LaVerne:

Welcome to Brilliant in 20, a new podcast from the Scoop News Group and Emerald One, where we celebrate the unique brilliance of today’s leaders and share their greatest lessons with you in just about 20 minutes. Hi, I’m LaVerne Council, CEO of Emerald One. My guest today is Bridgette Heller, the founder and volunteer CEO of the Shirley Proctor Puller Foundation, a non-for-profit organization committed to generating better educational outcomes for underserved children in St. Petersburg, Florida. In addition to her role as the leader of the Shirley Proctor Puller Foundation, she is a Board Director with Novartis, Dexcom Incorporated, and Tech Data Corporation.

Bridgette also holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where she serves on the school’s advisory board. Now, like that isn’t enough, most recently, Bridgette served as a global president of the Specialized Nutrition Division of Danone. She has also held global executive leadership roles with Merck, as president of Merck’s consumer care, and with Johnson and Johnson as president of Johnson and Johnson’s baby products, where I had the opportunity to work with her, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Bridgette was also at Kraft, and we’ll discuss that further in a moment. Bridgette, welcome to Brilliant in 20.

Bridgette:

Thank you very much. You are also remiss if you don’t say that we’re good friends.

LaVerne:

We are great friends. This is my sister. She is my sister.

Bridgette:

Absolutely.

LaVerne:

No doubt about it. I couldn’t think of a better person to be my first female leader that we featured on this podcast other than Bridgette, so I am biased, but I am also a curator of great taste, and so that is why she is here because I always… If I can get the best, I will do so. Bridgette, thank you. Thank you for giving me this time. Thank you for giving our listeners time to get to know you as a leader, and also talk about some of your experiences.

Bridgette:

Thank you. I’m humbled. I’m humbled to be here as one of your early guests in this new adventure, and especially humbled to be the first female leader.

LaVerne:

Yes, no doubt about it. It’s funny. I was starting to mention it in the intro, but you did start your career at Kraft, and I was always impressed. I think when I first met you over 20 years ago… Gosh, dating myself. It was over 20 years ago. We talked about the Gevalia brand in your time at Kraft, and few people could really say they created a brand. I mean, we manage ourselves as a brand many times, but to create a brand… I want to just give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about that because the creation of Gevalia led to K-cups, which I’m a big Keurig user. Most people are, and Nespresso, all these things. It led to the subscription concept of getting something delivered to you on a monthly basis based on subscription.

All these things now are sort of standard for how we take care of ourselves. Right? We subscribe and save, but that started with you as a young woman with great endeavors and great ideas, so while people often don’t think about this, many of our government clients are trying to create small brands as well within these large agencies. They’re trying to create things that will carry on and will meet their constituency and fulfill their mission. Talk to us a little bit about what it takes to create a brand, and what do you look for? How do you start with the process, and what do you find yourself doing to really manage it and make sure that it’s creative and it meets people’s needs?

Bridgette:

I think that you hit on a number of things that are critical there. Right? The first being hitting people’s needs or meeting people’s needs, and I think any brand that doesn’t do that, is really valueless. I think that the notions of brand creation and value creation are inherently linked. Right? For me, it always starts with what value are we trying to bring to the consumer? What need are we trying to meet for him or her? If we go back to all of the brands that Kraft, but especially Gevalia… The brand actually existed. It existed in Europe, and the story goes that it was just a European brand that a group of people decided to bring to the US as, believe it or not, one of the first forays into premium coffee. Before Starbucks was big in the US, before Pete’s and others, there was Gevalia, which really was a European import.

One of the ways in which we went about building that brand… Initially, they associated the brand because they were really trying to drive the business through subscription, a subscription model, and this’ll sound very kind of interesting or funny, but basically, what happened was you had a group of fairly wealthy people who decided that, “I would love to have this premium coffee when I go to my summer house or when I go to my winter house, depending on where it was.” And so they decided they couldn’t necessarily get it. They wanted to have everything sort of pre stocked for them, and they wished they could have it… They could get everything, but great coffee, so they decided that they would put in place this subscription model to make that happen. It actually came through one of the greatest brand builders and marketers within the advertising industry, a guy by the name of Lester Wunderman.

When I got to the business, what they were doing though, was they were building the business on the basis of sort of this free thing that they would give you to start the subscription, and then you would continue on. When I came along and said, “Well, let’s figure out what this means to the consumer. How she values it, why she values it, how she uses it, and let’s try and build the brand out around that.” And that was actually what enabled us to take that business from about 50 to a hundred million up to about 300 million in the course of a couple of years, and that was driven, again, because we really came to understand by talking to consumers, that what she really most valued was this was her personal thing.

This was a private little luxury that she actually cherished and kept hidden from many people, so she had this European crafted coffee that she really loved every element of that coffee experience, whether it was the aroma, the cradling of the mug, all those things. We managed to take all those things and put them in advertising as cues, and then begin to lessen the brand’s reliance on the offer, which is very critical in direct marketing. The offer. We began to lessen the dependence on the offer and make the business more dependent on the brand. As a result, that enabled us to get more value out of it, to really talk about the value it had for her, so I think that that is really what is entailed in building a brand is first and foremost understanding what it represents and the need it fills for your consumer and how they relate to it so that you can then translate that into your communication strategy, your advertising, et cetera.

LaVerne:

I love that because really what you’re talking about is consumer centric thinking. Right? This is before we had the design methods, the concept, but frankly, that’s what it is. You start with the consumer’s point of view. That empathy of what they want and our listeners can’t see you, but I can, and as you’re talking about this, I see you embracing the emotion of what that must felt like for them, and it reminds me, just this morning, one of my teammates… We always start with a day of gratitude, and I said, “What’s your gratitude?” And she says, “I have to be honest, it was going to be this morning’s coffee.”

Bridgette:

Yeah. A brand is typically a part of a ritual. Some sort of ritual that people have in their life. If it’s a runner, it’s a running ritual. If it’s a coffee drinker, it’s a coffee ritual. For me, I actually am more of a tea drinker than I am a coffee drinker. As my daughter says, “Don’t mess with my tea ritual. I don’t want my coffee heated up, and I don’t want my tea, rather, heated up in the microwave. I want my water in a kettle. I want when I hear the kettle go, and even”… It matters to me that even if you stop the kettle just before you hear it whistle, I’m like, “Oh no. Put it back on.” That’s really important. All those little elements are important.

LaVerne:

What’s the biggest threat you’ve encountered in dealing with brand management and making sure that that brand lives to see another day.

Bridgette:

I think that one of the biggest threats, and again, I’ll actually… I’ll do two. I’ll go… The first one actually happened for me at Kraft very early in my career. I think it was… It’s something called Minute Rice. I mean, everybody’s probably hadn’t been Minute Rice or heard of it, and at some point, Minute Rice became more about the time, and that’s what people thought about it as, as opposed to the experience of the enjoyment and the experience of it. People would say things like, “Well, I’m not even sure it’s real rice and blah, blah, blah.” And a competitor came along and was going to introduce another product that would be directly competitive because it would take the same amount of time, or at least a similar amount of time, so people thought about Minute Rice being only about the experience of the convenience rather, and not at all about the taste or about the other attributes of it.

And so we launched a campaign, actually. A recipe campaign called Quick Meals because that was really much more of what consumers were looking about. The rice was only a part of it. A small part of what you needed to put on the table. Right? What we did was we wrapped that brand… We did two things. We wrapped the brand in this beautiful set of 10 minute, 20 minute meals, and that was sort of one thing. We could give them all the things they needed. Boom, boom, boom. It was sort of that early one, two, three step recipe approach to giving people 20 minute meals, so that was sort of one thing we did.

Then the second thing we did was we made it even more convenient by coming out with this boiling bag product, which was the way the competitor was coming in. The competitor was coming in with a different product, and people said, “It can’t be done.” So we actually reduced… In that case, we reduced the development timeline down from what had historically been about a year and a half to six months to get from start to finish with a new premium rice product, and we brought that into the market. The greatest part about it was that at that point in time, we actually drove the competitor share down far, far below what anybody had projected they’d be able to attain in coming in, and we kept them there. That was really the biggest piece there. I think the second threat was actually an external one and one that we don’t think about very often, and that was actually something that happened… It happened to me.

The first time, it was, “Whoa.” That was a little bit of a surprise, honestly, and then the second time I was prepared for it. The first time it happened, I was at J and J, and you may remember this. I was actually preparing for vacation when one of the organizations, one of the… What is it? Sustainability or environmental organizations introduced or launched a piece, a communication piece, that was all around the contaminants or the irritants that they saw in baby products, and I was managing the baby business and they talked about these things that they felt were not healthy for children and the fact that they were in baby products.

LaVerne:

The Hide. I remember.

Bridgette:

Oh my God. They launched it, and in the US at any rate at that point in time, there wasn’t a lot of awareness around environmental sort of contaminants or things like that, and people were really very clear about the science involved in producing baby products, and if you could get that level of purity, they would pretty easily give you their trust. But… I wasn’t so worried about. I knew the [UWG 00:13:20] was launching the article. I knew it was coming, so I wasn’t so worried about it because this was a US product, a US organization, but the world had gone global, and what happened was at that point in time, there had been the metamine or melamine issue in China, and there had been then the Toys R Us issue in China, and so China was really ripe for watching for anything that represented contaminants and particularly contaminants that were associated with babies. When it hit… When the article came out, it made zero impact actually in the US, but somebody picked it up in China and we had a global catastrophe on our hands.

People started… Chinese retailers started to take it off the shelves. It was just incredible, and then it started to roll throughout Asia and we had to really take a step back and say, “Okay, first of all, have we missed something? Is there something that we’re doing that could potentially be harmful to consumers? Have they discovered something we didn’t know?” Luckily, we had… Even though, again, it wasn’t so big on the radar of Americans, we had in place an environmental sustainability person on my global team already as a scientist, and she quickly was able to say, “No. Actually, there’s more of this particular byproduct that is present in an apple then there is in this particular baby shampoo, so if you’re not concerned about your children ingesting it, the fact that you would put it on their skin, absolutely no problem.”

We were quickly able to come out with that messaging and put that forward, and you guys will know from an industry perspective, a federal government perspective, how important it is to be very, very quick and very clear with that type of messaging to say, “This is not an issue.” We were able to do that. We were able to get that research into the hand of the government agencies in China. Two different agencies, by the way, and they walked it through those agencies to then clarify the position and make sure that we were able to get the Chinese government agencies to release a statement to the consumers saying, “This is safe. You do not have to worry about that.”

And as soon as that was done, the whole region started to calm down, but the importance thereof was readiness with statements, looking ahead to where the market’s going as opposed to where it is today because, again, had we not already had an eye toward this environmental thing that’s emerging and had that scientist in place for more than two years, really looking at what ingredients were going to be potentially targeted at having a point of view about those, and even ready statements with our PR agency, we would have been days, weeks later in terms of being able to communicate around it, and that would have damaged our brand tremendously.

Then the second thing is being able to have the right people in place with the right relationships from a regulatory standpoint, so that you can actually get to the right government agencies to then really correct a misperception, and so that was the lesson I learned from the Johnson’s baby issue, and it actually came around, and again, we really were able to respond very, very well when it happened to us at Danone with an issue that that was occurring, again, in the baby food… Right? Infant formula market, where somebody raised a question about something that happened in Ireland, and then it happened in France, and then the next thing you know, the Chinese want to know part of it, and it was global again. From China to Africa to everywhere, and so you had to really know the right people, manage the right messaging, and really stay on top of it, and respond quickly.

LaVerne:

This was so interesting because we, at Emerald One, talk about the elements of brilliance. Right? And what you’ve talked about are all five of those elements with the issues you ran through in those products. We talk about leadership. Right? That’s key, and sort of understanding and willingness to not just deflect, but to engage. Right?

Bridgette:

Absolutely.

LaVerne:

We’re taping this during the COVID-19. We’re all safe at home, but this is a perfect example, too, of the need to have accurate information and the need to be able to share in such a way as a leader, but then you’ve mentioned also culture. Right? As the world was getting smaller, information was moving much faster than probably any other brands you had been associated with, and now it’s overnight. It’s minutes, actually, with bad information versus sometimes accurate information. Your culture has to be one of preparedness, having the right people, the right relationships, the right people on staff, but also a knowledge that this could be. You said something very important, Bridgette. You said, “It wasn’t about where we are now. It’s about where we’re going.”

Bridgette:

That’s right.

LaVerne:

Your preparedness state was built on where you’re going, and I think secondarily, was really leveraging trust. Right? The parents trust in that baby product, but also the trust in your rice. It really was rice, and it wasn’t about rice and time. It was about nutrition and feeding people, so tying those recipes around, it was a smart way to get people back to the real value of what that product was about versus it being about what someone else is saying. Right? I think all the agencies, the federal leaders, understand that. They all manage a brand, but they do have the focus on being that leader, ensuring they understand the culture, which they’re working in, building that trust and maintaining it, and then trying to maximize the value, but then ultimately, it was about time compression because you mentioned the issue that it took 18 months normally to bring a new product on and you did it in six. Didn’t have that time. You didn’t waste that time. You went for it. You made it happen. Two things that-

Bridgette:

One other piece that I would add to your list is this sense of transparency because the truth is… And vulnerability. A leader who’s not vulnerable, and who does not create an environment of transparency is really, in my view, setting him or herself up for failure, because the truth is two things don’t happen in that kind of a leadership aura. Right? People don’t bring you problems. Right? So they get hidden, and then when they really come to light, it may be too late for you to actually do the other things that you talked about in terms of your response. To a mass… A depth of response and a speed of response can come too late in the process. You may be unable to do that because the information comes too late in the process without an environment of transparency, and without the leader at least acknowledging a vulnerability in that, “I can’t know everything and I can’t do everything.” Right?

The truth is that I could get the information to China, but I couldn’t deliver it to the Chinese officials, and I had to… One of the most interesting experiences, and I know you’ve had it, is to sit across the table from someone in a Chinese government and have the translator translating and watch that person’s face because you’re hoping [crosstalk 00:21:37] that that translator is getting it right, or that you’re not saying something that’s offensive, and I’ll never forget, actually, once having a response that the translator felt would be marginally offensive and having her tone it down, and I knew she toned it down. I knew she toned it down because, again, the translator sitting next to me was saying, “Okay, she’s turning it down a bit.” Right? But that was okay because, again, that person, I entrusted to protect me in that environment. Right? And to make sure that we, as a company, weren’t doing something unnecessarily offensive. Right? Culturally offensive, and that’s happened to me a couple of times. Not surprisingly, in both China and in Russia, where the cultures are very different than our own. Yeah.

LaVerne:

It’s funny that you mentioned vulnerability and transparency together because you are vulnerable when you walk into somebody else’s environment and you don’t speak the language, but you have an accountability to people, to an organization, and you have to trust people because you are in that situation, but you also… When you lean to transparency, it’s not like in the musical, “Don’t bring me no bad news.” No, it’s like, “Bring me the bad news.”

Bridgette:

Absolutely, please.

LaVerne:

“Bring it to me quickly.”

Bridgette:

“And bring it to me early.”

LaVerne:

Exactly. “Bring it to me early.” Tell me what you think is going to happen because we all need to get behind this. Right? And that also means, as a leader, sometimes sharing when you don’t know and sharing what you can share in a way that allows people to go on the journey with you.

Bridgette:

That’s exactly right.

LaVerne:

It’s all part of that vulnerability. That’s so important, and I appreciate that. I appreciate that in you because I know some of those conversations aren’t easy, and also, being a woman and a global leader and showing up in various environments is always a very interesting state of things, so I want to talk to you a little bit about that.

Bridgette:

Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up because a lot of times people do associate sort of the vulnerability, particularly as a woman, they mistake it for something else.

LaVerne:

Weakness.

Bridgette:

Yeah.

LaVerne:

Let’s just say that.

Bridgette:

They mistake it for either weakness or something of that and you’re like, “Come on, dude.” That’s not-

LaVerne:

Being vulnerable does not mean you’re weak, it means you’re just open to the situation and absorbing the change. It does not mean you’re weak.

Bridgette:

Exactly.

LaVerne:

Well, let’s talk about that. Global woman leader. A lot of people ask questions. I mean, I know they ask questions to you about the leadership qualities that you had to have, create, and those that differentiate you. Talk to me about your global roles because all of them have been those kinds of roles, and definitely working in those kinds of environments had to be interesting, but what were your qualities that differentiated you, do you think, and what were the things that you really had to learn?

Bridgette:

Yeah. I think that the things that differentiated me are actually, I think the things that just make me good at what I do as a leader. First of all, that openness. That willingness to lead from an inclusive place. Right? I tend to not walk in with the same preconceptions, and frankly often misconceptions, that others will walk in with. I walk in prime to listen and prime to experience the environment. I am… Particularly working globally, I have always tried to be extremely respectful and sometimes even initially deferential to culture. Right? I have demonstrated that when I first start working in a culture, and certainly when I first started traveling to Asia in particular because I didn’t know that culture very well, or many of those cultures very well because there are differences, I would typically fly in at least a couple days early just so I could walk around and get a feeling for what it was like to just sort of exist in the space.

Recognizing that it’s still different for me to exist in this space than it is for the everyday consumer, but I really wanted to exist in the space first to be able to then ask questions and get more in depth learning about the culture. I think it also… What it said to many of my teams on the ground is, “Wow. She really cares. She cares enough to come learn about us.” One of my best experiences was actually landing and spending the first day I said, “Look, I don’t any meetings the first day. I just really want to ride and see what you guys do. I want to do ride alongs. I want to see the people in the field. I just want to do that.” And so I was actually meeting with midwives in Indonesia and midwives in Indonesia, by the way, are the primary maternal delivery system. They do not do a lot. I mean, most of the deliveries are done at home with a midwife or in a midwife’s house as opposed to in a hospital.

I really wanted to see that, and it was just fascinating to me how warm, how wonderful these midwives… I mean, I’m married to a scientist, a doctor. I am definitely a scientific sort of grounded person. As you can tell Novartis, Dexcom, those kinds of things are really… Tech Data, that’s really where my sort of inkling lies or my knowledge base lies, but I have to say, I totally understood, totally understood in that drive through, why a woman would have a child with a midwife, why you would want to do it in that space versus a hospital space, why you would want to do it in your community. Right?

Because your family’s down the street, they know that sometimes it’s the same midwife that delivered you and delivered your brother, and sometimes delivered all the people in that community, often, so you completely come to understand, “Wow. That’s actually really, really different than what I grew up with.” And I grew up in a community. I mean, I grew up in a pretty strong community, but not that kind of community, and so that was really interesting, and then first time that I then went back and had a mother from that environment, that culture actually entrust her child to me. She put a bit… One of my favorite pictures is actually of me cradling a newborn in Indonesia. Baby was less than a day old, and I was… I mean, I still kind of choke up actually to talk about it because, I don’t know about you, but when Troy was born-

LaVerne:

Yeah. I get that.

Bridgette:

When Troy was born, I did… Yeah, you wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t put your child into the arms of the stranger.

LaVerne:

No.

Bridgette:

I felt very much like by being associated and approved by the midwife, I was somehow a part of that community, and that’s a feeling that you miss if you just go in and sit in the boardroom or sit in the office, and it’s just… Well, it’s just not the same. Anyway, those are the things that I think made me different and enabled me to, again, build that… Not just the trust, but the trust that led to transparency. Again, that trust that led to transparency and vulnerability, where people knew, because they saw me in those types of situations, that they could bring me anything. “You could tell her anything. She’ll tell you what she thinks. You can tell her anything.” That was really critical to me, particularly in environments where, again, I didn’t speak the language, I had to rely on my eyes and my feeling, my gut around culture as much as anything. Very important to me. Very, very important.

LaVerne:

Don’t you think that also denoted a level of respect on your part? I know, for me, to take in time to learn about you and not expect you to convert to me, but for me to understand you, is a form of respect.

Bridgette:

For sure.

LaVerne:

Saying that, “I value who you are. I value where you’re from. I value what you do and how your life and culture is set up.”

Bridgette:

That’s right. And I’m… By the way, not only do I value it, I’m trying to help… I’m looking for ways to help make it better. How can I help you do more of what it is you value as opposed to trying to force upon you what I value?

LaVerne:

That’s a really important point. I think for some of the agency leaders to maybe think about as they’re creating a brand and a product, to make sure that they really do know the consumer that’s using it.

Bridgette:

Absolutely.

LaVerne:

Not to assume that everybody will be able to go A through Z like you laid it out on that process. Bridgette, thank you for joining me for part one of our conversation. This has been wonderful, and I can’t wait to share a part two with our listeners, and thank you for joining Brilliant in 20, a joint production of Scoop News Group and Emerald One. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you, so stay brilliant.