SHELLEY KALFAS, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING – SODEXO, HEALTH CARE CLIENT SEGMENT

Shelley Kalfas has worked for Sodexo in both staff and operations leadership roles for 23 years.  She is presently Senior Vice President of Strategic Marketing for their U.S. Health Care Client Segment. Shelley also serves on Sodexo's Global Marketing Council and leads their North American Wellness Council.  

What has been the evolution and background of Sodexo, as it moved from an operational to a marketing mindset?

Many of the structures we have established globally have helped to enable growth opportunities through better communication.  Technology tools have enabled easy sharing of innovations, best practices, data, and information.  Our tools have been developed to enable easy adaptation where necessary to meet local customs and cultural needs.  We feel we still have many opportunities in established markets by sharing solutions across client segments.  For example, room service is a common solution for us to drive patient satisfaction for our hospitals clients.  We are considering how we may be able to adapt that not only for patients in other countries, but also how can we adapt a solution like that to meet the needs of someone living in a retirement community.

Sodexo has established networks of global market champions and global marketing teams to facilitate transfer of knowledge and innovation, providing greater speed to market.  We set goals to adapt offers from other countries to encourage that sharing.

What has Sodexo focused on to create a cultural synergy with shared values, in a globally diverse base of 380,000 employees in 80 different countries? 

Everything starts with our mission – to improve the quality of daily life in everything we do -- and to contribute to the economic, social and environmental development in the countries in which we operate.  Our values of service spirit, team spirit and spirit of progress drive this mission, and these have been constant since the founding of our company in 1966.

Our mission and values are communicated and reinforced with our employees in many ways – through internal messaging and communications; through reward and recognition systems; and through the tools, systems, and processes applied at our client sites.  For example, in our health care client sites, we implemented a mandatory weekly communications process called Huddles to drive engagement in the patient experience.  This best practice has been replicated in other business settings to drive employee engagement in driving a positive experience for customers.

Much of the high employee engagement we have achieved has been the result of story-telling – in our health care client segment we literally get thousands of stories submitted every year which highlight the acts of our employees making a difference in the lives of the customers we serve.  We honor their contributions through an annual awards ceremony – for me, hearing their stories at this ceremony is the highlight of our year!

Can you define your market space and value propositions surrounding the 'Quality of Daily Life Solutions'?

At Sodexo, we focus on the Quality of Daily Life because we feel it contributes to the progress of individuals and performance of organizations. We don't want to simply deliver services at a client site; we want to be a strategic partner to our clients, and create, manage and deliver comprehensive Quality of Life service solutions that improve our clients' performance and development.

To do that, we look to help organizations improve performance in three key areas:

• People - by increasing employee, consumer and end-user satisfaction and motivation by helping them to be more effective at what they do.
• Processes - in enhancing quality, efficiency and productivity.
• Infrastructure and Equipment - through optimized asset utilization and reliability; and contributing to the attractiveness of living and work environments.

We touch consumers throughout their life cycle, from school children, to college students, to adults at work, to senior retirement communities.  Consumer needs and expectations might be different at these different life stages, but the common thread for us is in enhancing the Quality of Daily Life to meet those needs in the settings where we do business.

What are some of the challenges and opportunities you foresee in relation to growth within established and emerging markets?

Many of the structures we have established globally have helped to enable growth opportunities through better communication.  Technology tools have enabled easy sharing of innovations, best practices, data, and information.  Our tools have been developed to enable easy adaptation where necessary to meet local customs and cultural needs.  We feel we still have many opportunities in established markets by sharing solutions across client segments.  For example, room service is a common solution for us to drive patient satisfaction for our hospitals clients.  We are considering how we may be able to adapt that not only for patients in other countries, but also how can we adapt a solution like that to meet the needs of someone living in a retirement community.

Sodexo has established networks of global market champions and global marketing teams to facilitate transfer of knowledge and innovation, providing greater speed to market.  We set goals to adapt offers from other countries to encourage that sharing.

CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY: WHERE CMOs NEED TO LEAD

By James Cerruti, Senior Partner Strategy and Research, Brandlogic Corporation

Worldwide scrutiny of corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices and reporting is increasing. CMOs and other communications executives are being called on to ensure their brand achieves ongoing relevance and health in a world of shifting societal, customer, employee and investor values.

This focus on ESG is important for CMOs. Today, brand, marketing and reputation are more intertwined than ever. Corporate citizenship is important to investors, supply chain partners and consumers/employees – especially younger groups such as Gen Y. Better alignment between reality and perception is required to establish credibility. Research supports this view: a recent study by Brandlogic, Sustainability Leadership Report: Measuring perception vs. reality showed that ESG performance is indeed becoming more important to decision-making.
The question for marketers is what’s the link between operational sustainability practices and corporate branding? What profile should ESG be given in the organization’s brand positioning and corporate communications?

Corporate brand = corporate reputation

Measures of corporate brand performance have evolved over the years. Organizations have grown more sophisticated in their understanding of the importance of corporate brands in securing customers, talent and investment, as well as the attendant economic benefits.
Traditionally, corporate branding and reputation management were seen as related, but separate, fields of endeavor. Today, with corporate information and marketing communications readily available to all constituencies, this distinction is difficult to maintain. This is particularly true when the corporate name is also the primary marketing brand, as is the case for leading companies like GE, IBM, BP or Microsoft. Even in cases where the corporate name stands behind a range of brands – such as Procter & Gamble or Kraft – CMOs have found it necessary to strengthen their corporate brands and communications to help manage reputations and maintain credibility across all constituencies, not just clients/customers.

Measuring corporate sustainability impacts on brands and branding

There have been a number of efforts to measure the perceived importance of corporate sustainability practices and related reporting transparency. These typically high-level studies have not been detailed enough to prove useful in a practical sense.
To date, CMOs have lacked the resources and insight to pinpoint where and how corporate brand and reputation building communications should intersect with key constituencies’ ESG concerns. To overcome this challenge, they need to build a new set of tools and measures into their brand performance research and brand strategy initiatives. The goal is to determine on a factual basis, for each corporate stakeholder group, the appropriate brand strategy and messaging related to the company’s ESG practices. Such tools should also help establish and prioritize ESG issue-materiality to help internal operational teams better focus sustainability performance improvement efforts.

The 2011 Sustainability Leadership Report: Measuring perception vs. reality

To help corporations start to build the information base and tools required to bridge the operational and brand-image dimensions of their sustainability efforts, we recently conducted a worldwide study covering 100 global corporations contrasting their real and perceived sustainability performance.
CRD Analytics, the source of data for the NASDAQ Sustainability Index, provided ratings of the companies’ actual sustainability practices. Those ratings were paired with ratings of perceived performance developed by Brandlogic through a global Corporate Sustainability Brand Perception Survey across three highly attentive and strategically important groups: investment professionals, purchasing/supply management professionals and graduating university/college students.

As we had suspected, in many cases the study’s multi-dimensional analysis revealed significant gaps between a company’s real and perceived sustainability performance at the aggregated level (e.g., Apple and Google with perception way ahead of reality, or Merck, UBS and UPS with the opposite result). We also found notable performance gaps amongst peers in a given sector (e.g. Canon vs. Xerox, or BMW and VW vs. Honda and Toyota).

Beyond the aggregate results, the study provides deeper insights. As an example, it reveals that Apple's real performance on social factors lags significantly on measures of employment diversity, opportunity and quality, and that its high perceived performance on all measured social factors is driven more by its reputation with the investment community than with either purchasing professionals or graduating students.

Another example is Walmart's below-average scores across the board. The study detail reveals that it is Walmart’s performance on the environmental factors that drags down its ratings on both dimensions, and on the perceptual side it is not its management of resources, but rather of waste disposal, that needs the most improvement.

The work also points to opportunities – and risks – surrounding sustainability. Companies whose real performance significantly exceeds their perceived performance may have an opportunity to secure unrealized return on investment in sustainability through better corporate brand communications. This is because key constituencies may currently be making decisions based on inaccurate assumptions of actual performance.

Conversely, companies whose perceived performance significantly exceeds their real performance may have considerable value at risk. They may be receiving benefits (e.g., lower cost of capital and/or insurance, supply chain access, etc.) from the misperception of their real performance. Those with low performance on both dimensions clearly face competitive risks if they fail to improve.

What does this mean to the CMO?

For CMOs who must continually calibrate and drive brand relevance, the kind of intelligence that this research methodology offers is invaluable. It clearly establishes the link between ESG performance and brand perception, and provides real guidance for future management efforts. Building ESG factors into your research can help you identify any needed changes to your corporate brand platform, which can impact future brand health and sustainability

The promise of incorporating ESG into brand management is greater relevance to all stakeholders, from customers, investors and supply chain partners to future employees. In an age in which corporate citizenship is becoming more important than ever, that can be a critical differentiator – and an opportunity for CMOs to take on a leadership role in the future of their organization.