What keeps Susan Irving up at night?

By Will Novosedlik

In this series, we ask top industry execs and marketers across the country about their biggest fears and concerns. What are the things of marketing nightmares? This week, we caught up with Susan Irving, CMO at Kruger Products, about the biggest problems she faces.

In her current role, Irving is responsible for leading the marketing team, setting strategic direction and driving business performance for all Kruger Products brands and marketing activities in Canada and the United States. She oversees brands like Scotties, Purex, Sponge Towels, Cashmere, White Cloud and Bonterra. In 2020 she was named a Marketer of the Year by Strategy Magazine.

What’s keeping you up at night these days?

Number one is really creating meaningful connections with consumers, especially in our category. I think you can call any category a commodity, so it’s obviously about making meaningful connections that induce consumers to want to buy your brand. You can buy a T-shirt for $8 or for $200. Or if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you can fill your closet with Brunello Cucinelli T-shirts at $450 a pop. You can buy a coffee that was all about speed and convenience at 99 cents, or you can spend six to $8 to wait in line for a customized Starbucks.

At the end of the day everything’s a commodity, so it’s all about emotional relevance. Then there’s things like physical availability, mental availability, or the fact that all consumers are repertoire buyers, especially in CPG. No one is 100% committed to one brand. They’re buying two or three within their repertoire. And if you know that household penetration is king, you are trying to make sure that a consumer is buying your brand more than the other, and that’s how you win.

And are they?

We’re number one in bathroom tissue. We’re number one in facial tissue. And in paper towels, where we’re number two, we’re gaining market share with Sponge. Our mission of “making everyday life more comfortable” really gives us an emotional rallying cry. It’s really working for us.

Can you talk a little bit more about how you bring that mission to life?

When we say our mission is to make everyday life more comfortable, we mean for our consumers, our customers and our colleagues. And this naturally intersects with social impact. Look at what we do with Cashmere Collection helping those with cancer, or what we’ve done with the Kruger Big Assist helping fund hockey families in need, or launching our “Unapologetically Human” campaign, which was creating emotional appeal while reminding folks about the functional benefits that became so important during COVID.

The contradiction of COVID was that we were all in the same boat metaphorically, in lockdown, but physically in separate boats at the same time. That’s when Broken Heart Love Affair came up with this whole idea of spotlighting how our products relate to the messy moments that show that we’re all human. It was not showing why you should buy [our] product, but how [our] product actually shows up in your life.

And did that campaign have a positive impact on your business?

It did drive share. I think a lot of people were like, ‘well, the category was growing anyway,’ but we ended up airing it for almost two years. We launched it again at Super Bowl the following year. When we got the market mix modeling back, the ROI on that campaign versus anything we had done in the past two years was off the charts. ROI was well above industry norm for everything we were doing, but especially on this. I have never in my life seen an ROI on a one minute spot higher than a 6s or a 15s, that was very interesting.

Any other challenges you’d like to talk about?

Market dynamics. Everything was status quo until 2019, and then COVID hit, and then the recession hit, and then AI and all the media changes, supply changes. FMCG’s always been fast. That’s why they call it Fast-Moving Consumer Goods. It just feels like it’s even faster now.

Gone are the days of doing a business review. We still do it, but I don’t think in my entire 25 year career as a marketer I’ve ever executed the plan as written. So you start writing your strat plan and your ops plan. You present your annual ops plan in May for what you decide to launch in January. But [then a] competitor X does this, or the market changes, or you’re an American company and the Canadian dollar drops and you’re trying to remain profitable in the face of external forces that you do not control. Then there’s the hobbled supply chain. You need to pivot to whatever product you can get. It’s just so fast. I’ve never seen it this fast. You’re just always pivoting.

The other big thing is media. We’ve seen a lot change in the media landscape. It was so easy to plan a television campaign. We were probably 95% television. Now we’re 60% digital, 40% television. Trying to actually connect with consumers given the rapid change of digital and programmatic and AI, and now you’re not only trying to come up with great creative, you’re trying to actually reach the consumers you need to reach to get to your reach frequency.

It’s just this constant pivot, pivot, pivot. I’m on this course, I’ve got a plan, but I’ve got to be ready for my contingency plan because it is going to change next month and I’m going to have to tweak something. You’ve got your plan and your roadmap for where you want to go, but the road is not a straight line anymore. It’s zigzag. You’re always trying to figure out where on the road you need to be.

Yeah. And the road keeps moving.

Especially in a rapid world of inflation. One month inflation’s crazy, and you’re like, ‘Okay, we may need to pull back and make some priority changes,’ then things drop again. And then you’ve made this commitment. Things are just constantly changing.

The third thing that’s keeping me up at night is just this overall world of uncertainty we’re in. The mood is heavy. Everyone’s worried. People are worried about the recession, people are worried about what’s going on in politics. Then there’s the climate threat, and the AI threat. It’s just a heavy, heavy world right now. I think as marketers and leaders, we have an opportunity to bring a little more joy to consumers. The research is showing that if you can do something, anything, that’s going to emotionally connect with a consumer, even just to put a smile on their face for a moment, you should do that. I think you’re going to see a lot of brands pivoting that way.