Marketers are forever told to learn the language of the boardroom if they want to have any great influence over a business. Right or wrong, it is the reality for many. Which is why it is so interesting when a marketer moves into general management.
For John Starkey, president for family care in North America at Kimberly-Clark, it is a move that made perfect sense to him from his days as a brand manager.
“I’ve always been taught that brand manager is a good path to general manager because you’re the hub of the wheel,” he tells Marketing Week. “You manage multi-functional teams all with a common goal to drive not only business growth, but brand growth too.”
Marketers are forever told to learn the language of the boardroom if they want to have any great influence over a business. Right or wrong, it is the reality for many. Which is why it is so interesting when a marketer moves into general management.
For John Starkey, president for family care in North America at Kimberly-Clark, it is a move that made perfect sense to him from his days as a brand manager.
“I’ve always been taught that brand manager is a good path to general manager because you’re the hub of the wheel,” he tells Marketing Week. “You manage multi-functional teams all with a common goal to drive not only business growth, but brand growth too.”
And while for some the next step is to look to become CMO – there are paths into general management and he believes marketers are uniquely suited to these roles.
He explains: “I started my career with an undergrad in finance, so I already started with a P&L ownership mindset, but being able to build upon that with my passion for marketing and leading teams with brand-led, business growth is really what I think the benefit is.”
You may think that his team would relish having the ear of a former marketer in a leadership position, but Starkey is keen to be no pushover. “I want to say yes to everything but I also have a fiduciary responsibility and a business responsibility to uphold,” he explains.
Why I Love: Trainline’s brand VP on why strategic thinking makes marketers ‘the protagonists’“Being a marketer at heart, I am going to be harsher, because I’ve got to be able to stand by the investment decisions that we make. But I believe that makes our marketing sharper. It makes us disciplined and focused on growth ideas backed by insight and data.”
It seems to be working. As the president for family care in North America, Starkey has no shortage of famous brands under his stewardship, none more so than tissue company Kleenex. 2024 was a banner year for Kleenex, he says, with double-digit growth as well as growing household penetration with younger consumers all adding up to make it one of the “fastest growing large brands in CPG” for that year.
“This is all really hard to do as a category leader with close to a 50% share with a brand that has been around for such a long time, so I’m really proud of the team,” he says.
Starkey had spent the majority of his career working in the food and drink industry – working for 15 years at General Mills as well as stints at Wrigley and Mars – so the shift in category could have proven a challenge for him. But he quickly attuned himself and realised that the lessons he learned in previous categories held just as true for him here.
“Some people would think that categories like personal care, family care, that it’s going to be about functional messaging,” says Starkey. “But I’ve found that storytelling, creating that emotional resonance, continues to be extremely important. Having that right balance between functional messaging and emotional storytelling is always where the secret sauce is.”
Going through changes
Starkey has been a marketer, or at least marketing-adjacent, for the better part of three decades, and in that time, he has seen the industry move from traditional means of advertising to the omnichannel reality that marketers now have to contend with.
He jokes about how when Facebook and Instagram first started to really move into the cultural lexicon how “painful” it was as a marketer to see consumers just scroll past ads without even thinking about them.
Now, though, he is impressed by how “sophisticated” marketing has become at weaving a product into the content that consumers are engaging in and, at times, potentially “be that content ourselves” in order to grab attention.
“But what doesn’t change is the importance of being really clear on what your brand style is and how your brand is relevant,” he says. “Simplicity becomes more important these days than ever before, too, because the brands you can identify and pick out in a second or two are the ones that stick.”
If there’s one area where Starkey believes that the marketing industry has gone backwards it is the application of customer insight. He explains how he always “pushes” his marketers to be careful not to confuse “facts and data” with a true human insight – something that is becoming increasingly challenging with the vast amount of data that marketers have at their disposal.
“Obviously, we’ve got more and more data, and you can crunch that data and leverage AI to help you build concepts to actually help you identify these consumer markets,” he says. “But analytics without insight is just data, right? We need an insights function to extrapolate from that data and support our marketing teams to understand and predict where consumers are going so that we can develop products in the future in a disruptive and distinctive way.”
This, he believes, is “critically important” to the transformation journey that Kimberly-Clark is on. The entire leadership team – including its chief growth officer, Patricia Corsi – has been put together to focus on moving quickly with innovation at the heart of its growth plan.
‘Constantly looking for reinvention’: Andrex on its plan to bolster its position as category leaderCollaboration, then, is key and Starkey was quick to point out that his week in Cannes wasn’t about meeting the team and getting to know each other. They already regularly hold meetings across Kimberly-Clark’s divisions and markets to share ideas and plan for the future. And, like a true marketer, it’s all about the long and the short.
“We talk about this transformation we’re trying to drive and really set up at Kimberly-Clark to continue to lead in the future. It’s going to be innovation-led,” he says, adding that this is in the context of the “most volatile environmental situations” that most marketers will have seen throughout their careers.
They have to “deliver today”, he accepts, but they also need to be strategic about the “innovation pipelines” that will set the business up for 2035 and beyond. These “big bets” are something that are company-wide and require a team collaborative effort to come to fruition.
“It’s about understanding where the consumer is now, and thinking about where the consumer is tomorrow, and building strategic business plans that allow us to lead our brands with innovation that supports those brands and the needs of our consumers,” he concludes.
