Even if you’re not familiar with Reckitt, you’ll probably have some of their products in your home, including iconic household brands like Dettol, Finish, Strepsils or Durex. The company exists to “protect, heal and nurture in the relentless pursuit of a cleaner and healthier world.” As you’ll hear in today’s episode, they take this purpose seriously; and are working hard to embed it in every part of the Reckitt culture. 

The sixth episode of Purposing offers insight into the multinational company’s strategy to make purpose more than just brand positioning, building systems for measuring impact and adding substance to new product development. David Croft, Global Director of Sustainability at Reckitt, will share how they’re applying purpose to innovation, sustainability, and supply chain management - in a way that drives growth and makes a positive difference on inequality and climate change. 

Do you want to learn how to build a purpose-driven brand from Given, the consultancy that’s helped some of the world's largest organisations become purposeful? Download the Insiders’ Guide to Purpose HERE. 

So all that hard work behind the scenes really matters. So it's no wonder that marketers can get really excited about a company's purpose efforts. In fact, at Cannes this, year in June, where the world's advertising community got together to celebrate the year's best work. 28 out of 32 Grand Prix awarded touched on purpose inclusion or sustainability in one way or another.

Some people who were worried about the rise of purpose wash argue that purpose is too important for marketing. Some people think that marketing because they sit at the intersection of production and consumption, is actually the only one that can drive the change that's needed. But others say they should stop trying to save the world and just get back to selling stuff.

So this obviously raises some big questions and this episode tries to cut through all of that. It's about how you make a business purpose real and relevant through your brands and products, whether that's across different markets, different categories, and different audiences. And crucially, it's about how you do all this in a way that delivers both substance and business results.

From the given, this is Purposing, the podcast that lifts the lid on how to run a truly purpose-driven business. I'm Becky Willan, and with the help of leaders from some of the world's most recognized brands, I'll be demystifying this often misunderstood topic into clear, actionable advice you can use in your own business.

This week I'm joined by David Croft, global director of sustainability for Reckitt, the global health and hygiene business behind household names like Nurofen, Lemsip, and Vanish. David's career in sustainability goes way back and over the years he's held senior roles, at Diageo, Cadbury, Waitrose, and the Co-op.

Through this conversation, you'll learn how to figure out what role purpose should play for your brands. Make sure your marketing teams have got the right tools for the job and get purpose right and avoid purpose wash. Before I speak with David, let's take a quick look back at his career to learn how a degree in environmental sciences took him all the way to leading sustainability for some of the world's biggest brands.

David's career began in local government in the northwest of England working in environmental health.

The values of consumers were critical to making that brand work. And I think that's really where I started to see how you would bring purpose to life.

David remembers one moment in particular from this time. He had taken a craft leadership team to West Africa to meet cocoa farmers, in a remote farming village in Ghana.

You don't need to come and visit us anymore. Our children are going to school. Our farms are stronger. And the fact that she had the strength to stand in front of the elders and these visitors, who she'd never met before, and say what she said, I felt incredibly humbled to be part of enabling something like that to happen.

That's the sort of change that you can make when you bring purpose to life in those value chains.

These are brands like Dettol, and Lysol, which millions, billions of people probably have seen over the course of the last two years during the pandemic. Household health and nutrition brands that include Durex, Finish, and Enfamil, in terms of infant formula. Brands that make a difference in people's day-to-day lives as we frame it in our business strategy, tackle the world's biggest problems that come from the impact of climate change and health, The emerging challenges of hygiene, the fact that we've got greater organization.

We have challenges around sexual health and well-being. We have an aging population where nutrition at both ends of that age spectrum is gonna become increasingly important. The quality of life and I'm very fortunate to work day to day with those brands all over the world and help bring not only our corporate purpose to life but also individual brand purposes to life through fantastic brand directors all over the world.

And that corporate purpose to protect, heal, and nurture, and the relentless pursuit of a cleaner, healthy world is something that binds all of those individual brand connections together. But it's a corporate purpose that very much drives core activity and drives it into the business strategy for growth.

And it helps us deliver impact for the business, but also impact through the business.

And those two things for me are very important. If we can harness the whole strength of that organization, both in economic terms, and in the impact, we create into the wider world, the people we serve, day in, day out, those 20 million households, and our impact on every type of stakeholder, investors, shareholders, the communities we serve, the people who use our products, governments in terms of the public health agenda, becomes really, really powerful.

And that drives core business and that drives our business strategy for growth. That helps us deliver something we call our fight. The fight to make access to the best quality health, hygiene, and nourishment is right, not a privilege, because we see, looking forward the sense that inequality prevents communities from thriving, creating better access for everybody to health, hygiene, and nutrition.

Then we're tackling inequality, but we're also growing the markets that we serve. And in the end, that's what Reckitt was founded upon. 200 years ago, James Reckitt, one of the philanthropists of his age, understood that running an effective business means thinking about the impact you have on the communities that you are part of that helps you thrive and prosper.

And we have the same ethos today. If we deliver on our corporate purpose and then individually on different brand purposes, then we make that dual impact.

But at the same time, there's a big difference between being a business that has a bold vision and being a true purpose, a purpose-driven business where every decision that's made is really driven by that idea. So where would you say that Reckitt was on that journey? How embedded is that vision, that purpose in the business as a whole?

How much does it really drive decisions day to day?

It's a tool that we apply to every new product innovation, and the goal is that every new innovation is more sustainable than its predecessor. And so we measure the carbon footprint, the water footprint, the packaging footprint, the ingredients footprint, the chemical footprint within that, and we're trying to improve it.

And if we improve it by at least 10 percentage points, then it counts towards a published KPI about net revenue for more sustainable products.

But it's not just about the process. What we've also done is we've created performance incentives around it. So every leader in the business has a proportion of their incentive associated with that KPI, and that means that we're consistently thinking about: Are we designing more sustainable products? Are we retailing them well?

Are we connecting to customers well? Are we connecting them to our consumers well? And are we helping take those consumers on a journey? Because we know more people want more sustainable products.

And so with a brand like Finish where we've designed the product, so it doesn't need to use as much water, it doesn't need as much energy when you put it in the dishwasher, we have to connect with those people using that product day in, day out and persuade them, Don't pre-rinse, you don't need to. Your dishes will come out just as clean, and you'll save water and you'll save energy, and at the same time, it probably also means you're saving money as well.

So these are the things that we're trying to connect through to bring that overarching purpose to life through a brand-light finish and its own purpose about water and sustainable ways of living in people's homes. But this isn't about altruism. This is about good business. These are products that will be more resilient in the future, but also that we know consumers want because they keep telling us they want more sustainable products.

But marketers should stop trying to save the world and get back to what they do best, which is selling stuff. So how do you sort of make the case for why doing this through the brands is the right approach for Reckitt and not just looking at this from a corporate perspective?

We also see it in the sense that externalities are increasingly being factored in. Externalities coming through in terms of attacks on packing. Potentially down the line of packs on attacks on carbon and carbon in products, at least in the manufacture of those products, if not at some point in the future in their use.

It also affects in time how people will use those products. If you're paying more for your electricity but you know, this product can be used with less energy than its competitor. and in time, we will see carbon labeling on the pack, I'm convinced about that. Then designing products that can be used at lower energy gives you an advantage in the marketplace.

We've seen that actually been around for quite some time. If you go to electrical superstores, you see the different white goods being sold with the measurements against the A B C D E, and so on. And increasingly there are fewer and fewer that are D and E. There are more As and Bs because the brands have come to realize that unless you are competitive in that sense, people leave you on the shelf.

So it's a mixture of risk and opportunity and building it into that process gives us confidence in the future. And bear in mind that some of our products don't churn very often. They're regulated products. We have to be absolutely convinced and assured of their efficacy in terms of health protection, their safety because they're medical products in many cases and their stability over potentially quite long shelf lives.

It takes a while to work through all of those. So thinking now about a product that will perhaps come to the market in two, three years' time, but beyond the market for the next five, ten, maybe longer than that, and making certain we build it sustainably now with ingredients that will be resilient, packaging that resilient, and that will deliver on those externalities that will come into place in a few years time is critically important.

And then finally, it's worth thinking about the emerging concept of dual materiality. And this is going to be built into ISSB-style reporting. And so what we're seeing is there is the impact for the most materialist use for a company, but also the most material issues that that company has in terms of society.

And those two things put side by side, you know, simple two-by-two access. So the more you can design your organization to be effective for itself, but for society, the more resilient and the more opportunities you'll create and double materiality, becoming the norm drives you in that direction. And so to your point, marketers should be about how they sell products.

Yes, I agree. But it's about selling products that people want that are resilient, and drive opportunities for growth in those two dimensions. We think that in doing so, we position ourselves incredibly strongly for the future.

Because, you know, Unilever's come under a lot of criticism. I think Terry Smith at the beginning of this year said, well, why does the mayonnaise need a purpose? And I guess they are in a slightly different category from you but are there any brands at Reckitt where you think it's not appropriate for purpose sustainability to be a part of how they build their brand and find that relevance with consumers?

So if I take a brand like Vanish, which its purpose is to give clothes longer lives. At face value that doesn't have a direct sustainability conversation around it. And yet when you start to unpick it, you're talking about fashion that has a high carbon footprint, a high water footprint, has, we know sadly, lots of fashion ending up in landfill sites.

We know the history of the global value chains that sit behind fashion, all of those things. We want to be confident that we're with Vanity's purpose, making certain that we have tackled, but still fundamentally giving people the opportunity to have clothes that last longer, that deliver more, and then quietly, therefore, have lower environmental footprints associated with it.

We won't talk about the carbon footprint opportunities of vanishing, particularly because that's secondary, and so purpose needs to be focused. It needs to be targeted on what matters and what the brand can honestly, credibly, and consistently deliver. There will also be things that sit around that, that is co-benefit.

And then we will look at those co-benefits and make certain that the things that sit proverbially below the waterline are tackled consistently, and credibly. So things like the human rights and modern slavery aspects of global value chains, all of that happen behind the scenes. That's not something you would see in a brand like Vanish dialogue, because that's something that happens at a corporate level, and it's just an expectation.

There might be certain times when we will talk about that. So for example, with Durex, Durex is a people-centric brand. Sort of goes without saying in a way, but sat behind that, is how we think about people in that global value chain. So one of the things we've done with the smallholder farmers in Thailand who give us the latex, the high-quality latex that allows us to make Durex condoms, those farmers now get a fair trade, the fair rub of premium, and that means that's a stronger livelihood for them that.

Investment in their farms as well as in their communities. So we are looking after the people at the heart of that value chain. And the same way we want to look after the people and the health of the people who are using that brand and the consumer end of the market chain and the value chain. And it's consistent with the Reckitt ethos, not just in terms of preventing risk, but dialing up opportunities where we can do so.

You have to make it local.

And when we look at it, we think it's important that you take a really kind of holistic, multidimensional level. So often what we see is that brands think about how they might change things for people at an individual level through, you know, new and improved products or services. It might be more about tackling cultural barriers or you know, raising awareness of an issue or changing behaviors. But at the third level, I think often brands, and this is where I think stuff goes wrong if brands jump to trying to tackle institutional barriers, so getting involved in sort of stuff that looks more like activism, so policy change, lobbying, that kind of thing.

Often when the most powerful opportunities lie where brands are doing all of these, but in a meaningful and kind of credible way, but do you have a framework for how you help your brands figure out, I guess, A, which issues or topics to focus on, and B, how to actually create that meaningful impact around those topics?

The other part of that framework is what we talk about at a corporate level and how you blend Reckitt as a corporate brand together with our individual consumer problems. That's why when we talk, for example, about the importance of climate change and public health, that is a voice of Reckitt, but also is something that cuts across multiple brands.

And that way the brand, the consumer-facing brand is very consistent and the corporate brand is very consistent, but they complement each other well.

That's why with a brand, like Finish, it's not just what the brand does and says with people using it day in, day out. It's also the connections that the brand teams make with different stakeholders. Stakeholders like WWF, with whom we have a fantastic partnership. That is about aquatic ecosystems and catchment area management, where that saved water and the necessity of water and the quality of water is really brought to life.

We've been doing similar things already, looking at, for example, the populations of river dolphins, because that really then shows the benefit as an indicator of how thriving that water ecosystem is. And as we go along, we're doing more and more of that type of impact assessment. A good example is a work we've done in Thailand where we looked end to end at the total value chain, and we thought about the different ways we created an impact, both positive and negative, I have to say, from the farms where the latex was grown, transporting it, manufacturing condoms in Bangkok, and then into the marketplace where people are using them. And we worked with external specialists on this about what would be the different types of benefits and impacts that you had, impacts like perhaps, water pollution from fertilizer on farms, or adverse impact on biodiversity, perhaps in those farms.

Or the manufacturing footprint or the packaging footprint, but against that, we have more positive benefits. Strengthening biodiversity, helping with agronomy, building more sustainable factories, reducing the carbon, putting solar panels on the roof, and we are able to look at those positives and negatives, a sort of simple but emerging multiple capitals model, and think how does that translate through?

And what it told us is that directionally we overall make a positive benefit, but that's not enough. You then have to have a conversation with yourself that says, How do I maximize those positives? Because it's not as simple as saying the positives outweigh the negatives. And avoid, not just minimize, avoid the negatives, and that's why we continue to innovate.

We continue to think, how do we make that packaging more sustainable? How do we reduce the footprint of the factory, how do reduce the footprint of the transport, and so on and so forth? So knowing directionally you're making a positive impact because you prevent huge impacts on people's health. Public health generally in the country is a good place to start.

You can't rest on your laurels. That's why we continue to innovate, to be more sustainable for the future.

That all line up against our drive towards plastic packaging reduction, chemical footprint reduction, and scope three carbon reduction, and they're progressively built-in with training and support. And that's where specialist teams in both R&D and the sustainability function, are also there, to help provide guidance to bring the outside in, but also, our procurement teams and the brand teams, and the R&D teams connect with our supply network.

We have a fantastic program with suppliers that builds opportunities for new innovations, and when it rolls up, does the new innovation score better than the sustainability innovation calculator that connects it all together? And that drive, particularly with the incentives pitched around it, Helps to give cohesion.

So it's about creating that framework, finding the metrics that support it, incentivizing around it, but making really importantly, making certain that people have the knowledge and the tools to bring it to life in practice. What we don't want to do is make the elastic with consumers and leave some of them behind, because we are moving perhaps too fast.

It's critical that we take people with us and then we can create a collective impact.

How you create change through it, how you engage organizations, how you build more sustainable products, how you connect to millions of people every day who might use your brands if you're in the sort of sector that we're in. If I think about things like climate change, I'm fairly sure that we now know about the science of climate change.

We'll continue to learn more, but I think we know what is going on. So for me, what is more important? The science of climate change is actually just the science of change. How do we make change happen, and how do we translate all of those risks and those opportunities into practice in a business that is global, that reaches 20 million households every day, and so sustainability people, yes, they have to have that technical understanding, but if they cannot be agents of change, great communicators, motivators, and bring it to life for the other different functions that they touch and serve within an organization, then my fear would be they don't actually achieve anything. Bringing it to life is critical.

My experience of the last 20 or so years of this type of agenda is if you try and police it to make it happen, it doesn't work. We could all design systems that on paper are perfect, but in the end, people run systems and if you haven't got those people on board, Then that system, frankly, is probably doomed to failure, and I think that's true for sustainability within an organization.

I think it's true in terms of the connection that we make with people who use our brands all over the world. We want to give them reasons to believe and reasons to support it. I want to persuade you to skip their ins on your dishwasher. You are gonna do that later on, I hope. Okay. Because we've designed a product that helps.

And finding the right framework that allows that to happen is critical. And I think the more we can do that, then the less we see sustainability as a separate function. We see it just as an activity that everybody does. And there's a concept in health and safety, bizarrely called the Bradley Curve.

And this was invented by DuPont, I dunno, probably about 40 years ago now. And it talks about maturity and it talks about when there's no health and safety system, people get hurt. That's not acceptable. And then you introduce a series of rules and if people don't follow the rules, you penalize them, which is helpful.

But if you've had an accident, being penalized doesn't really have that benefit. You know you've had a problem. And what it then tries to get to is people, to internalize health and safety so that they think about doing things in a certain way and internalizing it. And that's what they call the independent phase.

And that's good because that means I remember to put my safety hat on before I go into a factory. But then there's a further phase, and this is interdependent, and this is when you get everybody thinking about how they internalize it, but getting other people to internalize it as well. So I would know more go into the factory without putting a hard hat on than I would let you go into the factory without putting the hard hat on.

And I think that type of maturity approach. If we can find that same machine and we're progressing very rapidly on it, I think on the sustainability agenda, by embedding it in the way people work, by embedding it in building capacity and capabilities and playbooks and incentivizing people, and yes, having certain standards and rules that they must follow but embedding it and motivating people around it is a critical step change in how the sustainability dealings will operate, and we do that better when we understand the needs and the lexicon and the ways of working of other functions, and you do it better together, that drives change faster. Bear in mind it's 40 years since the Bradley Curve was invented.

We don't have 40 years on the sustainability agenda. We don't have 40 years to play with on climate change. We have to act faster. So internalizing it and getting to that interdependent phase where we're all connected around the same agenda, be it how the grand purpose comes to life, how we design products, or how we develop and run supply chains is critical to making those changes happen faster.

And I do think that the businesses that do that will be the ones that thrive. They'll also be the ones who create greater impact and help us combat the world's biggest issues like climate change.

Lots of really brilliant insight there. So here are a few things I've taken from the conversation.

Find an authentic and active connection between your brand's purpose and your business purpose. It's gotta be credible in relation to the actual impact of your product or service, relevant to the needs, expectations, and insights you've got about your consumer, and distinctive, because it builds on the unique qualities and capabilities of your brand.

Make purpose about proof points, not just a new brand positioning.

Get your marketing teams to collaborate with your sustainability teams. Marketing brings big ideas for building distinctive brands with real relevance and is an expert in the science of change. While your sustainability team is experts in calling BS, have rigorous tools and processes for measuring impact and can add real substance to creativity.

Get smart about your overall theory of change. Think bigger than campaigns. Figure out what happens at an individual brand level, and at a corporate level. Your brand might be about new and improved products or services or changing behaviors while your corporate activities could be focused on changing the system through collaboration or policy change. The key is to take a big picture and long-term view.

If you'd like more practical advice on building a purpose-driven business with brilliant insights from people like David, download the Insider's Guide to purpose givenagency.com/insidersguide.

Purposing is produced by Fascinate Productions