Zena Arnold is the Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at Kimberly Clark
Kimberly Clark
In June 2020, Zena Arnold took on a new role at Kimberly-Clark as its Chief Digital and Marketing Officer. Despite the difficulty of making this change during the middle of Covid-19, Arnold believes the lessons of the pandemic have shown companies the potential of a newfound agility in how they approach business. I sat down with Zena to talk about moving into this new role during the middle of the pandemic, how her team has responded, and how she is bringing lessons from her time at Google into the world of CPG.
Dave Knox: After a decade at Procter & Gamble and Kellogg’s, you made a move to Google. What led you from the world of CPG to the tech industry?
Zena Arnold: I really wanted to be where the growth was, and at the time, CPG was not growing dramatically. I saw the shift in people’s behaviors that was being driven by technology. I knew that this was going to be a fundamental shift that would really change everything about how we do pretty much everything, and that it wouldn’t go back. When I got the call from Google, it was this really great opportunity to get back to my tech roots because of the Computer Science degree that I have and the passion I have for technology. At the same time, I was able to bring to the tech world all of the great marketing that I had learned in this very classic CPG environment.
Knox: How was that transition from CPG to Tech?
Arnold: It was a very jarring transition. CPG companies focus on efficiency and are very strategic. By that, I mean they make very carefully considered choices. Tech companies, at least those that are growing really rapidly, are focused much more on growth. As a result, there is this culture that’s very friendly toward trying new things, of knowing that you are going to fail, and of operating on a much shorter time horizon. In tech, there is this feeling that it is okay to not know 100 percent of something before you make a decision. But in CPG, we often feel the need to know 110 percent of something before we make a decision.
It was hard coming into that kind of an environment since it was a very different way of operating. There are these amazing processes that we would learn in places like P&G and Kellogg’s where you have absolutely optimized an “87-step” process to do something. Coming to a place like Google, there was no process at all. The challenge, but also the opportunity and what I loved about it was figuring out, “Okay, I know how to do this in 87 steps. I’m never going to be able to do all of those here, but maybe when we pick the five, that would really help and direct the work to improve our results. Let’s see how that goes.”
Being able to adapt some of that heavily process-oriented thinking to a rapidly growing environment was the challenge, but that’s also what was really fun about it. I loved the atmosphere of being able to test and learn and try something different next time.
Knox: In 2020, you returned to the world of CPG as the Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at Kimberly-Clark, with a portfolio of iconic and essential brands like Huggies, Kotex and Kleenex. We don’t often see marketers return from tech to CPG. What was behind your decision to make that move?
Arnold: I loved my experience at Google. It is such an energetic and innovative company, and I was fortunate to have a lot of great experiences there. I worked in the marketing side for most of my time at Google, but I also spent some time in the product business and operations side, too. I learned a ton, but one thing I was really missing was the role of marketing in truly driving the business and the strategy of the company. In tech companies and especially at Google, strategy is really driven by the engineers, and marketing is an auxiliary function that doesn’t really have a seat at the table for making strategic decisions because essentially the differentiator is the technology itself.
In a lot of CPG categories, your brand is just as or maybe more important than the product, so marketing is super critical to growth and the business. I wanted to be back in that environment since that’s where I grew up.
Knox: You made that transition to your new role during the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. How did that impact your move?
Arnold: Taking on this role in the middle of the pandemic has been one of the most challenging things for me as a leader. My team is phenomenal and has done an incredible job of collaborating efficiently and effectively completely remotely, but it is still hard. There’s something about seeing people in person and bonding over shared experiences – both the challenges and opportunities.
On the business side, it has been challenging as well, but one of the biggest opportunities that has come out of all of this is that people now know that they can roll with the punches when big changes arise because no one expected what happened, and yet we were able to successfully navigate through it together.
Kimberly-Clark did a fantastic job of putting our employees’ health and safety at the forefront, which means that we have been able to continue making essential products that our consumers depend on around the globe throughout the pandemic. We really had to adjust our processes and set strict safety health and safety protocols to make all of that happen – and it worked. That is an interesting muscle that I’m now drawing on to say, “Look, we thought we couldn’t change fast, but circumstances forced us to be agile, so we did. Now we know we can. So, let’s not say that we can’t do it. Now we can be more proactive about some of the change that we want to drive.”
Knox: As you have started in your new role, what have been your top priorities?
Arnold: The reason I was so excited to come here is to help Kimberly-Clark embark on a broader digital transformation. That’s not just, “Great, let’s do more digital marketing.” It’s, “How do we embrace all the tools, all of the agility, and everything that digital really enables for us and ensure that it’s reflected in everything we do.” The biggest shift that we’re trying to drive is making a change from more traditional awareness-focused marketing to more relationship marketing. It is new for CPG companies to think about relationships, but that is where the categories are going.
You look at a lot of the upstart brands that have been able to come in, and they view a product as more than something that simply fulfills a functional need. It is about the entire experience. What can we do, and what is the value we can exchange with the consumer? For us, it’s how do we take what is working in our traditional paid advertising model and expand that into developing a deeper mutually beneficial relationship.
Data has really enabled this. In the past, you couldn’t build one-to-one relationships with millions of consumers because there just wasn’t the scale to be able to do that. Now, with all of the advances in technology and data, we can do that, we can tailor communications, and we can tailor offerings to our consumers and really deepen and build that relationship.
It is about the “what” — the tools and techniques that we use. But it is also about the “how” — the agility and experimentation and being okay with failure. There are a number of areas that we are really focused on, ranging from getting much more precise in our media buying to ensuring that we are delivering that right message at the right place, at the right time, with the right consumer, and at the right cost. We’re thinking more broadly, too, about how we create the right content and engage with consumers in interesting new ways. What are other digital experiences that can build that relationship based on consumer and product spaces?
Underlying all of it is truly the data analytics piece. There are just so many new ways of gathering consumer insights in much more of an agile fashion. We used to have these long insights studies that we would receive maybe once a year to get a feel for how consumers were doing, what they were thinking, and how they were using our product. Now, there are tools that can scan ratings and reviews very quickly and help us see where things are trending and how people are feeling.
Knox: Most companies have a Chief Marketing Officer, and the Chief Digital Officer is a title that started appearing a few years ago. You have a unique title that combines them as the Chief Digital and Marketing Officer. What’s the significance of this?
Arnold: The impetus behind my title was to really ensure that the organization is thinking and viewing all of our marketing as digital first. When people say digital marketing, it still has the connotation that digital marketing is something separate than regular marketing. All marketing is digital now. But I do think it’s important when you are trying to drive a big change in the culture of the organization to call it out so that people know and understand that it is the focus.
At Kimberly-Clark, we are trying to evolve the mindset of, “Let’s start with a traditional ad or traditional idea,” to “No, let’s think about how we want to strengthen our relationship with the consumer.” What is the message that we want to put out there, and then what are the right ways to do it? How can we leverage the uniqueness of all of those different channels to enable that? It is really rethinking about how we deliver our marketing strategy and then how we evaluate it. The role of my team is to drive the innovation and the thinking around how we introduce new technologies and new ways of working to the broader set of marketers around the globe at Kimberly-Clark.
Knox: With a year in the role, what have been the highlights of the job?
Arnold: There have been several highlights. This past year has been challenging on a lot of levels, but one thing I’m most proud of the team for doing is updating our brand responsibility principles and guidelines for all of our marketers. This work started last summer when the murder of George Floyd happened, and consumers were asking companies to stop spending on Facebook. We started having conversations, and we said, “We need to actually articulate what we’re about and ensure everyone knows what they should do in these circumstances that are sadly becoming all too common.” Developing these principles so that everyone in the organization could rally around them was great.
These brand responsibility principles take the more traditional brand safety principles that many companies have and reshaped them. It is about us saying, “We want to actually be driving the change in the industry that we want to see, and we want to be investing our considerable marketing spend in the places and spaces that are helping to drive the biggest change and support the people who need it the most.”
Over the past year, we launched several initiatives and partnerships that embody these brand responsibility principles. For instance, the U.S. team had an awesome initiative with Cottonelle and BLKHLTH that was very purpose-driven. They partnered to help reach Black people with critical information about colorectal cancer, which impacts the Black community at greater rates. Cottonelle and BLKHLTH are working to address stigmas and reduce barriers associated with screening for colorectal cancer by providing a number of educational resources and free at-home colorectal cancer screening tests. This education piece was done in a very unique way that was very Cottonelle in the look, feel and the tone of it, and it was just a great example of how we’re bringing those brand responsibility principles to life.
Second, I’m proud of the work we’ve done to improve the personalization of our media to secure much higher ROIs. We’ve been able to show real impact on the business from being very selective and doing a lot of tests and learns. The underlying theme of all of these efforts is that I’m just amazed at how much progress we have achieved in such a short time. Pre-Covid-19, I don’t know if the organization would have been able to move this quickly and make as much of a positive impact – both inside and outside of the company’s walls.
Everyone across Kimberly-Clark had to pivot quickly when the pandemic began, and as a result, we have embraced a more agile way of working that will continue to fuel us moving forward as we deliver on our commitment to making lives better for thousands of people around the globe.
