Kimberly-Clark: meeting expectations, achieving more

Kimberly-Clark is really three global businesses – tissue, personal care and professional health care – with operations in over 40 countries and sales in more than 150. Tissue products include Andrex, Kotex, Kleenex and Huggies disposable nappies, while personal care includes incontinence products – the company says its products really do cover ‘cradle to grave’. Professional health care includes gloves, surgical masks and gowns. The company has been in the UK for fifty years, headquartered at Maidstone, and has production sites at Barrow, Barton-upon-Humber, Flint and Northfleet, plus three staff office sites.

The company’s community affairs strategy is managed at two levels:

? the pan-European level of cash and in-kind contributions to a few major charities; managed from Reigate by Lyn Mayes, the corporate communications director, this covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA);

? programmes around specific sites, managed by a committee of local employees and with strong emphasis on employee involvement.

Focus on employees

A year ago Lyn commissioned research among diverse Kimberly-Clark employees, to assess the benefits of allying the company with one, pan-European cause -‘caring for carers’ was suggested. The feedback was enlightening – deep cultural differences between the different countries emerged in attitudes to the family, donations, employee involvement and the concept of carers.

Employees felt the theme could be more closely tied to the Kimberly-Clark brand – that Kimberly-Clark products are all about families, and cross all generations, so the community programme should focus on the company’s most important audiences – children, women and the elderly. They recommended a more local approach, tailored to priorities around each site, rather than a ‘top down’ strategy.

In response, the company developed simple guidelines which define the community relations focus as:

? helping families,

? benefiting children,

? supporting women and children, and

? caring for individuals who both work and have responsibilities as carers at home.

Employee involvement is central, with a preference for sharing knowledge and expertise, rather than fund-raising. Central funding is used to lever local activities, with education as an overarching theme.

The company supports Euro Linkage Caring for Carers, a Brussels-based charity targeting carers across Europe, and some national UK causes – the Tommies Campaign and the National Canine Defence League through cause-related marketing campaigns linked with the Huggies and Andrex brands respectively. The total UK community spend in 1999 was £350,000, including product donations to disaster relief campaigns such as Kosovo last year.

A local model

Kimberly-Clark’s UK headquarters in Maidstone is a good example of current efforts to focus more at a local level, develop employee involvement and ownership, and put the education theme into practice. Working with BITC, the local HR manager, Tim Ealey, reviewed the company’s reactive, ‘scattergun’ approach and identified four ways in which employees could make a more strategic contribution. He was strongly supported by Ian Jones, the company’s general manager who had recently attended a Seeing is Believing visit.

The four planks are:

? Partners in Leadership – partnering senior managers with local head teachers;

? Common Purpose – involving managers in Kent in building cross-sector networks on community issues;

? sixth form college partnerships – developing more junior managers through projects linking with local colleges, including Young Enterprise;

? Time to Read – open to all employees to help develop literacy at local schools, for a total of 37 weeks each, at two hours per week – due to start in September.

Around Europe, several other sites have developed employee involvement at a local level, assisted with central funds, and Kimberly-Clark has supported recent moves to develop a network of employee volunteering intermediaries (Cecile), with part funding from the European Commission.

Both Lyn and Tim see two main corporate benefits from this local focus: building employee satisfaction at having made a more strategic contribution and enhancing trust among local communities. Currently there are no plans to provide paid leave for volunteering nor does employee involvement feature in the appraisal process – they want to ensure engagement is voluntary. However as an HR manager, Tim sees and takes seriously an increasing emphasis on the role of corporate reputation in attracting future employees. That will need better communication about the company’s policy and contribution – another area for future development, partly in response to employee demand. An environmental report for the EMEA region is being considered. A future social report is not ruled out.

Looking ahead, the emphasis, according to Lyn, will be on developing this trend towards a more integrated approach: “we’re a company that uses paper pulp in our products, so why not something that links, say, tree planting to schools in a more creative way?”

Environmental impact

That raises the question of how to link the local programme, driven by employees and with an education focus, to a central business issue – environmental impact. Disposable nappies feature centre stage here, although Phil Mogel, Kimberly-Clark’s environmental manager for Europe, points out that concerns about different products vary hugely from country to country. The company estimates that disposable nappies account for between 0.1% and 0.15% of total waste, and around 80% of a used nappy is biodegradable. Apparently the environmental impacts of disposable nappies versus cloth alternatives are roughly equal, once chemicals used in growing cotton, and water and energy to wash and dry non-disposables are factored in.

Kimberly-Clark has been working to reduce environmental impacts since a major review in 1994. Achievements by its Vision 2000 programme are summarised in the accompanying table. New targets are being set for the next five years: the biggest challenges are keeping pace with developments in product technology and applying standards globally, where markets have different practices and priorities.

Cause-related marketing

The third element in the approach of a company like Kimberly-Clark should be its brands and the company has run several cause-related marketing campaigns recently, notably through Andrex and a link-up between Huggies and the Tommies campaign. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Andrex Puppy in 1997, Kimberly-Clark teamed up with the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association (GDBA). The aim was to develop brand loyalty and sales, interact with consumers at community level, and add creativity and spark to the company’s sales promotions.

The result was the Andrex Puppy Appeal – an on-pack token collection scheme which enabled collectors to use their tokens to make a five or ten pence donation to charity, as well as collecting a toy puppy. Some 1,500 guide and brownie packs took part, and over 1.3 million tokens were collected. The programme achieved over 50 hours of radio airtime and reached some 16.5 million people through print media over eight weeks. The GDBA gained publicity and raised over £400,000. Sales increased by 20% and market share by 6% during that time. One million new households bought Andrex, and the campaign won three awards.

The programme has recently been modified and repeated, working with the National Canine Defence League. Andrex pledged a donation of ten pence for every toy claimed and guaranteed a minimum donation of £50,000 to the charity’s Give a Dog a Life campaign: the level of sales redemptions lifted the donation to over £100,000.

Conclusions

Kimberly-Clark has achieved more in the hard-to-get-right area of cause-related marketing than many other brand-based businesses. Now it could integrate social responsibility messages more closely into effective long term relationship-building with consumers. One example is the main company web site, which could carry more information about action on social and community issues that really matter to the company’s customers and their families. Likewise, the separate, award-winning Huggies web site could describe the Tommies campaign to customers and consult them – it already features impressive, interactive material about childcare and Q&As about recycling.

Thinking ahead, what should the links be between the three main elements of Kimberly-Clark’s approach: cause-related marketing which strengthens consumer brands, successful environmental management to reduce impacts and a community policy which responds to employee consultation and focuses on local concerns? Lyn has already suggested finding environmental elements of local schools work which involves employees. That must be the right strategic approach to a company’s engagement in the community, one more likely to achieve results for the business and for wider society. Finding points of synergy where the expectations of diverse audiences can be met together will surely mean the outcome is greater than the sum of the parts.

Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 52 – June, 2000