The Candid CMO: Jiunn Shih, Global Chief Marketing, Innovation and Sustainability Officer at Zespri

“Before we are marketers, we are humans and hopefully part of a constructive society, living on the same planet which is going through tremendous challenges.”

Marketing fruit is a challenge, even when you represent the world’s biggest producer of kiwi fruit. Zespri may not have quite the dominance of De Beers in the diamond category, but it still makes for around 30% of the market.

The opportunity for fruit brands is clear (although more produce brands does diminish share of voice for Zespri’s NZ$200m annual budget) given that, globally, fewer than two out of ten people consume the minimum recommended five fruit and vegetable portions a day.

“I find the global food system so paradoxical, when you think that the food system should be nourishing people and helping communities, and yet we have over one billion obese and almost one billion people malnourished,” says Shih. “It should also foster thriving farming communities, yet over 80% of our food comes from small holder farmers where the majority live below the poverty line.”

Zespri’s mission is to grow value for all kiwi fruit growers, even those that aren’t shareholders. And the corporate structure – it’s controlled by growers – means that if it earns more than a certain level of EBIT, then the margin goes down and the difference is returned to farmers.

The reality of the kiwi category is more complex since Zespri kiwis are mostly grown in New Zealand and have very high share in some markets at certain times of year but much less when the rival Chinese season starts and the New Zealand supply drops off.

To combat this, the company is now growing in the northern hemisphere too. New outposts in Italy as well as in Korea, Japan and France will help it become a 12-month brand, but its core production remains in its home country.

From Brazil to Zespri

Shih was inspired to start in marketing in his early teens by his grandfather, who had emigrated to Brazil from Taiwan and was an avid Coca-Cola drinker, dapper dresser and awesome storyteller. He was his main carer and his hero, a Chinese James Bond.

Even after he started suffering from Alzheimer’s, he still remembered the bright red labels, the distinctive bottles. He would continue to raid the fridge at Shih’s parent’s Chinese restaurant not remembering how many Cokes he had a day.

“Growing up I’d ask myself: how can someone forget the people they love but still retain that auto-pilot behaviour of picking up a Coke... I wanted to understand how this almost magnetic attraction to brands worked,” he reflects.

Shih has since worked all over the world for Unilever and L’Oréal among others, in his home market of Brazil but also in Europe, China and Singapore before finding his current role at Zespri, where everything clicked in terms of his aspirations to use marketing for good.

He’s delighted to be “selling a product that’s good for people, good for the environment and creates value for the farmers who grow the fruit, while having the opportunity to build an iconic Global brand in a category that has been historically more commoditised.”

Marketers have “tremendous responsibility” to apply their persuasion skills for good. “Are we using our powers to just sell more products, regardless of the impact those products may have on society, regardless of the unintended consequences that that business may have on the environment? I think it has to go back to values and value. Before we are marketers, we are humans and hopefully part of a constructive society, living on the same planet which is going through tremendous challenges.”

Brands solving real problems people have

Bought in to run global marketing in 2016, he admits that initially the company knew a lot about kiwi fruit growing but much less about when and why its customers were eating kiwis.

“The superpower of marketing remains in understanding people’s needs, what is the problem you are solving in people’s lives,” he says. “We really needed to shift from the focus on the product to the consumer needs.”

That has meant embarking on global demand spaces work including focus groups, home visits and accompanied shops to identify the fact that, on more than a third of occasions, people are not eating other fruits – they are eating other products.

That need to focus on the consumer is, he says, a wider issue for marketers that’s also hitting their credibility in the boardroom. “We fall in love with ads before we fall in love with the problem we are trying to solve for people,” he says. “I think we have become more enamoured of our tools, whether that’s our TV ads, our print ads or our TikToks.”

As marketers, he argues we need to remind ourselves that our purpose is to create profitable solutions for the benefit of people and planet.

“As marketers we are in the business of creating value. Not in the business of creating the next Cannes winning ad,” he says. “I’m not one of those to say profit is bad. Profit is good. But for me, the delivery of profit should be an outcome of solving real needs of people and the planet, hence by being a positive force for society.”

Great work and key challenge

Right now, Zespri focuses its global marketing on 15 strategic markets, representing 85% of the business, structured into four tiers of development, based around levels of awareness, penetration and frequency of purchase.

There is a huge opportunity. In its 15 core markets, the Zespri brand reaches 90m households in those markets, for a 25% household penetration. “Yet we are still less than 1% of the global fruit bowl,” he notes, although the category has been growing at double-digit rates over the years.

Shih says he’s most proud of a 2020 campaign developed in Japan, at the time the company’s No. 1 market. Developed before the Covid pandemic took hold, it was focused about how to make healthy choices more irresistible.

The brand focused on the fact that “Healthy has to be something that you love”, especially in a society that’s very stoic, and told the story with humour. The result touched people to the extent that they started writing to the brand, with the ad being named best ad in Japan.

For Shih, the big lesson of his career has been to learn to focus more on people.

“I think one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is not to focus too much on the work to the detriment of my focus on the people behind the work. Early in my career, when I started getting management responsibility, I wasn’t always conscious that the ‘us’ and the ‘I’ is what delivers the ‘it’,” he says. “Now I’m more focused on helping and coaching and being supportive and empathetic to future generation of marketers that will build brands for good.”

About WFA’s Candid CMO series

WFA wants to celebrate the world’s best marketers and explore the journeys they are on to deliver better marketing. This series helps distil some of the biggest learnings of our CMO members. As we are great believers in the power to learn from successes as well as missteps, we hope this will give our readers the opportunity to learn more about the things they are most proud of, but also about where they may have done things differently. More at https://wfanet.org/CandidCMO.

If you'd like to nominate someone with an interesting story to be interviewed for the Candid CMO series, get in touch with Camelia Cristache.