Breaking through in innovation

In this episode of The Persuasion Game, Laura Halliday and co-host Adam Rowles interview Jane Buck, Global Head of Innovation at Cadbury. 

Jane is a seasoned expert in innovation with an extensive background at major brands including Mondelez and Unilever where she launched and scaled the €1BN+ personal care brand Love Beauty & Planet

Jane discusses her unique approach to brand development, explaining how she integrates consumer insights with visionary thinking to drive innovation, how she spots patterns and opportunities, and the importance of balancing short-term actions with long-term vision in corporate settings. The conversation also covers her time co-founding and launching natural skincare brand REN which Unilever eventually acquired.

Finally, Jane shares her perspective on leadership, emphasising the need to push teams beyond their comfort zones and the value of holding hypotheses in a fluid, patient manner.

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Transcript

Adam: This is the Persuasion Game, the Forge’s podcast all about the art of persuasion. Each episode we connect with marketers, business leaders and beyond to learn how they use persuasion to influence their customers, convince their stakeholders and drive their businesses forward.

Adam: Hello Laura.

Laura: Hi Adam, how are you doing?

Adam: I am very well thank you. How are you?

Laura: Very excellent. And very excited about today.

Adam: I am thrilled about today. We’re going to be speaking to someone who has worked client side in an innovation hub for a long part of her career. I have always been interested in how that works inside a client organisation — when you’ve got small brands that are being launched and created, and how they compete with the bigger businesses and bigger brands within the organisation that are also competing for the same resource. We’re going to find out a bit more about that today.

Laura: And the interesting thing about our guest today is that she has also spent a lot of time agency side, including doing a lot of very close consumer work. I think that’s a really interesting position to come to innovation from. Sometimes when we think of visionary innovation we tend to think of the Steve Jobs approach — “don’t ask consumers what they want, just show them.” Whereas actually I think what we’re going to find today is it’s very much about joining the dots of lots of different inputs, but very much with consumer centricity at the heart of the thinking. So it should be a really interesting chat.

Adam: Absolutely, yeah, looking forward to it.

Laura: Jane Buck is a visionary thinker with uniquely diverse and impressive experience defining the future of some of the world’s biggest brands. From working as a small core team founding the skincare brand REN — now part of Unilever Prestige — to global roles in innovation and portfolio management for some of Unilever’s biggest brands including Knorr and Dove, Jane has always blazed her own trail. This combined with her years of experience as a planner and consultant for companies including PepsiCo, Mondēlez and Ferrero make her a serious force to be reckoned with in the innovation world. And as of 2024 she’s now taking that experience back to Mondelēz as Head of Global Innovation for another iconic brand — Cadbury. Welcome Jane.

Jane: Great to be joining you.

Adam: So Jane, you’ve had a very varied background in your career — you’ve worked in planning, insight, innovation, marketing and capability. How has that background shaped how you think and approach your work?

Jane: Fully. I think I thrive on the fact that my background is quite multifaceted, but actually at the end of the day it really comes back to a few basics — which is people, people’s behaviour. So I’ve always been consumer-centric. And brands — I just love brands. So I think bottom line, all the different parts of my career are essentially rooted in people, observations, behaviours and brands — how they behave, what makes them tick, what makes them grow. It’s always back to the roots of working with how consumers interact with the stuff we sell.

Laura: You’ve said in the past that you almost think of brands like humans. What do you mean by that?

Jane: I sort of think of shaping them almost through the same rules that govern human behaviour. So I always perhaps personify brands in my mind. And I’m also always interested in a brand’s stretch and the possibilities that they could move into.

Adam: So how do you spot these opportunities for brand stretch?

Jane: Bottom line, I realise I’m a pattern spotter. I like to see patterns in things and I probably see them everywhere. What I bring to this kind of work is just understanding the patterns that make things tick, but also then to use that to look into the future. Because if I understand the patterns and make connections, I can start to get a feel for what’s coming. I can look at something and spot that it’s similar to something else, or it triggers a thought as to why — why is that the case — and then I’ll make a connection.

I think also I’m always carrying around hypotheses in my head — I know that sounds a bit strange. I’m always trying to prove or disprove things. And I guess basically I like to understand how things work. It’s a little bit always the backdrop in my mind when I’m trying to understand stuff.

Laura: It’s interesting that you say people’s motivations — because one of the things I know from working with you is that you’re always pushing for that deeper why, you keep pushing on it. Can you tell us a little bit about understanding people’s motivations and how you get to that?

Jane: I would say I’m conscious that my “whys” are built on a very deep experience of seeing year-on-year-on-year patterns that I’m somehow keeping track of in my head and just keep referencing.
I saw a really clear data point that showed that the way people snack is changing — that snacking, for example, is becoming more prevalent than eating meals for a certain age group. But it was not black and white in the data points in such a way that you could convince the business or people around you, who weren’t so close to it, to see that. So I found — quite fortunately — a data point which proved that and showed the shape of a shift in snacking behaviour that was just an eye-opener. An immediately clear view of how there is a kind of paradigm shift in snacking. That then unlocks a whole different framing for conversations with people. If you can find that data point — which I did — to show the shift in the landscape that’s going on, then immediately you reset the conversation with people. Immediately everyone is on the same page. And then it unlocks a completely different way of looking at the opportunity.

So it’s about finding the data points that prove the hypothesis that’s been building in my mind over time, and just shifting conversations to a completely new way of looking at the framing — in this case, snacking moments.

Adam: So what was this reframing data point?

Jane: If you’re eating fewer meals and eating more snacks, then actually the context for snacking is different. But people don’t talk about the context of snacking being different — they just talk about that particular snack. But I’m always thinking, okay, but the reference point has changed and therefore the role of that snack is different.

Laura: I think that’s a perfect example. And the thing that’s really interesting is carrying around all those hypotheses in your mind — you have to be quite patient and quite comfortable with fluidity. You have to be comfortable with “well, I wonder if this is going to shape out this way, I have a hunch that this is going to…” and it might take a few years of things feeling quite fluid. Is that something that comes naturally to you or have you had to work on it?

Jane: I think I walk around with a ton of ambiguity in my head. And we used to talk about workshops being “the muddle in the middle” — and I’m quite comfortable with the muddle in the middle, because I always have a sense of what’s going to be the next step after that, even if I don’t know exactly what it looks like.

You’re quite right — because I have a whole bunch of things mulling around in my head, I’m comfortable to hold on to them. Sometimes it’s frustrating that they don’t land at the right moment, but nevertheless, with a bit of patience, eventually they do. And actually even in my current role there’s a lot of new and really exciting work happening, and one of my line managers said to me “one needs to be really able to handle ambiguity in this role, and you seem to be able to do it.” And I am — I’m really comfortable with that level of ambiguity. Obviously at some point I’m also eager to make sure it lands in something very concrete, which is also important to me. But yeah, I don’t get fazed by ambiguity, because somewhere there’s always some processing going on that’s trying to work it through, and I know it will come good in the end.

So I think that ambiguity is critical to keep things in a more visionary way and to keep moving towards the longer-term picture. Because longer term is complex to work through. Everyone has to understand the need to land things and execute. The difficulty comes if that happens in such a way that there’s no framing of it, no bigger picture, no context — it just becomes very tactical and it’s very easy to fall into that trap.

I’m fine with the desire to land things and to know the “so what” — but only in a satisfying way if I can get clear on the backdrop for it. And then you can make a decision about whether that’s a good “so what” or not. Because the other thing is, you also need to know how to judge whether you’ve made a good decision — there’s always a bigger goal that we can chase in the longer term which is in this direction but is X, Y and Z further along the line.

Laura: I so agree. I was talking the other day about the importance of context and wider context, which I think is something you really evangelise about and champion. And I always think it’s a bit naff, but you know — the analogy of Game of Thrones is like, you can be obsessed with which of the houses is going to win, but meanwhile the White Walkers are coming in and it doesn’t really matter who’s going to win immediately, because the whole world’s about to change.

Jane: But it’s exactly that — if you put your eyes down too close to the ground in front of you, you don’t see the path ahead. And it’s just that simple. You just have to see the bigger picture to know how best to put that first foot forward. Otherwise you won’t realise, let’s say if you’re walking along slowly, that you’re about to walk into a hole.

Adam: And on balance, in the organisations that you’ve worked in, do you see that as being the bigger challenge — the bigger picture, visionary rethinking — or is it in that more tactical lens? Where is the bigger opportunity for the corporates that you’ve worked with?

Jane: A vision is quite hard and rare to really have big visions, only because the pressure is just so massive on the short term. I’m not naming names with any of the companies I’ve worked in, but it’s just genuinely a difficult thing to have a really big vision. You do really need to focus on the short term absolutely — no doubt. The ideal is managing both. And it’s actually really difficult — it’s that stretch from big to small, big to small, all the time. And to make sure that the work streams are connected, which again is why I like frameworks, because otherwise you don’t get the bridge from the long term to the short term.

And I have also seen too much the other direction — where you have a sort of big vision but it just doesn’t land, because there is no connection to not just the activities going on today, but the way the whole business is constructed, the way people are thinking, the language. It’s like two separate worlds. So for me, I’d rather see a continuum from one to the other, where you create the connections. People will talk about vectors or multi-year platforms, but I think the better way to look at it is to just keep a big strategy and understand the bridges between the long term and the short term.

Adam: I mean, you were at Unilever at a time when it was launching a lot of really exciting brands in the beauty and personal care space, including Love Beauty and Planet, which I think is now worth over a billion dollars. What was the role of the short and the long term in your work there? How did you balance those two things?

Jane: Love Beauty and Planet — it’s a lovely example. And that was probably my biggest success case in terms of helping create real value. As you say, over a billion euros in actually quite a short period of time, from scratch — this brand didn’t exist at all.

And it was something that was born out of a workshop I was doing, where I sort of spotted the name and the opportunity of a name fitting the real zeitgeist — the need for mass skincare to move into naturals in a way that it hadn’t before. So going back to those threads of the past for me — it wasn’t just that I spotted this. It was actually called Love Peace Planet at the time, this name, and I thought “that’s a really interesting place to start for a new brand.”

Actually, it’s because my whole life I’d been more sustainability-minded. I was a vegetarian since I was 18. Laura knows I was always sustainability-minded. So I was banging the naturals and sustainability agenda at Unilever for quite a long time, prior to the role I was in running the Innovation Incubator. And because I had that understanding of the need to help move these big legacy brands and legacy businesses into this space — the natural space — which was hard for brands that hadn’t existed there to deliver, most people hadn’t embedded in the culture of the business the thinking to understand the naturals business. I came in from outside, really understanding the nature of what naturals would mean to those consumers that really wanted to buy into it.

And the consumers that buy into the mass brands tended not to be quite so tuned to the subtleties at the time of all the natural insurgent brands that were existing back then. So yeah — big picture vision, and then having the opportunity to land it in something very tangible. It just took time to keep shaping and banging on the drum for the narrative of needing to bring naturals to our consumer. Because ideally people would have wanted to do it through their existing businesses rather than need to create a new brand.

Laura: Yes, that’s what I wanted to ask you. Because when I was at Unilever we launched Persil Naturals and it was like – let’s take the logo and make it a bit smaller, we’ll have a really big leaf and it will smell really nicely of aloe vera. And then you’re sort of instantly in a frame of “oh well, it’s a very small opportunity because it’s only 2% of this big brand.” And I think what you’re saying is that’s the mistake — taking an existing brand and making a natural variant. This is quite a different approach, isn’t it?

Jane: Yeah. And when I was running this part of Unilever, there was a time in that business where we were able to create new brands. To your point Adam, it’s much more efficient to use the power brands to take on that trend. It’s really painful to create new brands and build them — and big businesses are just not built for that. They’re built to scale, not to nurture these more emerging type propositions, emerging spaces, emerging consumer groups that are leading the trend.

And it’s a bit like the global-local story — it goes in waves whether companies do it or don’t. There was a period of time where Unilever did create all its own brands and launch them, and that was a huge success. But there were many many others we did which didn’t stick so well, because it’s just difficult to essentially have founders sitting within these big corporations. And Love Beauty and Planet did luckily just capture the time so well, and was really well executed by a great team.

Adam: What I love about the Love Beauty and Planet example is it’s also a conflation of two trends that are often positioned on opposite sides of a wheel — premiumisation in beauty and sustainability. As if even our visual way of thinking about things encourages looking at them as separate directions. And actually what you were seeing was the convergence of those two things as an offer.

Jane: Well I think for me, that’s what innovation actually is — it’s mashups. Especially when you’re creating a new brand. Building iteratively on existing stuff is not the big step-change way forward. There are all different levels of innovation, but something like that — to create new space, new momentum — you need to basically combine slightly opposing forces. Like any good proposition, there’s a tension in there. And that combination — getting that combination right — obviously is the smart part. But it’s true for all good innovations. To capture a new space you find what the real barriers are and overcome them, you find the tensions in the category and solve for them.

Laura: So it’s almost like you’re finding two areas of delight in consumers’ lives and then going — well, why can’t they coexist? What’s the tension?

Jane: Yeah — delight but also what are the barriers. Taking a really obvious one — instant foods. If you have a Pot Noodle or a convenient instant pot, it tastes delicious but it’s not necessarily that good for you. But there are moments where you do it anyway because it tastes so delicious.

But I find it fascinating watching what’s happened with Huel in the market — how they’ve started life as a protein powder for bodybuilding basically, and just kept stretching and stretching and moving into that same pot space, but with a proposition built on actually pretty strong nutrition credentials. And now they’re working very hard to say it tastes great as well. Because of where they’ve come from, they’ve got a much more credible chance to convince people that they’re not bad for you, than brands that started in taste and are now trying to add a bit of health credentials. But they’re both doing it because they are genuinely trying to solve that tension of super convenience but not healthy.

I worked on Bouillon cubes and it’s a category where salt is, in a way, at the basis of the category — it helps give flavour and obviously gives fantastic flavour with the product, but it is definitely a barrier. So only when the technology to unlock salt flavour without salt came through could zero salt be created. But you have to work hard with these things because people also — it’s a double-edged sword. People know the ingredient that’s unhealthy is what they don’t want to eat, but they also somewhat doubt whether it will really work if you take it out and replace it. Is zero salt really going to taste as good as the alternative?

And the same is true in natural skincare products — if it’s natural, even if you tell me how high-tech it is, is it really going to work as well?

Laura: I remember you talking about REN trying to go into shampoo for a while, and you were saying the big problem is people want suds — that’s the cue that it’s working — and if you don’t have sulphates it’s not going to work. But then you’ve seen these interesting things like co-washing coming in, or bar soaps, where you naturally don’t get quite as much lather and maybe people are a bit more comfortable with things changing.

Jane: You have to educate people slowly. Obviously there are the fanatics who don’t care — in healthy, more natural foods it probably doesn’t taste quite as good as the overly processed stuff, but because your priority is to eat well you get used to it. You will sacrifice a little on taste.

Little by little, with some really good product development and a lot of education, people get used to it. Our taste buds get used to less and less salt or less and less sugar if you educate in the right way. But it does take time. And actually that’s one of the things I’ve seen with innovation — you have to be quite careful not to go too far against existing behaviours. The best thing is to really work within the guardrails of people’s comfortable behaviour so that you’re not having to change behaviour and change product narratives at the same time.

Laura: Tell us a little bit about working on the beauty brand REN when it was a startup.

Jane: The thing with REN that was so important for me was I absolutely believed in the products. The amazing thing about REN was just the product — absolute hero — and the quality obsessiveness around delivering to this need for clean, more natural products. So it wasn’t a fabricated story, it was genuinely something that I always really passionately believed in. To have such a high quality, relatively accessible, category-changing brand was very exciting.

I mean it was hard, and it was certainly all-consuming in terms of the conversations. But on the other hand it was incredibly exciting to see it in store — to see something that was — I was stacking shelves pregnant with my first son when it was very first, almost a prototype, in a Conrad Hotel front lobby. It was very much part of our lives. But I had to also keep working to help fund it at the beginning. And in the end Anthony and Rob were really the ones day-to-day in the office, growing it.

The birth of REN showed me how I would bring that more entrepreneurial spirit to my work — to see how something can be created from scratch and become real. So it gave me a belief in the possibility of creating something. And I honestly do think Love Beauty and Planet was born out of that understanding — in fact when I was at Unilever I created this new brands programme, of which Love Beauty and Planet was one example.

So I think the combination of understanding how small businesses operate, how they can play to a niche audience and grow, is something that I actually bring into my work every day as well. I can’t help but think a little bit more laterally, even if I’m working on big brands — I want to bring a bit of that same spirit to the big brands that I work on.

Adam: That’s a perfect segue because what I wanted to ask you was about how you can inspire that lateral thinking, agility and entrepreneurial mindset in other people. What would you say to people who are perhaps earlier on in their journey and thinking about how to think more expansively — what should they be doing?

Jane: Really stay close to all the trends. And Laura, remember I’m a slightly obsessive shopper. Just even recently I had to go and look for some products and before I knew it I’d loaded my bag up because I was like a kid in a sweet shop grabbing all these interesting things. So I’d say just stay really close to product. Whatever business you’re working in — especially if you’re in a global team or in a role in analytics where your head is always thinking — it’s actually very difficult to keep the creative part of your brain alive. So I would definitely say: just always stay really conscious to keep the creative part of your brain alive. Scour the shops, always keep an eye out for new stuff coming through. Look at adjacencies, always think about what the adjacencies are. Just keep alert to trends and new themes that are coming through. Obviously keep an eye on the relevant stuff on social media.

But the other thing I do and appreciate a lot is speaking to companies that are pushing into areas that are interesting to me. If you can create conversations with new companies doing interesting things — I’m able to, in my role, have conversations with people — not necessarily with an immediate outcome to work with them, but just to get to know what’s out there, get to know new people. So I’m doing that more — working with startups to stay close to a very different type of business problem, different types of people, but also just emerging things that are happening in the industry.

Laura: You’re also very known for — and I’ve gained the benefit of this — pushing people slightly beyond their comfort zone but in a way that is sort of for their own best interests or for the best interest of an idea. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Jane: Well actually I realised at some point that I had a phrase that may sound a bit strange — I like to lead from behind with the team. As you know Laura, I could be described as more of a visionary-type leader — I’ve seen that on profiles that have been done for me. So I definitely have a strong sense of where I want to take things and I think I bring that to the conversations. But actually when it comes to working with the team, particularly newer people into the team, I really try to almost wrap my arms out wide and walk behind them and give them room to try and find their own path forwards. So I’m pretty good at delegating and letting people find their way through.

And what I really believe in is that the way in which people show up needs to be true to them. Not to dictate or have an absolute expectation. Actually that’s something I find quite difficult in big corporate companies — there’s one way, for example, if a company is full of extrovert people and you have to be really good at being a good extrovert to survive and thrive. Well, I’m actually not. And I find it quite difficult sometimes to be an introvert in these companies. So I really appreciate letting people succeed through their differences rather than trying to mould them to be something they’re not. Just give them room.

Adam: It’s also a little bit about being comfortable with being uncomfortable, isn’t it?

Jane: I also believe that you do need to be pushed. I’ve pushed myself so much over the years and I’ve been pushed. And it’s painful, and there are some agonising moments, but in the end you really can break through and suddenly realise that you can do an awful lot more than you think you could do. When I say I lead from behind, I really do like to say I’ve got people’s back. I hope that feeling is strong

Laura: I was thinking about what books might inspire you — have you read Radical Candour?

Jane: I love that concept actually, yeah.

Laura: I can see that with you — where there’s a lot of clear feedback about what needs to be done, but it’s in the spirit of the work and the development of the person, with good intent rather than politics. There’s a high trust equation in the conversation.

Jane: You’re quite right Laura. For me the point is it’s always about the work. I struggle if it’s political — I absolutely not only hate that, I just don’t thrive in it. I find it really difficult. So if I am quite pushy at certain moments, it’s always to get great work and it’s never personal. And I think that does come through with the people I work with — if I’m pushing something, it’s always to get to a better outcome.
But yeah — the intention is the key thing. And I think that’s something you can sense with people — whether it’s self-serving or to look good to their senior line managers, rather than genuinely to get to a good outcome. You can feel the difference.

Adam: Excellent — that’s really really interesting. Thank you so much.

Laura: Jane, it’s been such a pleasure to talk to you. I’ve really loved your inspiration and your openness about all the different elements of your experience. Thank you so much for sharing.

Jane: Great to talk to you both.

Adam: I really enjoyed that Laura. How did you find it?

Laura: I always love talking to Jane. She has a really different perspective on the universe in a way that I find very illuminating and enriching.

Adam: And you’ve worked for Jane haven’t you?

Laura: I mean I have, yeah. I mean I followed her around those shops with the extra basket we needed for snacks.

Adam: But she must have been a really interesting leader in the businesses that you’ve been in — how did you find her leadership style?

Laura: Very inspiring, sometimes challenging — in a good way. I think a lot of the things she talked about, she really lives those values in how she actually behaves, which is always a huge positive.

Adam: Yeah. I think the thing that I really took out of that was the importance of having a very clear vision for what you’re trying to do. We speak to lots of brands — some of whom are struggling quite a bit at the moment. We’re seeing private label stealing market share, we’re seeing shrinkflation making the news and consumers losing trust. And I think it could be fair to say that some of that is linked to losing sight of the bigger vision, the bigger purpose you’re playing in consumer lives, and focusing too much on what’s going to create short-term value.

Laura: And it’s challenging isn’t it — I mean one of the things she was very candid about was that holding hypotheses in your head is not always comfortable. Living with big questions without jumping to solutions is not easy. I certainly find it very tempting to go “I’ve got a solution” — and to actually sit with that, really play with an idea over time, be patient with it, be comfortable with not knowing — is a particular mindset, but one that I’ve always found inspiring from Jane. And I think a lot of us could do well to remember that as we chase next month, next quarter and so on.

Adam: Yeah. And there’s a bit of a theme there around discomfort as well — when she talks about her leadership style, pushing people into things that she feels they could really do well at, but they might not necessarily want to, like getting up on a stage and speaking to a room full of people. That really came through in this idea of leading from the back and challenging people to push themselves. And challenging in a way that’s positive — person-focused, work-focused, not politicking. I think that’s always a real positive that people can take forward, and it’s a huge motivator.

Adam: Yeah. A really inspiring interview with a really inspiring leader. See you next week.

Laura: See you next week.

Adam: Thanks for listening. If you’d love to hear more from marketers, entrepreneurs and business leaders about how to use the art of persuasion to drive your business forward, then make sure you’re following the podcast in your favourite podcast app. And just one last ask from us — this is a new podcast and we’d love it if you could be persuaded to help us spread the word by telling somebody else about it, leaving us a review, or even better sharing an episode on social media. Search The Forge on LinkedIn.