor variants of a biscuit—but how many new-to-world biscuits are there? Not many, because it involves new molds and line investments etc.

Yet, where are the biscuits that are shaped that you can build them into 3D toys, or perhaps puzzle-piece shaped biscuits that each have a word so you write poetry before consuming it? It’s suddenly a biscuit that’s a toy or a form of creative expression. So where are the companies building things with more play and imagination and fun?

By the by, I hadn’t thought of either of those biscuit ideas until just this second. But here’s why and how I can do that so fast: I don’t stick to going deep in one category. I’ve spent thirty years going deep across many, from beauty to food to toy to education and in the not-for-profit space, too. Everything is a puzzle piece, and by thinking far wider and then narrowing down to something executable, you just get to better spaces. Like, the idea for the world’s first circular make-up came to me when I took my team to a homewares store. I was looking at the new Nigella range and saw they were using a baking tray as magnetic signage. Suddenly I thought about designing a palette where everything tesellated to fit together perfectly so the consumer has no redundancy

What’s important, too, is that an innovention mindset isn’t just about products or services. It’s equally how you go about every aspect of business and challenge anything causing friction. For example, I never advocate for a one-speed Stage-Gate Innovation Process. You need at least a two speed.

That became business critical over Covid where you had to have the right people who could speed inovation up where the friction load of the Covid environment was unbearably bad. To do that, you need someone who can balance analytics with creativity. I’m a scientist—and scientists are highly valuable business brains aren’t capitalized on enough. This is because a scientists is always solving problems, and business is essentially a series of problems to solve.

How has your approach to marketing changed over your 25+ years in the industry, especially as consumers have become more skeptical of advertising?

You really have to understand your consumers and not treat them as homogenous. You need to do away with all this demographic garbage, speaking about Gen Z and Gen X and the like through tropes that homogenize entire cohorts. I’m an Xer and I go to the gym more than my Gen Z kids. I have more disposable income than they do. Why do so many brands ignore the consumer sitting there in plain sight? It’s about consumer mindset and life stage rather than age and stereotypes. A new mum today might be 20 or she might be 45.

For me, it’s always been about optimizing every single touchpoint. Too many brand teams sink a brand through lack of clarity, drowning in data. There are universal truths that don’t change over time but have become lost in the data noise. What connects is heart-led over head-led brands. And humor is also always a strong tool. Just look at how many people love the sharp wit of the Wendy’s social team or the Hungry Jacks versus McDonald’s commenting, or the recent brand wagoning after KitKat had a heist on a truck of chocolate. It pays to have your audience seeing you’re having fun.

Some marketing spend and focus has to be ‘test & learn.’ When you inherit a brand, you shouldn’t throw everything out just to make your mark. Generally, there is less respect for what came before as people are keener to show impact sooner. The average CMO tenure is four years versus five to six years for a CFO and seven to eight years for a CEO. That’s a shorter meaningful runway.

The trouble in today’s faster world is a new CMO feels pressure to prove themselves instantly and often changes too much too fast. It takes far longer for any messaging to land with the end consumer than those who live, eat, and breathe a brand think it does—and a board or leadership or brand team get bored far quicker with their own stuff than the end consumer does.

So one should resist the pressure to accelerate and have an ‘all change’ mindset, yet at the same time retain a mindset of brand bravery and trying new things—and bet and invest more on innovention over line extension ‘safe space’.

Kindness is seen as something soft and fluffy that cannot be measured. However, that’s untrue. Ultimately, it should be a metric within a brand and company’s P&L—it’s that vital. I’m serious.

Do you see kindness as a paradigm shift for most brands? What has kept it from being a more prevalent business value?

Kindness is seen as something soft and fluffy that cannot be measured. However, that’s untrue.

Ultimately, it should be a metric within a brand and company’s P&L—it’s that vital. I’m serious. From the age of six, my mum sent my brother and I alone for six weeks every summer to Switzerland. Her family is a bunch of eco-polypreneurs, which is to say they run six businesses very successfully. Swiss businesses tend to employ staff from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and more, who come to work seasonally because of higher wages. I saw vast differences in productivity between, say, my godfather’s businesses—a highly profitable dairy and cheese farm and a bio-organic restaurant—where staff were treated well, than my godmother’s parents’ businesses, where staff were treated unkindly.

At the latter, I’d observe staff standing around idly or gossiping. This dented profitability due to unproductive time spent complaining, dawdling, or not leaning in beyond base level expectations in those roles. These were hard working businesses. Kind didn’t mean soft; it meant fair. It meant true understanding for someone hours away from their parents or sometimes their kids. It meant rewarding the staff financially when a good month was had in business.

Where do many brands go wrong when they try to be purpose‑driven or kind in their marketing today?

It often feels performative when you make an obvious and noisy deal about it. Several of your kind gestures should be done without fanfare. There’s a brand who made a big song and dance about a customer with a neurodivergent kid. The kid didn’t brush their teeth, so the brand made a big play of packaging up several samples for this kid and posted about it. Now, loads of people will fake neurodivergent conditions to get free samples which will tie customer service’s time up. Conversely, do this gesture repeatedly and silently, and it’ll percolate up organically and be earned. That feels genuine, doesn’t it?

Also, a lack of alignment between internal culture and external portrayal matters. I actively measure that gap. It’s interesting when you have a disconnect—a toxic company culture—that bleeds outward. Brands can’t hide today, with Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and more showcasing what’s going on internally. So, the first step is to fix your internal culture—and I mean, take a grass roots approach to fixing it. One unkind person internally can decimate an entire division and lead to mass resignations, like dominoes toppling. If you counted that loss of corporate knowledge fiscally, it’s measurable in the millions from one bad egg.

Inauthenticity is another problem. Consumers are smart, and they can sense when it feels forced. Distrust is on the up with the rise of machines writing copy and creating visuals, as well as the fear AI is here to take all our jobs. It’s subconscious, yet the brand needs to tell the story with genuine authenticity. It’s better to trade polish for grit and honesty. Lean into being a better, though imperfect, version than polished perfection. 

Think about any category with major competitors. There’s animosity there, so every brand is essentially in a fight. If you’re number one, you have to stay at the top of the mountain, and, if you’re aiming upwards, then you might have to get scrappy. So, at a base level you have that ‘fight mentality,’ which is already combative. Now, let’s layer that with our global economic reality. Everyone in a job is fearful of losing their job to the colleague with better results and, increasingly, to AI. So, people are living in their fear state. This means behaviors that should be left at the door are brought into a workplace—from bullying to exclusion to all those things you think of from the schoolyard.

The thing is, these behaviors are deeply destructive and damaging. We speak of psychological safety. To access that, you need to feel that, if you speak up, you’ll be met with curiosity rather than derision. Unfortunately, too many companies have a culture that encourages consensus and office politics. But that doesn’t lead to better business outcomes. So, start with sorting your internal culture and make the hard call of moving out the bully. Many C suite teams aren’t close enough to their businesses to figure out who those problematic people are.

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What does kindness as a brand attribute look like in practice? How do you measure whether kindness is working as a differentiator?

Kindness is about how people feel toward your brand. How you measure that matters. Here are two areas where brands are going wrong today. Firstly, research budgets are getting squeezed, and, secondly, in this era of big data, brands are keeping quantitative methodologies and canceling qualitative. Yet qualitative is where you get significant richness as to what your brand actually stands for in the real world.

Remember consumers get incentivized to join panels and answer quantitative surveys, so be cautious about overly trusting those percentages just because you have a group of, say, 2000. Everyone in your company needs to dwell more with the customer base, up to and including the managing director and CEO. Stuart Machin at Marks & Spencers, the UK food retailer and department store, is a great example of someone who is out and about relentlessly.

I generally bake that as a KPI into my teams’ deliverables. For example, at least half a day in store is a monthly minimum for a brand that’s in retail. They should be working alongside colleagues, with clear permission for shop staff to complain about everything the head office does. That’s where they learn brand stories, and it’s where they get to truly feel what it’s like to shop our brand versus the competitor. They hear a customer speaking, unfiltered, about our brand versus another. Mystery shopping is also good. Unshackle teams from their desks and computers and make them go, experience the brand, and deep dive into it.

I approach market research with the cynicism of a scientist. I never advocate for bias-designing research that’ll look good for the C suite or board. What’s the point of elegantly going out of business? Recently, I wrote a LinkedIn piece called “The Seven Deadly Sins of Nike.” Many people pointed out, as a recent mis-step, the “Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated.” signage at the Boston Marathon (whose official sponsor was Adidas). My point was that the unkindnesses (arrogances) of Nike have been multiple—so it becomes a death by 1000 cuts that’s reflected in their share price woes. Here’s a sampling:

1. The way they’ve treated female athletes—for example, a 70% pay cut to Allyson Felix when she returned from maternity leave.
2. Head office allegations of sexual harassment back in 2018.
3. Getting rid of swathes of Nike lifers with 20- or 25-year careers with a read-out HR statement in a two-minute online meeting.
4. In advertising terms that had been divisive, their previous Parkrun signage similar to the Boston Marathon signage.

It’s that death by 1000 cuts of unkindness (where brand tone felt cruel or uncaring or arrogant to many). And this from the brand that was built on founder Phil Knight’s shoulders of elevating everyone through “Just do it.”

Design better research to actually see what’s going on under the hood. And realize that what shapes a person’s view of a brand is rarely a single interaction.

It’s easy to talk about gaining customer trust in the abstract. How can brands begin to implement it into their strategies?

First of all, it starts with consumer psychology as well as going wider and deeper than your brand and category. What’s the PESTLE background at the highest level? What is impacting your customer’s ability to spend? And what is that spend competing with, not just within the category but as an either/or choice?

One problem for brands that are top dog in a category is they begin to develop arrogance around what they are and what they stand for. They also need to be mindful not to lose their focus. Just look at how Nike has seen not just one but several brands erode their brand trust (and share) from:

1. Innovation-led: Hoka One Ones—those shoes inspired Swiss brand On Running shoes and elevated Hoka to category innovation.
2. Performance focus: Brooks and ASICS went laser focused on runners, while Nike diversified to fashion, streetwear and collabs—and lost the serious runner in that lack of focus.
3. Shoes as fashion focus via simplicity and unisex approach (and mining archives): the German duo, Adidas and Puma drew from superior archives versus the more “bro coded” Jordans and basketball hype shoes that Nike has.

Case in point: there are currently 16 pairs of Adidas Sambas and Spezials in a household of two teens and two adults as well as six pairs of Brooks and ASICS versus a single pair of Nikes.

Be humble, have humility and gain external trust by working hard—and I mean really hard—on employee trust. I’ve consulted inside some brands people revere externally that are starting to fade; their internal cultures need serious work. There’s both correlation and causation at play here.

How can a brand be both commercially ambitious and genuinely kind, without sliding into virtue signaling or greenwashing?

This is where we need to strip a brand back and examine every single consumer touchpoint.

I was working with an aesthetic injectables brand whose every single order is worth thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our competitor had a flag within their system when a first order was placed, and the brand budget would pay for branded cupcakes to be sent to that clinic. This skirted medical device guidelines in the highly regulated Australian marketplace, just barely staying on the right side of legal compliance. That clinic team would share those cupcakes all over their socials. They would get all the feels that that brand was really supporting them from the get-go. The little things can be big things.

If a CMO isn’t reading the customer service report and having their team meet at least monthly with customer service, that’s something to focus on. Also, finance can be holding product going out of the door for an unpaid invoice, but who is training the finance team in brand tone of voice when the speak on the phone to large customers? Again, a great CMO is looking at the full 360 to ask: “When is anyone external interacting with our brand, and how does that look (and feel) to that end customer or wholesaler?”

The pain point can be somewhere unexpected: For example, in finance, when a box for the first order comes in, how the invoice or comp slip is worded can leave an impression. Tone of voice matters everywhere.

It comes back (again) to heart-led or head-led brands. The brand that makes you feel something is the one that makes you open your wallet. Of course, you have to be technically competent and your product needs to be desirable. But the feel and the heart behind it is the differentiator when quite frankly, in many categories, there’s not really that much to differentiate product.

Take Apple for example. They created a tribe where you feel like you belong to the ‘cool kids.’ Families build out an entire eco system of Apple products. Yet is the camera on the phone any better than another brand’s? On the flip side, I’ve conducted research with phone providers where single parents are crying in store because their kid’s school is mandating a certain iPad, and it’s beyond their affordability. Even the school is part of that tribe now.

As for greenwashing, I have a real problem with sustainability being a nice-to-have. Sustainability isn’t one department. Everyone should have a sustainability metric in their KPIs and title. Otherwise, you’re likely killing your P&L in ways unseen through wastage, over-forecasting, or other planetary crimes. One of the biggest tensions is between marketing and sustainability. So, what about making the marketing person also lead on sustainability? Place that tension in the role title and metrics to spiral up to better.

Brands and companies are either lazy, greedy, or they don’t think things through. If you practice what I call the ‘Boomer scarcity’ mindset of measuring your impact on planet, re-designing your P&L to do a better job of measuring, then you don’t get into situations that murder your P&L. Here’s an example, ordering too much stock or SKU proliferation is an act of gluttony leading to costly write-offs. Or if you don’t go the extra mile with packaging design, your outer box might not be re-purposed for something else post-usage. Why? Repurposed boxes cause the brand to live on, too—a win-win for planet and for brand awareness.

Let me illustrate with a concrete example: I inherited Lancôme Australia, a luxe beauty brand in the L’Oreal portfolio, which was also their worst performer globally. It was -16% year-on-year in an era where L’Oreal saw twenty successive years of double digit like-for-like growth. I plowed deep into the P&L and realized the biggest drain on the brand budget was the luxury gift given away twice a year—typical of luxe beauty brands.

As a category practice, it’s a crime against our planet. Here’s what it looks like. The global team produces a catalogue. Then you anticipate how many gifts you need per retailer. These are invariably mini samples plus a beauty bag. At the end of a promo, exclusive for each retailer, the excess stock gets returned. But you can’t use them. It costs more to have them unpacked than to landfill them.

I did research to find consumers hate the bags. They are fugly (cheaply made), and they get tossed into the bottom bathroom drawer. So, instead, I created Muji-like clear perspex drawers and found a crazy Italian with a plastic factory to make them locally—no airfreight or sea freight. I had the mini samples shipped en masse from France and made the gift boxes up locally. No over supply. I also shifted to full size product instead of samples. For example, in eyeshadow, value perception is higher, and the difference in cost of goods (COGS) is negligible for full size vs a mini.

Within 14 months, we went from -19% to +16%, the worst to best country globally top and bottom line. I dropped millions straight to the EBITDA bottom line. I didn’t have landfill or excess gifts. Instead, I operated with a KANBAN-like philosophy of just-in-time manufacturing. It was harder logistically, yet had the Lancôme brand adopted that globally, it would have generated $200 million of incremental EBITDA. Would a brand sniff at that extra straight profit?

I met the department store buyer maybe 15 years after that promotion ran, and he said, “you know what? We were skeptical, but what’s in my guest bedroom and kitchen still today? Those perspex drawers of yours. You know what you won’t find? One single fugly gift toiletry bag.”

The ridiculous thing is the CMO who followed me into that role reverted to the bog standard way—the bags, the minis, the order from a global catalogue—taking the P&L and in-market differentiation away. The brand reverted to poor performance. The global team didn’t on-board the idea either because it came from outside of the central innovation team, and luxury teams especially are a bit sniffy about that. That’s when I resigned.

So, another moral in that story is  a central tenet of mine: Don’t centralize innovation. Allow people in-country the ability to generate ideas and genuinely have openness to that and—crucially—a process that enables it. Brand teams often dislike what global teams produce in an ivory tower approach, and don’t get behind it.

One more example with a lens of futurism: We are reaching a tipping point of influencers or what I like to term “SINfluencers.” These are influencers simply paid by a rotating cast of brands, so they hold no singular brand loyalty. Instead, brands need to seek out the “KINfluencers,” the kinfolk who share deeply help brand values. They may take a beat longer to find than that influencer who spruiks [promotes] multiple beauty brands and are already repped by an agency (and favor a different brand each week, diluting consumer trust).

And beware of promoting hyper-consumption. The case study for that is Stanley drinkware. They got ridiculously greedy far too quickly, pushing consumers to 20 water bottles in all colors to accessorize with their outfits. The types of (planetary) SINfluencers they gravitated to were garnering many comments about over-the-top consumer behaviors. The brand should have been seeking out more genuine KINfluencers. I find myself advising brands on what that target looks like with increasing regularity. It’s easier for an overworked team to use the same set of people with the same characteristics as their competitor is.

How should a brand think about the role of a traditional TV‑style commercial in a world dominated by short‑form video, influencers, and social‑only content?

TV style commercials still have their place. In fact, a great TV commercial can be shared on socials and, if designed well, can evolve to be sliced and diced to short form content.

I made a TV ad over Covid and chopped it into eight to 11 second snippets to use in Broadcast Video on Demand (BVOD). I based it on an insight that teen kids en masse were setting up accounts and accessing free Spotify with ads. I doubled brand awareness for an acne product in just six months. I used the same creative feel in the format and duration that matched that audience (the attention span for a BVOD ad peaks at that magical 8-11 seconds). The longer form content on TV ads was designed for mums who are still largely choosing and buying the product. And also still influencing the purchase decisions of their tweens and teens with acne. I doubled awareness within that cohort, too. One creative, multiple uses, optimized for each audience.

I will raise the ad jingle here. Music has stickability where I guarantee that a 40 to 85 year old Brit can complete all of these ads:

• “For mash, get…”
• “A finger of Fudge is…”
• “Only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate…”
• “I’d like to buy the world a…”
• “Everyone’s a fruit and…”

And here’s another example. It’s not a musical jingle, but it’s a high recall ad told with a rap beat:

“Way down deep in the middle of the jungle…”

All of them come with a jingle (or rap). So, hire a composer please—and not an AI composer—and get a musical jingle happening for your tagline. It’s a great loss that we don’t have these.

Just think of the recent Dr Pepper creator-led jingle by Romeo Bingham on TikTok:

“Dr Pepper baby, it’s good and nice…”

We are craving music for memorability, relatability, and a brand that earworms into our brain on repeat as only music can.

The marketer needs to fight for their team to have space to breathe and to be as creative as we demand them to be ever more dashboarded and analytical and measurable.   

Looking ahead five to 10 years, what kind of marketing leadership culture do you hope becomes the norm? And what would have to change for that to happen?

Let’s focus at the top: There needs to be a better recognition at the CEO and board level of the value and role of marketing. And with that comes a need for more marketers on boards. There’s a survey that examines Fortune 500 Board compositions. Once we get past the red flag that only 70% of board members have experience in strategy, we see a heavy weighting to finance and legal and then a negligible 4% with marketing.

I view a board must-have as the tension-creating duality of an expansive and reductive mindset. Under the reductive mindset sits governance and de-risking, so fiscal and legal considerations in broad terms sit there. Under expansive, we have vision, innovation, and investment in the future of the brand. And all marketers should be obsessed about the future state. So, where on the board do you see the CMO or brand innovator? The brand champion who understands and will invest in and allow ‘test and learn’ behaviors?

Marketing has shape-shifted more than any other function over the last 20 years. It’s stretched and expanded to leading e-commerce, digital, social media, market research, innovation, category, and more. Take category, which is often under the commercial team, yet 80% of a retailer deck is prepped by the brand team. Check the meeting load of each functional team and I guarantee the marketer is requested in more meetings. That’s because a company is a brand or a sum of brands. So, support from above and respect from peers is paramount because without that you get nowhere.

Every marketer should advocate for secondments [temporary assignments] because a commercial or legal head spending time in marketing will quickly understand this is complex stuff. Strange to say, but marketing needs to do a better job of marketing itself because it’s still met with a reputation of lightness and fluff. Yet a well-rounded CMO who brings analytics and a creative mindset has absolutely earned their seat.

In financially reductive times, the pressure is on from global, regional, and local teams to be conservative and swing back to that reductive mindset. So, the challenge will remain to fight for “test and learn.” Marketers should all be versed in human-centric design as well as the lean startup thinking of entrepreneurs. That applies across the business incidentally, but both are must-have for brand teams. Most companies past a certain size become sluggish with too many approval layers. So the marketer needs to fight for their team to have space to breathe and to be as creative as we demand them to be ever more dashboarded and analytical and measurable. And please, no more death by PowerPoint and 85-page decks prepped for range reviews with a retailer or a global template that results in a 165 page deck for an annual brand plan.

Fight all this noise and push to simplify instead. Remember the rule of threes: Humans remember three things. So try to have no more than three brand values, three company values, and three strategic imperatives at any one time. Hire the more imaginative marketers you can find. Don’t constrain yourself with their background needing to be in the same field. That part is easy to learn. Teaching their brain work differently is not. So, be braver—and kinder. Internally, externally. Remembering that kind isn’t nice, and it isn’t weak. Kind is the very essence of strength. And a kind mindset will win. Always. 

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About Stéphanie Vilner-Sheppard