Episode 191 / Libby Escolme / Sodexo / Global Marketing Vice President
Podcast: How Functional Nutrition Opens Up Marketing Opportunities
Having worked across B2B and B2C marketing in hospitality, retail, FMCG and property, Libby Escolme is now the Global Marketing Vice President and a keen follower of trends in functional nutrition – her Shiny New Object. As we become more aware of how nutrition impacts our performance and our well-being, Libby argues that marketing opportunities grow and evolve as well.
Brands like Deliciously Ella are becoming increasingly popular as they harness the trend of functional nutrition and respond to the needs of consumers today. Libby believes that individuals and organisations alike are starting to see the impact of nutrition on all aspects of their lives and performance, and with this comes a huge range of marketing opportunities – especially in terms of product development.
We all have this ship called our body that we have to look after
What we eat is infinitely more connected to how we feel than you might expect. As a result, the big question is how to help ourselves to feel good, live longer and think better, through better nutrition choices. This is a question that consumers are beginning to ask more and more, perhaps as a by-product of the lockdowns and the pandemic. So, brands that pay attention to solving this riddle and create products that respond to market needs are going to be successful.
Be more issue oriented
Brands that try to match products to what people are looking for, including from a holistic health perspective, are going to achieve more sales and more loyalty. The question should be: what problem are their products solving? Issues like brain fog, low energy, or bad sleep are all actively being researched. There is a lot of targeting that brands can do from a marketing perspective, to actually help people to make positive changes.
Organisations are making functional nutrition a priority
The interest in holistic health and how that is impacted by our inputs goes beyond a personal preoccupation. Organisations are understanding that, along with caring about how people identify with the company culture, looking after their team’s wellness is correlated with better performance and retention. Investing in people at the earlier stages to help them feel better will yield lots of benefits down the line.
Listen to more of Libby’s thoughts on the link between marketing strategy and functional nutrition, as well as her top marketing tips, on the latest podcast episode.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 0:03
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative and this is a weekly podcast where I get to interview one of our industry's leaders about what their vision for the future of our industry is. And this week is no different. I'm on a call with Libby Escolme, who is global marketing, Vice President at Sodexo. So Libby for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do. Can you give us all a bit of background?
Libby Escolme 0:31
Absolutely. Hi, Tom. It's great to be speaking with you. I am a senior marketer and I have significant cross industry experience currently working in services. But I've also worked across hospitality, retail, FMCG and also property. That means that I have done vast amounts of b2b and b2c and scarily b2b for C marketing. And I've lived and worked in five countries for multinationals like Unilever, Kraft, Diageo, and Foster's, as well as quite a few SMEs along the way.
Tom Ollerton 1:05
Right, you've got all the stamps on there. Fantastic. So curious to know, in that wide and varied career, are you a marketing book reader, or you learn by doing person? And if you're a book reader, which titles do you recommend?
Libby Escolme 1:22
I absolutely both. I actually think it's fantastic to stay fresh by reading, you know, new marketing titles. But I also like doing things a lot. But you know, I think it's a mixture of both.
Tom Ollerton 1:39
And when it comes to reading, kind of which which books are your preferred Bibles as it were?
Libby Escolme 1:44
Sure. Well, I think an enduring favorite is The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. It's a fast paced and enduring relevant guide that I think all marketers should read, you know, you have a protagonist that's hungry and driven. And he will probably, it could be a she, eats a number of foods every day demonstrating perseverance and trial and error, you know, to achieve growth, and I think it also interrogates failure. So when the caterpillar eats too much one day, you know, it absolutely has this tanking experience, but then harnesses the failure to evolve at the right time and turn into a butterfly. So it clearly illustrates the power of doing something, not nothing. And I think in marketing, trialing until you're successful, and pivoting strategy when you need to, and scaling and transforming when the time is right. Is is a fantastic way of driving corporate growth.
Tom Ollerton 2:44
I love that and my daughter's four. So I'm familiar with the work. So lovely answer to that question. Thank you. Do you share that book with your team? And have you given that the philosophy before and how was it received?
Libby Escolme 3:06
I mean, I think absolutely. I think marketing is all about storytelling, and it's all about memorability. So actually, the most successful marketing strategies that I've ever put in place are the ones where you have a really succinct, relevant, memorable elevator pitch. And everybody across, you know, the marketing team and the other functions in the organization, know what you're trying to do and can say, the pitch. So actually, with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I think when you say that to a marketer, and they were, you know, have a junior marketer come to you and say, you know, what's our philosophy? Or how are we going to do stuff and you kind of say, well, you know, think about The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and their approach, which was continuing to try things every day doing things every day, until they hit the jackpot, and then really kind of leveraging the jackpot to go on to the next thing, but continuing that cycle of, you know, expecting change, and continuing to do something so I think marketing is so cyclical, you know, often you'll launch a great new strategy and potentially it's a campaign and you achieve a lot of success. And anybody who's been through those cycles knows your job isn't done at that point. At that point, you need to start immediately planning for how you're going to continue your success because the whole world of marketing is cyclical.
Tom Ollerton 4:28
You've completely pulled the rug from under my feet there. Thanks for successfully joining my home and family life with my work life. Fantastic. So outside of looking to kids' books for inspiration, what is the marketing tip that you give most often, that kind of silver bullet bit of advice.
Libby Escolme 4:53
You have to be in it to win it. And I don't know, it's very much an Australian saying I don't know whether it's as popular in England, but certainly my team get a big dose of Australian sayings. And I think they will try and fight being a little bit Australianized along the way, but subliminally, it might happen. So be in it to win it. Because for me, in marketing, you're, again, it's building on The Very Hungry Caterpillar, you know, you, you're always going to be more successful if you're doing something. And I think in large corporations, often you have these mega planning or strategy processes. And they really do help structure your thoughts and also hopefully engage your cross functional team members in your planning process, and you state and agree what you're setting out to do. But you know, I don't think a marketer is going to be successful if they pontificate ad infinitum. So my advice is always get started, you know, have a decent plan, don't bail on your plan too quickly. And don't be afraid to build the plane as you fly it if you need to. So it's all about trial and adjust, but more than anything, just do something.
Tom Ollerton 6:05
And is doing nothing a viable alternative? Like do people literally do nothing?
Libby Escolme 6:12
Well, I don't think you have to do nothing. But I do think sometimes organizations are quite oriented towards their internal processes. So sometimes, you know, I've been a part of advertising campaign development, where you go through multiple rounds of iterations. And even sometimes if your testing doesn't come through, actually, you know, the campaign is disbanded. So absolutely, I've seen it happen that plans don't go to air because you don't meet benchmarks. Now, what does that mean? It doesn't mean that you should go out there and flight or, you know, activate a campaign, you know, that hasn't sufficiently resonated with consumers. But if you do nothing, what you can be assured of, is you will get an increasingly large proportion of nothing, and your brand share will slip away.
Tom Ollerton 7:02
So we're gonna now talk about your shiny new objects, which surprised me, which is functional nutrition. So I cannot work out how this is going to tie back to marketing. But I'm fascinated to hear why you think functional nutrition is a shiny new object, and what will the impact of it be on marketing?
Libby Escolme 7:25
Well, I guess maybe this is a little bit of a function of, you know, almost two years of lockdown that we all developed these, you know, new hobbies. But just as a little soundbite functional nutrition, or functional medicine is basically the new arm of nutrition. It's all about the gut brain axis, and how what we eat is infinitely more connected to how we feel than you might expect. So it's very much a scientific data based approach to nutrition. And, you know, I know that this is a marketing centric podcast, but like mindfulness and other techniques that we employ, to be high performing, you know, we all have this ship called our body that we have to look after to work well, you know, maybe you're working long hours and you're time poor. And the big question is, how do we help ourselves to feel good, last longer, and think better. And actually, this nutrient and nutrition has absolutely gone from strength to strength over the last few years, and it's generally being advocated by doctors who've pivoted their careers from being all around drugs, you know, to fix a symptom, and hopefully, a cause, to actually fix the lifestyle to stop you getting the symptoms. So, you know, if you're tired, don't reach for a chocolate bar, which will cause an insulin spike, and then a crash, leading you to need probably three more coffees and yet more sugar. Instead, you know, functional nutrition is all about a fantastic way to improve your performance and mindset through sleep, exercise, food and mindset management. And I think it's helped me enormously and, you know, being a manager of, you know, various teams over the last few years. You know, I think everybody it's a bit like environmentalism, everybody is now thinking more about health. Statistically, as a nation, we're thinking more about health. And increasingly, people are asking themselves, you know, am I eating the right thing? And it's not just about am I, you know, overweight, underweight, or the right weight, it's about how do I feel? And do I have the right level of perseverance?
Tom Ollerton 9:32
Oh so much to talk about there. So help me understand how you do this. So it's always difficult to argue with something that's based in science and has the support of doctors so let's just say that, like, you know, from an awareness perspective, you've succeeded in enlightening the audience but from, considering I've done and I've gone through a marketing funnel here, but from a consideration perspective, what does it actually look like? Does it mean? Is it like a regimen whereby they have to eat these foods at certain times and exercise at this time? Or is it just being conscious about what you eat? How does it, how does it actually work for Libby?
Libby Escolme 10:11
Well, how it actually works, it's very much around eating the right foods and nutrients, and even how and when you eat. So time restricted eating, for example, is a, you know, is a fantastic way to let your stomach lining recover overnight by limiting the number of hours that you eat during the day. And what that does for you is it means that you don't tend to have leaky gut syndrome, which actually leads to brain fog. So I guess, you know, if I wanted to pivot this a little bit from a marketing perspective, what I would say that, you know, if you work in food, and this is a new rising trend, because it is based on some great science, then it's an area that is really worth looking into. And there's been some fascinating trends in the way the government wants to engage in, you know, fast moving consumer goods, foods over the last even 20 years, let's say, you know, years ago, I worked at McVities. And, you know, the government was trying to stop this trend towards kingsize. More recently, in the UK, we've seen the introduction of calorie declarations, it was trickier than you might expect to say that word calorie declarations, which has just cost restaurants, and you know, companies like food service companies, vast amounts of money, time and resources. And it's such an interesting, you know, knee jerk approach really, because calorie counting is a 1950s blunt instrument that was to try and raise awareness. And people have, you know, gosh, is half a chocolate cake too much or not, but it doesn't really address how we absorb the nutrients, and whether it's good food or bad food. So a blunt instrument that's costing, you know, the UK, just tens, probably hundreds of millions, if you really wanted to get into it. So I think, you know, that's something that we've had to be responsive to in the food industry. And potentially, there's other far more significant areas. So as a marketer that actually works in food services or in packaged goods, I think it's very important that you're aware of where the rising trends are coming from. And we all know, the keto and all the various different diets that you can go on low cal, low, high fat, whatever it is, you know, vegan, vegan, vegetarian. And we do as marketers need to know about these. So I think it's that functional nutrition is really sensible, is absolutely scientifically based. And we're seeing some brands, for example, like Deliciously Ella, who really started going down this path and had some good success. And I think that's really reassuring. And also interesting, because it is a commercially viable path for companies to pursue.
Tom Ollerton 13:04
What specifically are Deliciously Ella doing?
Libby Escolme 13:08
They're trying to look at making products that are actually helping people with their holistic health and tasting good. Rather than being I guess, you know, the last 10 years approach to food, which was around is it calories, or fat, or sugar or sugar replacements, they're starting to try and produce products, which are actually better for your functional health. So and maybe, for example, be more issue oriented. So let's say you have brain fog, or you have low energy or you can't sleep, you know, there are lots of different needs states, or you know, as humans, we all know, there's a million things that we'd like to have solved. So there's a lot of targeting that you can do from a marketing perspective, to actually help people to make positive change in their lives through food and beverages.
Tom Ollerton 13:59
And so how, how does the diagnosis bit work? So I mean, there's definitely days where I'm not feeling that motivated or have brain fog or just can't be bothered or like feeling so hyper that I can't focus on anything, so is there a diagnosis is like an app where you have to track how good you feel bad you feel or how foggy you feel. How does that work? How do you as opposed to just going out and buying a bunch of Deliciously Ella stuff and cramming it all in? Works? How do you diagnose the issue? And before you start prescribing what kind of food it is that you take on board?
Libby Escolme 14:32
It is, there are a large number of apps being developed in this space, you know, Inside Tracker is one but there's, you know, there's rings and obviously a number of us have watches that tell us you know whether we've had REM sleep or light sleep or whether we're you know, your phone kind of buzzes to tell you it thinks you might be dead because you haven't moved for the last three hours. So there's lots of different ways, of tools that companies are actually now selling to actually help you understand yourself better. And some of them are very good at actually saying, okay, you know, yesterday, you didn't move much, and you've also slept really poorly. You know, have you considered whether you've eaten the right foods, you might want to plan to be a bit gentle on yourself today, because you know, you're probably not feeling that good because you didn't sleep well, last night, you know, maybe don't overdo the coffee this morning, because you might end up with the shakes rather than feeling. You know, well rested and concentrated. That kind of stuff.
Tom Ollerton 15:34
Yeah, I think that would just really annoy me so much. I remember when the Apple Watch came out years ago, this guy I used to work with wrote this blog on it. He said, the last thing we needed in the world was more notifications. And now we've got them on our wrist as well. So I'm being, I'm not skeptical about the science, but like, yeah, as you've seen on Apple Watch, I remember when I first got one years ago, like I got up out of my chair, walked across to the fridge to get a beer, and I completed my steps challenge at that point. Well, there you go. So yeah, I'm not sure I could deal with that, having someone telling me what, what to do. But I think it gets super interesting when it becomes automated, right? So you've had three birds and that bad night's sleep, and you've eaten these things? And you know, so here's some bananas automatically get delivered. So I'm being trite, but you know, like, oh, okay, cool. So it just makes that decision, or makes a practical step for me.
Libby Escolme 16:35
Yeah, and I think organizations are taking this very seriously as well, like ours, is actually doing a trial with, you know, a couple of 100 team members as they transition from working from home to working more days in the office, and looking at, you know, movement, mindset, sleep, and then people have opted in, it's not mandatory by any means, you know, to what, how they're actually performing now that they're coming back to the office several days a week, because what the company wants to actually look at is what's happening two key engagement, engagement metrics as they make that change. But companies also recognize that along with, you know, caring about whether people feel part of the culture, looking after your team's wellness will, absolutely, you know, is absolutely correlated with them performing better in the workplace, having less sick days, suffering from less depression. So I think, you know, we and, you know, many other companies, and I think healthcare companies are recognizing, you know, invest in people at earlier stages to help them feel better and be more well, and pretty benefits.
Tom Ollerton 17:45
A bit of really shocking, but of data, or real world experience. I, I went to a festival on Sunday, it was think it's a four day festival. I just got a day ticket here in Budapest, and I went and watched them, you know, saw the final act, you know, there's 20,000 people in the crowd moving to, a lot of people, and no one was wasted. Hardly anyone was smoking. And then all of the food, things were like, you know, pizza and stuff, but there's a lot of like vegan and alternative, like, healthy foods if you'd like. And I haven't been to many festivals in a long time. And it just absolutely struck me that it's that generation of kind of how many generations there were there, but they how and hedonistic it was. And, like, there wasn't that kind of indulgence, or certainly, I'm sure, it wasn't in places, but in the majority of people that I saw, it wasn't kind of wasted people, like no one was smoking weed, as far as I could tell, and people weren't drunk, and they would have all these healthy options around them. So I think that really backs up your point about that, not only that, there's that the younger generation need it, expect it. And I think it's gonna be fascinating to see how brands cope with that. As we move forward, and even if it is, restaurants putting calories on in the UK, which seems a bit bizarre. But um, thank you for sharing that. And that is a, I think that's a fascinating, shiny new object for the impact it could have on our work and the marketing we do, but also on the products that brands have to deliver in order to meet these changing needs. So I really appreciate your time. Libby, if someone wanted to get in touch with you about any of the things that you talked about the Hungry Caterpillar, or the hungry humans and functional nutrition, where would you like them to do that? And how would you like them to get in touch with you?
Libby Escolme 19:37
I'm always very happy to receive messages via LinkedIn. So absolutely. Feel free to drop me a note.
Tom Ollerton 19:44
Brilliant and what goes in a really good note to Libby?
Libby Escolme 19:49
I think expressing what you're interested in. You know, it's always about sparking interest, isn't it? So it's how do you cut through all the messages that we all get in LinkedIn? by you know having an interesting perspective question or observation that you share.
Tom Ollerton 20:06
Nice lovely thank you so much for your time
Libby Escolme 20:09
Thanks so much Tom
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