Jim Stengel

Known as the innovative marketing genius who reinvigorated consumer giant Procter & Gamble, Jim Stengel is one of the preeminent champions of ideals-driven business.

“A brand ideal,” explains Stengel, “is not social responsibility or altruism, but a program for profit and growth based on improving people’s lives.”

Dynamic and perceptive, Stengel honed his inventive techniques through 25 years at P&G, where he worked his way up from brand assistant to Global Marketing Officer. Universally respected as one of the world’s most innovative companies, P&G’s core businesses were stagnating at the time of Stengel’s C-Suite arrival.

“To hit these big targets, we needed an even bigger goal: identifying and activating a distinctive ideal,” says Stengel. “Improving people’s lives would be the explicit goal of every business in the P&G portfolio. We could then establish each business’s true reason for being as the basis for new growth, and we could link them all into a strong foundation for P&G’s recovery.”

The company’s quick and decisive turnaround was engineered with the help of Stengel, who oversaw an $8 billion marketing budget and more than 7,000 employees. With an open mind and willingness to try something different, he transformed P&G’s marketing culture and firmly established it as one of the world’s most admired brand-building companies.

After seven years on the Executive team, Stengel left P&G to start his own eponymous consultancy and think tank – the Jim Stengel Group – to pursue his passion for helping businesses grow by focusing on human values.

There’s a common thread to some of the world’s truly significant brand transformations, finds Stengel. They are all born from authentically activating the brand’s higher purpose.

Working with an array of companies, from Fortune 50’s to start-ups, Stengel has learned that all struggle with sustaining growth, differentiation in the marketplace, and employee engagement. His group’s proprietary “Purpose Path to Growth” approach addresses these challenges head on – helping leadership teams galvanize their organizations to move toward significant, lasting change.

Outside of his consulting work, the bustling business sage takes time to teach his marketing methods as an adjunct professor at Kellogg School of Management and previously as an adjunct professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Stengel also runs dual week-long academies at the influential Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, the annual global benchmark for effective marketing communications, bringing together the creative communications industry every year. As part of his focus to give back, Stengel aims to inspire younger people who will be the next generation of professionals in the field of business.

Currently, Stengel is embarking on the research and writing for his third book about the interconnectivity of our current world. His first tome, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies, is based on a 10-year study demonstrating the direct correlation between brand purpose and financial performance. His second book, Unleashing the Innovators: How Mature Companies Find New Life with Startups, serves as a playbook for big companies to change their culture to drive innovation and growth.

Highly acclaimed, Stengel has been honored numerous times by prominent industry publications Ad Age and Brandweek. His leadership was recognized when P&G was honored as “Advertiser of the Year” at the 2008 Cannes Lions Festival. He was named to the first-ever Fortune Executive Dream Team in 2011. And, in 2017, he was inducted into The American Marketing Association Marketing Hall of Fame.

Equally comfortable talking about both the passion and emotion of value-laden marketing, as well as big data and research analytics, Stengel unleashes his persuasive playbook for embracing and activating new ideas and ways of working.

An avid practitioner of transcendental meditation, Stengel undergirds his explosive energy with a grounding sense of calm. The Financial Times says, “he sometimes sounds more like a Peace Corps volunteer than a corporate executive.”

With enthusiasm, a bold vision, and entrepreneurial imagination, Stengel inspires brands and organizations to get in touch with who they are – and who they must become – in order to effectively compete in a new generation.