At a Forge breakfast panel during Cannes Lions, senior marketers from Haleon, HSBC and Unilever argued that in a faster and more crowded market, durable growth still comes from doing the fundamentals exceptionally well. The session was hosted by Forge’s Chief Growth Officer, Eleanor Lloyd Malcolm.
The conversation at Cannes Lions tends to reward what is new. At a Forge breakfast panel this year, three of the industry’s most senior marketers made a steadier case. In a market shaped by pace, abundance and continual disruption, the most reliable source of growth is a small set of fundamentals, applied with greater discipline than before.
The panel brought together Kathryn Swallow, Global Head of OTC at Haleon; Nicole German, Global Chief Marketing Officer for Corporate and Institutional Banking at HSBC; and Nathalia Amadeu, Global Brand Director for Vaseline at Unilever. Each leads brands in the middle of substantial change, and each has reached a similar conclusion: a volatile environment rewards a firmer grip on the fundamentals over a search for the next new thing.
Change is constant, and the growth expectation has not moved
The panel discussion was framed around a single question: how businesses and brands find growth in an age of pace, novelty, abundance and polarisation.
Lloyd Malcolm’s view was that the wait for a return to normal is over. “We are no longer going back to an old normal,” she said. “We’re in the new normal of pace and opportunity, but also disruption.” In that environment, she argued, advantage belongs to the organisations that can move with agility, confidence and clarity, which is no small task inside large and complex businesses where behaviours and structures are deeply embedded.
The scale of the shift is visible in HSBC’s own client base. German described a survey of the chief executives of roughly 4,000 of the bank’s largest clients, conducted ahead of its annual client conference. Around 95% said change and the need for resilience are now permanent features of running a business, with change cycles arriving faster and less predictably than before. At the same time, 85% were still pursuing scalable growth. The pressure to grow has not eased as conditions have become harder. If anything, it has intensified.
Swallow’s response to that pressure was to return to first principles. “You can’t deliver for today if you’re not clear about who you are and what you’re trying to do,” she said. “It just becomes tactics.” For all the disruption around them, she argued, the case for the fundamentals had strengthened. “In a world that is AI powered, where the world’s changing more than ever, the fundamentals are more important than ever. More important to have those buttoned down.”
That view set the terms for the three areas the panel kept returning to.
Start with the category you are really in
Growth, the panel agreed, begins with clarity about the category a brand competes in and the role it chooses to play. Swallow described sharply defined brands that understand who they are, where they are going, what they will and will not do, and how they show up in a crowded environment. Once that is settled, she said, a plan can be built back from it. Without it, activity drifts into tactics that never compound into anything.
The larger opportunity lies in redefining the category itself. Two Haleon brands illustrated the point. Voltaren had been understood internally as a treatment for osteoarthritis, a 2% diclofenac product defined by its pharmaceutical claim. Reframed as a movement brand whose purpose is to enable pain-free movement, it competes on a larger and more meaningful field. Otrivin, a nasal decongestant, has been recast as a breathing brand. At a time when 99% of the world breathes air that fails World Health Organization guidelines, it speaks to a far bigger and more urgent need. “I would argue that brand has never been more relevant,” Swallow said.
Amadeu made the same observation from Vaseline’s side. Brands, she said, are usually limited less by their markets than by their own definitions. “We restrict ourselves. We limit ourselves,” she said, pointing to the way narrow readings of category and product hold brands back. Loosening those definitions had been central to Vaseline’s growth.
Relevance is earned through closeness
If clarity defines where a brand competes, relevance decides whether it grows there. Relevance has always mattered. However, in a market of abundance and noise, it has become the sharper test.
For a brand as large as Unilever’s Vaseline, present in half the households on the planet, distribution has reached its practical limit. “Brands like Vaseline cannot grow now through distribution or reaching more households only,” Amadeu said. The next phase of growth comes from mattering more within those households. “The question is not how many people we reach, but how many moments we matter in.” On that basis the brand has continued to grow at double-digit rates after more than 150 years.
The same logic applies in business-to-business. When HSBC brought its corporate and institutional divisions together, German’s team went to clients to understand what would differentiate the relaunched bank. They built what she called a “share of system” model, spanning share of mind through thought leadership, share of wallet through demand generation, share of experience across every client touchpoint, and share of advantage through investment in talent, tools and technology. The aim was consistency across 50 markets with the flexibility to stay relevant in each.
Relevance of this kind cannot be asserted from a distance. It has to be earned through closeness, and the panel described three forms of it.
The first is closeness to the consumer. When Vaseline Verified surfaced anti-chafing among runners as one of the brand’s most popular uses, Amadeu went to running clubs, to their training sessions, their events and their members, to understand the subculture directly. “With that intimacy, it opened our eyes to insights our competitors were overlooking,” she said. That understanding became a competitive advantage, and in time a campaign.
The second is closeness to the customer. German recalled that HSBC had long been seen as strong on its international network, only to find in research that every international bank was seen the same way. Being international was a point of parity rather than difference. The work was to go deeper, find a genuine point of advantage, and build from there.
The third is closeness to culture. Amadeu described Vaseline’s approach as winning business globally while winning hearts locally. The brand looks for insights and ideas capable of travelling, then grounds them in local practice: Vaseline used as a base for carnival glitter in Brazil, to protect henna in parts of the Middle East, and within wedding rituals in Nigeria. Ideas scale, she argued, only when they are rooted in a real understanding of local nuance.
For Swallow, the enabling trait is curiosity, a word she felt is often used too lightly. The teams that grow brands treat them as their own business, go deep into their audiences and communities, and do not wait for a report to hand them the answer.
Stewardship over ownership
The third fundamental concerns how tightly a brand is held. Amadeu described much of Vaseline’s recent work as a challenge to decades of brand-control thinking, particularly for a legacy brand of its size. The shift she has pursued is from ownership to stewardship. For years, she said, marketers treated the brand as an asset to be managed and protected. She now sees brands as ecosystems to be stewarded. “It’s not to define or protect, it’s to guide and let it grow,” she said, provided the brand’s identity and equity stay intact. Clarity about who the brand is allows it to grow with consistency and greater flexibility, without dilution.
The reward for loosening control is trust. Consumers, Amadeu argued, do not expect brands to be perfect. “They appreciate human brands, brands that are relevant, brands that understand them, brands they can trust.” In a low-trust environment, a brand that shows up openly and behaves as part of its customers’ lives earns something a more tightly controlled brand cannot.
Leadership sets the conditions
None of this survives contact with a large organisation without leadership that makes room for it. The panel was candid about what that requires.
It starts with ambition. Amadeu spoke about pushing her teams to refuse to settle and refuse mediocre work. German described a company value at HSBC, “simplify to amplify”, which gives teams explicit permission to escalate when internal complexity gets in the way of ambition. When something is being slowed by process, the team can take it to the top of the house. She pointed to relaunching a major part of the bank in twelve weeks as evidence that regulation is often used as an excuse rather than a genuine constraint. A mindset, applied consistently, becomes a culture.
It also requires a different posture at the top. Swallow argued that authenticity now matters more than authority. Leadership has moved away from the expectation that the person in charge holds every answer. “No one’s got all the answers,” she said, and pretending otherwise erodes trust. The more useful stance is to be open about the journey, humble about what is unknown, and deliberate about creating the conditions in which the right answers can surface.
That means becoming comfortable with ambiguity. Amadeu noted that surrendering some control is part of building a brand at the speed of culture, which will not always be perfectly polished. The counterweight is confidence about what the brand is and stands for, which lets a leader enable participation without diluting equity.
Finally, it calls for care alongside ambition. German described HSBC’s approach as high performance with care, a balance between pushing teams hard on the things that matter and paying attention to how people are coping with constant change. Regular contact at every level, she said, builds a less hierarchical organisation and keeps teams engaged.
AI, and the question of trust
AI did not enter the discussion until an audience question near the end, which Lloyd Malcolm noted was deliberate. It is difficult to discuss growth without discussing AI, she said, but she had wanted to see whether it arose on its own, given how many other sessions at the festival were devoted to it.
When it did, the panellists were clear about its value and its limits. Amadeu described AI as fundamental to how Unilever and Vaseline work, bringing efficiency and scale in production and helping to identify insight. Its role is to support rather than replace. “AI has been critical, but it has never replaced our role, and I don’t believe it will,” she said. The human stays in the loop, particularly in interpreting the emotion behind the data.
For Swallow, the more pressing issue sits alongside AI rather than within it. Trust, she argued, is the real concern, especially in health. Consumers increasingly turn to large language models for health information and can receive different answers from different tools. That inconsistency is troubling in a category where the stakes are high. Haleon’s task, as she framed it, is to find where it can play an enabling role in giving consumers content they can trust.
The work of people
Lloyd Malcolm closed on the thread that ran through the morning. The value of the conversation, she suggested, was in returning to the deep fundamentals of brand building and the skills that support them. The visionary leadership the panel described is not something a machine can do. Relevance, closeness, courage and trust remain the work of people, and in a transforming market they are what continue to separate the brands that grow from the brands that keep pace.
