Providing a Unique Platform Can Create New Opportunities

Hi, my name is James Thompson and I am Chief Brand and Beauty Officer at Avon. Well the brief at Avon is to turn the company around. It's a company that's been in deep trouble for a number of years now. We've let our direct selling model become old-fashioned and tired. We haven't invented it for the modern era. And we've lost sight of the fact that our voluntary representatives, nearly six million of them around the world, are the people who need to be at the heart of our model. We've bypassed them with big advertising we couldn't really afford to use. We haven't given them the training or the tools or, frankly, the earnings opportunity that they need to stay with us. And we should remember that they can leave at any time because they're not our employees. So putting them back at the heart of the model in order to transform our brand and our business and make it one for the 21st century, that's what we're there for. What I was trying to do was showing how the small insurgent companies that are omni-channel or are a combination of web-based selling and direct selling, they're winning because they've realised that people are at the heart of the system. And there's something about beauty, but I believe personally about business in general, that needs to be fundamentally human and fundamentally social. In a time where people are consumed and obsessed with technology, rightly so because it provides so many different opportunities, many of us forget that people are at the heart of all of this. That's what we're there for. So rather than saying Avon needs to tear its model up, the model that's served it since the 1890s, and reinvent itself entirely, what I was trying to say was what we need to do is remember what was great, find out what was in our DNA when we were really successful and then reinterpret that for the 21st century. And that's what I was trying to talk about today. We made opportunities for people. We were not just about great cosmetics. We used the power of beauty, if you like, to improve lives in three ways. Because we don't have to pay great retail margins or make massive TV ads, we put that money into the price so people can have world-class products at a fraction of the price they'd otherwise have to pay. And that means that beauty is accessible for everybody. The second one is, through our five to six million voluntary representatives around the world, we are the biggest sponsors in the world of women's financial independence. And people have told us stories about putting their children through school, keeping bits of money back from their abusive husband and so on. We've really provided earnings opportunities for people who need it. And the third one is we are the biggest sponsor and have contributed over a billion dollars to vital causes for women. Breast cancer awareness and awareness of gender-based domestic violence. And we lost sight of all that. So doing all of that again, more loudly, more properly, doing it with a digital spin on it, and for our representatives, providing them tools to make them micro-influencers, successful entrepreneurs in the physical and digital age. That's what we've done. Rediscovering what's great about us, reapplying it in a modern way. Well, we've stopped making big ads, by and large. There may be one or two. But now we make lots of video every week. Gifts and memes and how-to videos and all that sort of stuff. And we send them to our representatives who post them on our Avon On app site, which we've given them to run their business. Or they send it to people via WhatsApp. And they distribute it. And we've trained them to make their own. So we've let go of control to these people who don't even work for us. I think that's quite brave. And they distribute our channel. So these people are our storm. They're our media channel. They're our advertising agency. And they do it in that human, fundamentally social way. The reason I think we're the original social network is we brought people together for over 100 years. Whether it was in church halls, whether it was in remote villages. And there are still villages in the Amazon or Siberia where they don't have very much. And the Avon person turning up is a big deal. Makes life more convenient, more social for them. And now we can bring people together in those ways, but also using digital tools and frameworks to do that. So we've been going a lot longer than Facebook. There are six million real people who are doing this. And they're using modern tools to do it now. It's interesting that with all the things we're trying to do, they are technology dependent or technology enabled. And in some of the countries we operate, because we operate in a lot of emerging markets, the technology is developing. So for example, the bandwidth that people can have on their phones is very small in many countries. For example, South Africa, all very expensive. And this has become a real social issue that governments are investigating. So one of the things that we can do is we can help pay for people to have access to decent technology. And as part of that, they could work with us and share our content through that better enablement. So in the markets we operate in, sometimes we have to be one step ahead of where the general population is able to be on their own. The power of having our own platform in our Avon All-in-Out is that our representatives can run their entire business from it. So it's basically how they invoice people, how they know what products are available, how they know what prices are there, how they can follow up on things and so on. And it can also be the way they become a media channel. So effectively for these people who are busy, they want to work on their own terms, they don't want to go into an office, they want to work from home or on the go, we developed something that basically can allow them to be entrepreneurs and micro-influencers in one go. Now we are grateful to and use the big platforms. WhatsApp is extremely important to us. Of course, but no one can quite do that. No one can quite help somebody run their own business like our own platform. People say what is the next big trend, whether it's in technology or video or whatever. And the way I've started to think about this now is that actually it's something in the word kindness. And if you think you don't just have to go very far, whether it's politics or elements of sport or dialogue in general in the world, it seems to become a much less kind place. And I think there's an opportunity not just to make the world better, but for companies to do very well by putting kindness at the heart of their model. How can you help people be kind to other people? And I think there's social, there's film, there's business, all sorts of opportunities in there. People have started to scratch the surface and fundamentally that is at the heart of what Avon is trying to do. It's a kind company. And that's what we want to be and use the technology available. So I think I haven't completely got my head around it. I think that's the space to go from.