E140 - Jos Harrison from Reckitt

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Welcome to the Green Element Podcast, where we meet business leaders in innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable, and in the process help you on your journey of sustainability. I'm your host, Will Richardson. With me today is Joss Harrison. He is the Global Head of Brand Experience and Design at Reckitt. Reckitt is a multinational consumer goods company which produces health, hygiene, and nutrition products. Joss has worked with Reckitt for over 11 years, and his ambition is to bring brands closer to people to ultimately improve lives with regards to their health and happiness. Joss, welcome to the Green Element Podcast.

Hi, Will. Thanks for having me.

Now, I understand that you're an advocate of brands being a force for good as they cross borders, cultures, age groups, genders, and ethnicity. Let me start by asking you, what role do you see brands playing to make the world a better place?

I think brands in the last 15, 20 years have changed completely the role that they play in society and therefore, of course, in our lives. And we see across the world a reduced reliance and a reduced trust perhaps in more official bodies like governments, even some NGOs. And I think people are looking a lot more to brands and corporations, particularly those that are most visible to them, for some kind of guidance, some kind of support, and ultimately a positive effect in the world. So I think that brands now almost have a responsibility to use their scale or their influence or simply the things that they produce, whether it's a product or a service, to somehow create that effect.

It's really interesting. And just to bring it into context of the brands that you have within your portfolio, I mean, you've got Dettol, Air Wick, Durex, Finish, Gaviscon, to name a few. I mean, they are household names, and it's an interesting concept of what you're talking about.

Yeah. So, as with the kind of brands that we have, you can see how we feel as As brand owners, we feel that responsibility hugely. If you think about our products, they probably touch people's lives throughout their day, every day, in some of the most important parts of their lives, the things that affect their loved ones, the things that affect their own health. And so these products, of course, have a huge influence and therefore a significant role to play in people's lives, even if it's a small moment in that day, using a toilet cleaning product, you know, how do we ensure that that product is safe to use, that I understand how it's used easily, that I'm not kind of making mistakes in its use, I'm getting the most out of the product? How do I ensure that the user knows where the product has come from, where it's going to in terms of disposal and recycling and so on? So I think every touchpoint, every opportunity to connect with the brand is a time that the brand should be showing that responsibility. and providing, whether it's information, reassurance, absolute sort of safety and confidence, that it forms a part of someone's self-care or home care regime, in our case at least.

I mean, you mentioned the toilet cleaner. I would imagine it's Harpic that we're talking about. With that in mind, what's the difference between— I mean, we've heard of the Method, Zirkovas, and these people that talk about sustainability as a part of their whole brand messaging. Where do you sit in relation to those type of companies?

So probably closer than you would think. It really becomes a discussion around brand equity. You know, what is the USP of each of those brands? What are they known for? And how does an individual user identify that brand and its point of difference? And I think Harpic, as our example, has its history in some degree of innovation and probably power and germ kill. So, these kind of core needs of toilet cleaning and bathroom maintenance, if you like, hygiene, have formed what the brand is today. Whereas the Method and Ecovairs of the world have started from a different point, and actually a different point in time, when the need for sort of perceived to be safer chemicals or more natural solutions has become more apparent and more of a decision driver for people. So their brand centers around that particular fulfillment. But what you find is that the formulae that are used, the active ingredients that are used differ very little between the majority of the larger brand owners because all of these brand owners of course have that same responsibility, that same governance that's required in order to be able to sell products and to provide solutions to people. So, the additional accompaniment to the product solution starts to become the more important aspect of the brand. How does the brand demonstrate its commitment to sustainability, for example, whether that's ecological sustainability or whether it's some of the other kind of less consumer-facing or less well-understood aspects of ethics and responsibility as a company? So, I think about kind of inclusivity, for example. The influence that we have on our end users to ensure that their home is hygienically safe for their family and so on. I think it goes beyond simply the use of the product, and there are other ways to add to that brand value through digital touchpoints, through work that we do in other parts of the world and making that information available to the user and so on. So it's probably a long answer to a short question, but it becomes quite a complex discussion around the equity of the brand, and how do we, as brand owners, ensure that the activities the brand undertakes are congruent and authentic with that point of difference that the brand has? And we talk about it internally as a company as purpose. What is the purpose of the brand? Why does it exist in the first place? And what is its sole driving objective that guides all of its actions?

Is it harder for you to move through that journey because you started from an earlier point? You mentioned that organizations have started at different, basically, times where, yes, chemicals weren't deemed as so bad in the '60s, '50s, '40s, et cetera, whereas they are now. And it's that cultural change, I guess, is what I'm getting at, and it's that change in mentality. Is it harder?

So, I think it's simply different. The irony, in a way, is that if you talk about the purpose of a brand, the driving force that kind of goes throughout all of its actions, its products, its services, and so on, I think the general perception, particularly in the business world, is that more recently established companies have a more intrinsic sense of purpose because this, the startup model, if you like, is that a small group of people aim to solve a particular problem. It's a problem they face and they've experienced. And so, every action they take is totally dedicated to solving that problem. Now, of course, the irony is that the vast majority of the the world-leading brands in home care and other FMCG categories actually started in the same way just a very long time ago. If I look at Harpic, it's 100 years old this year. Lysol and Dettol, similarly, they're sort of around the 100-year mark. Even Air Wick, I think, is something like 80 years old. And what you find when you look back at the inception points of these big global brands is actually they probably started with a single product, and that product was a technological solution, whether chemical technology or electronics or whatever. It was a solution to a specific human need. And I think that truth of that human need is actually reflected in today's use cases and today's need states. And it's just kind of brought forward. Actually, the way we think about the purpose for our brands starts with looking at the way the brand started and grew initially? What was the problem it was originally solving? And what's the equivalent authentic problem that people face in today's society that connects directly to that? And then it's about understanding how that is translated into the future activities and direction of the brand so that it remains relevant, it remains able to expand or grow or change some of its solutions to meet the needs of people's kind of evolving lifestyle.

Should that be communicated more widely then?

Yeah, I think it's perhaps something that FMCG brand owners maybe don't do enough, is explain, I guess, simply put, where the brand comes from. You know, what is its heritage and why does it exist in the first place? And you see it from some of the sort of global set of brands that you think of as industry-leading. But maybe it's not articulated explicitly enough. I think FMCG as an industry tends to direct the majority of its above-the-line communications, kind of predominantly advertising, tends to direct it at specific products. So kind of driving awareness of a particular solution to a problem. And you don't see a great deal of what you might think of in other industries as equity advertising. The explanation in everyday terms of what the company stands for, or what they do in multiple channels, how they're acting, what their stance is on a particular issue. I think there's a perception inside the industry and out that FMCG brands often don't kind of have the authority, maybe is the word, or the kudos to be able to put across a point of view that incorporates their long-term heritage and maybe provides a point of view on on specific current-day issues, I think there's also a degree of risk involved in exposing a point of view. But I think there are ways to deal with that, and it becomes a question of how much does the end user or the average person understand about your brand? Not just do they recognize it, which of course, as a designer, is a large part of what my job is and my team's, is instant recognition of brands and their point of distinctiveness. But I think far more importantly, what is the brand about? How do I understand it as an average person? What can I expect from it? And I think that really only comes through implicitly through the brand's actions, because if I'm just telling you I do something, and the reason I do it, it's maybe less credible than you seeing me actually doing that, actually taking those actions, actually having a positive effect, if we kind of bring it back around to the point about purpose. I don't really want to say my purpose as a brand is this, because honestly, my challenge as an end user would be, okay, sounds good, show me.

You're obviously an ardent about ensuring brands and their products are improving the quality of life for people and the planet. What benefits have you seen for Reckitt by taking this approach?

Well, I think you hear a lot of people talk about sustainability in ecological terms. And I think we're only just, as an industry, and in fact, as a world, starting to evolve from the position of assumed responsibility for ecological issues, let's say, a bit like the— it used to be called corporate social responsibility, didn't it? Almost like it's something we have to do, a box we have to tick. I think we're only recently starting to evolve as a world, social consciousness, let's say, into the understanding that we don't have a choice. It has to be integral, not just ecological sustainability, but the principle of sustainable business has to be integrated into all of our business activities. And so as an organization, Reckitt tends to think about sustainability as a whole, as the effect, the positive effect that our brands can have on the world, and therefore the effect that our company through its scale can have on the world, and the business activities that are needed in order to continue to have that effect. If that makes sense. So, one of our very senior leaders a couple of years ago explained it as both doing good and doing well. So, in order to continue to do good, utilizing our scale and our reach of billions of users, we have to do well commercially to ensure that that scale is maintained. And so, our perspective, I think, as an organization is that the the two things are intrinsically linked. The opportunity to do good things and to have a positive effect is only really contingent on our ability to maintain our growth as a business, our profitability as a business. And I think we're quite open about that. I think it's super important that companies like ours are transparent about the role that they play. If I come back to the point I mentioned earlier about trust in commerce and brand owners in particular, rather than or in addition to governments. I think we have to acknowledge that if we're a business, we have to operate as a business to continue to have that effect.

You choose a brand you want to choose for this example, but a particular product has to have that full lifecycle, has to be looked at in every single ways through the packaging, through the distribution, through the ingredients that they're using. I mean, what could you give us an example of how you've done that with one of your brands?

Absolutely, yeah. So we're actually working on those type of initiatives throughout our portfolio all the time, and we have been for some years, and we use an internal sustainability calculator. To input and to track all of the kind of most influential metrics that will guide the continued improvement of the sustainability profile of the business and therefore through each brand and each product. The most recent example is some work that we've been doing on our hair care— sorry, air care, not hair care— air care brand, Air Wick. So air care is the category name that we give it, so air fresheners. to the average listener. And what we recognized is that the various components of the product itself, of the packaging, aspects of the distribution chain could be improved in terms of their sustainability. So when I talk about sustainability, I don't just mean the material use or the ecological impact. I mean the kind of societal equity the responsible manufacture in terms of the way we look after our teams, our staff, our third-party suppliers, and so on. So we've kind of— we built this map of the value chain and looked at all the key intervention points that were needed in order to vastly improve the overall sustainability profile of the particular product lines we were looking at. And what you find is that through, I suppose, a kind of organic improvement over years. It's relatively difficult to make some of these improvements. So we can see conceptually that removing cartonboard from the packaging, for instance, makes quite a big difference to the water usage throughout the supply chain, particularly in the early stage of manufacture. On balance, those alternatives are slightly less sustainable, So have a slightly greater impact on the environment overall than the carton board that we were using. So we looked at all the various kind of physical components, all the processes that we undertake to get to the finished product, all the way back as far as the sourcing of the fragrance ingredients. So it's a case of putting in place the kind of measurement criteria by which we select the fragrances, the governance of the way that our fragrance partners develop those fragrances in the first place, through to our supply chain that we manage internally, which is the creation of things like packaging, although the devices we source externally through third parties. So we need to look at their working conditions and the material sourcing that they have. So what you end up with is this very deep detailed kind of value chain map. And the primary areas that we looked at for improvement, ironically, were not necessarily the ones that we have direct influence over, the things that we make. Because as a company, we've put a lot of effort in the last sort of 10, 15 years into big improvements in some of the major impact aspects of sustainability, like carbon footprint, water usage at manufacture sites, release of waste at those manufacture sites and all this kind of thing. What we found was that the biggest impact that we could have is in the user behavior. So people don't dispose of packaging responsibly. They don't recycle in a lot of geographies. They tend to have quite sort of wasteful behaviors in buying the products and then not finishing the use of the product and buying another one and so on. And so what we found was that coaching better behaviors in the use of the products was probably going to be more impactful than the changes that we also made in the value chain, things like entirely recycled PET for our blister packs, for example. Recycled component— recycled material content in some of the components in the devices, reducing the amount of plastic used in the devices and so on. So there are some improvements that we made in the things that we directly control, but then we're already still looking at the ways of influencing people's behavior, whether implicitly or explicitly, to improve the eventual total lifecycle impact of the products.

Okay. And when looking at individual products, because you've got the luxury of having so many different and numerous products across different ranges, do you see commonalities across it so that you go, oh, actually, we can change that, and on these, we could also do exactly the same?

Absolutely, yeah. I think my supply colleagues would probably see it not as a luxury, but as an added complexity. But when we as designers are suggesting maybe we could carry over that learning to something else, we see it as a luxury, yes. Very much so. I think the principles that you establish in one piece of structural packaging are relatively straightforward to transfer to other bits of structural packaging, or the operation of specific principles of filling line management similarly can be transferred between lines in different geographies, filling different types of products, and so on. So absolutely, there are there are learnings that as soon as we validate, we roll out across the business.

Out of curiosity, some organizations promote their carbon. So if they've carbon footprinted a particular product, they'll actually put it into their, maybe their financial reporting or their environmental impact report or some kind of sustainability report. Or some companies are in a closed group. So we know that Nike, Patagonia, and a bunch of others are all in a very closed group where they actually share. So Adidas tells Nike exactly what the carbon footprint and everything is in their shoes to their competitor in order to push it. I mean, where do you sit with that? Do you promote what it is that you're doing and share the carbon footprint of each of the products or where are you in that?

It's a bit of both. So as you've probably seen in our annual reporting, we have key metrics that we track. And we publish our ambitions. You're probably familiar with the most recent one aimed at 2030, kind of where we'll get to by 2030 in some of these really important areas that have a big impact. But alongside that, we also are part of industry bodies that have a certain amount of information shared between the arbiter of the body and some of our key competitors to ensure that we're, as an industry, we're pushing pushing forward rather than just individual sort of brand owners or companies. I think one of the things that's really important for us to do more of is an initiative that we began last year, which was to map the recycling facilities of primary sort of recycling providers, understanding what facilities they have. So specifically, what kind of materials can they deal with? What are the processes that they employ to deal with them at those sites? And pairing that up to a way of providing that information in usable terms to the end user, to an individual. So that, for instance, if you were to scan a particular pack, the digital part of the experience would tell you, this pack needs to be recycled in this way, you can do it at this location, or parts of it can be left with your normal waste outside your property for local councils or so on to collect. And the intention is that we build that database and make it available to our direct competitors so that anyone who makes and sells a product that has high-density polyethylene as its primary structural pack, for instance, can connect to this database and tell their users where the product can be recycled, anything they need to do to prepare it, like strip off a shrink sleeve, for example, remove labels if that's necessary, so that we We drive to better behaviors. We talk about it internally as compliance. So, we want to get compliance to the best possible recycling and disposal behaviors with anyone who uses the product.

That's really good. I love it. The waste thing I particularly like because it's so complex. I mean, even in the UK, it's driven Anyway, let's not go there. Nightmare.

But I think that's a particularly important area that companies like ours need to give a lot more thought. All the companies in the FMCG world are looking at the provenance of the materials they use for their packaging. And of course, we're conscious that we generate a lot of packaging. And so there's lots of post-consumer resins being used, there's lots of of recyclable stickers going onto things, but ultimately, we're entirely reliant on the end user. And so making it easy for them to make the right decisions and take the right actions has to be one of our priorities.

It's getting WRAP to try and make it more uniform across the whole of the UK and in geographies that they have a much more uniform approach to waste it's worked a lot better. So for example, Germany. The UK, we allowed councils to choose what colors they had. I mean, how much more— I remember WRAP talking about this in the early 2000s and going, we're redesigning our waste. And then they came up with this strategy of allowing councils to do what they wanted. And it's like, why can't you just have everything the same?

Well, I think there's an element of the right thing in that first step. So, actually, we use this approach sometimes within our business, which is to give multiple stakeholders the opportunity to create the solution. But then, crucially, you've got to have a point in time at which someone reviews those solutions, picks through whatever criteria, picks the best best working solution and then rolls that out across everywhere. Continuing to operate, as you said, multiple councils using different ways, different colors, different types of materials they can deal with, sorting or not sorting, it doesn't make sense to continue to prolong that dissolution of organization. At some point, it has to be consolidated and even if necessary, imposed on everywhere.

Yeah, no, absolutely. How did you get into sustainability?

I think that's actually probably the easiest answer I'm going to give you today is I'm a designer. Designers, you ask any designer, particularly product designers, industrial designers, they'll tell you that it's just the way we think. We're trained that way, so I'm not suggesting that I'm some kind of amazing altruist. I was born this way, but I think you see that designers, if you're creating something physical, which is the majority of the way we were trained, certainly back a long time ago when I was trained, you feel automatically that sense of responsibility. You're putting something out into the world that people interact with, that has a physical effect on the world, whether it's leaving something behind, whether it's changing something. And so, you automatically feel that responsibility. Designers simply automatically think about the effect that their work has on the world. That's what we do.

If there was one piece of advice that you could give our listeners that were starting off on this journey as a designer, what would that be?

Turn around and be a marketer. You'll be paid better. No, I'm joking. I think it has to be educate yourself. I think if you're already interested in design and the creative services, your passion is almost certainly already in the right place. Your heart's in the right place. The important thing is to become a relatively knowledgeable authority on the levers that you have available to you. to create that positive effect. Educate yourself on materials technology, on production technologies, on things like the recycling infrastructure, which as you said, is a bit of a nightmare. And I think there's probably the less obvious areas of expertise that you also really want to kind of dig into, which is people's behaviors, the reason for people's behavior. So what's the context for the reason people can't be bothered to recycle? Actually, it's not that they can't be bothered, it's more that they don't know how. It's off-putting because there isn't consistency, to your earlier point. Maybe it's not communicated intuitively, it's lots and lots of leaflets with lots and lots of words. And most people have a lot of other worries going on, particularly at the moment. And so I think the education part, become an expert in whatever it takes to have that Good advice.

What leadership role do you think consumer goods companies should take to achieve net zero?

I think it's far greater than we have currently, to be honest. And I think everyone inside Reckitt and probably in our key competitors would say the same thing. We're making big steps. We're vastly improving our sustainability profile in a number of areas. But I don't think any of us feel that's enough. We absolutely feel we need to do more. And I think a lot of that is not just in the actions, it's in the way that we present ourselves as brands. So as I said earlier on, FMCG or CPG is probably not viewed by individuals, by the world at large, as a kind of thought leader in sustainability issues. I think we sometimes kind of assume the role of scapegoat when it comes to things like plastics and the packaging in general. But really, I think we could be more proactive in helping people to understand why that behavior needs to change, whether it's their behavior, so the end user, or whether it's our behavior as the brand owner, the manufacturer. I think being more vocal and more articulate about the effect that we have on the world and how that can change. This is where I think our— the leadership of our industry, this is where we need to be.

Do you think that the sector as a whole is responding quickly enough to the climate emergency?

No, no. And I think this is the point, is that there's no one inside Reckitt or our key competitors, you know, the Unilevers and the P&Gs and so on of this world, I don't think anyone would say that we are having enough impact, that we are moving far enough from do no harm to replenish. There's a very kind of watershed announcement by the CEO of Walmart a few months ago, I'm sure you're familiar with it, where he said that we need to shift from this principle of do no harm. Our industry has evolved over the last sort of 30 years from provide whatever we think people need to reduce our impact to do no harm. Now we've got to shift to regenerative. We've got to figure out how we actively fix some of the problems that now exist in the world. And that it's more than just ecological, of course. There's massive societal problems actually there. You could argue they're at the root of some of our ecological problems. And I think that's the responsibility that our industry has to take. It's that shift from doing no harm and continually reducing the impact we have to actually increasing the impact we have in the other direction. It's got to be regenerative. It's got to be replenishing our planet if that's the core message. Brilliant.

Well, Joss, thank you so much for joining us today.

It has been a pleasure. Thanks, Will.

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