An interview with Simon Clift
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In an exclusive interview with The Marketing Society, Simon Clift, former CMO of Unilever, reveals how he might have been a teacher and why he has a book of 100 Chinese Characters beside his bed…
What advice would you offer to Marketing Society members looking to become the leaders of tomorrow?
Be yourself at work. Behave like the consumer that we all are. Don’t assume a fake persona of ‘professional marketing manager’ whereby you suspend your own critical judgements. (After all, if we were to judge objectively, how many marketers would really find their advertising engaging or their product differentiated and of superior quality?)
What three things can all marketers do to drive the growth of their business?
Unleash their ambition, show courage and trust their taste. Most marketers confuse a high level of ambition for their brand or company with their own desire to get on. They are not the same! Focus a bit more on the former and you’d be surprised how often the latter follows as a consequence. It takes courage to stand out from the crowd and do something genuinely different that risks getting noticed by consumers. And nobody ever talks about taste in marketing (except the immortal John Hegarty), but recognising powerful ideas, communications, or packaging requires it!
What’s the biggest mistake you made in business and what did you learn from it?
A generous selection of occasions when I didn’t have either the courage or the judgment to blow the whistle on brand or communication ideas that weren’t genuinely unique or compelling, where somebody had managed to convince himself that they were. There’s an extraordinary amount of self-delusion in our industry.
I should also have stood up more strongly against the creeping ‘mechanisation’ of marketing that has taken over during the last few years, perpetrated in the name of ‘rigour’. By which I mean that a régime of rigorous quantitative pre-testing can certainly root out the plainly bad, but will also probably equally efficiently ensure that nothing spectacular will ever squeeze through either! So it will no doubt help to ‘raise the floor’, but will also ensure that the ceiling is kept safely in place, and probably rather low at that. And it spawns a destructive internal culture, too.
What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your marketing career?
Firstly, I was sent abroad very early and learned my marketing in small marketing departments (Portugal, Austria, Mexico), which was great for hands-on experience. (After all, communications development, like bricklaying, is a craft skill, and I learnt it from making about three ads a month!) But I wish I had spent more time early on in a big, structured marketing culture such as you find in the UK or the US. I only learned about some of the more fundamental disciplines towards the end of my career when I became CMO, which was frankly a bit late and sometimes downright embarrassing! Like a painter or a musician, it’s best to show you’ve mastered basic techniques before going on to ignore them!
Secondly, as Unilever started out on its long and ambitious journey to globalise, I suppose I wish I’d understood better that the often acrimonious discussions between global brand managers and countries are, whatever they appear to be, usually less about the intrinsic merit of the proposed solution and more about the relationship. I could never quite understand how competitors managed to get so much more mileage out of inferior mixes. So it’s barking up the wrong tree endlessly to discuss the quality of the mix, rather than working on listening, engaging, demonstrating that you understand real consumers in a given country and building a common agenda. It’s what EffectiveBrands call, quite simply, separating the ‘What’ from the ‘How’. I suppose I wish I’d thought to ask them at the time!
If you hadn’t been in business, what would you have done?
I’d have been a teacher, I suppose. In fact I very nearly was… (Phew!) I dread to think how that would have ended up.
What is your guilty pleasure?
I’m not very good at guilt – rather better at pleasure. Fine wine, I suppose.
What book is sitting on your bedside table?
A little pile consisting of Rachel Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern; Selina Hasting’s superb biography of Somerset Maugham and The First 100 Chinese Characters. (I’m learning Chinese. And I’m on about no. 7…)
Tell us a secret.
I think most of my friends would agree that I’m too indiscreet to have any secrets left…
Simon Clift, former CMO, Unilever, has joined the Advisory Board of EffectiveBrands, a global marketing consultancy focused specifically on helping brands build global marketing strategy, structure and capability.
Posted: March 24th, 2011 | Author: elen.lewis | Filed under: Customer Champions, Customer Stream, Growth Drivers, Q+A, WLTM, leadership | Tags: effectivebrands, marketing leadership, simon clift, unilever | Leave a Comment »
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