Dina Ruth Howell

She was promoting soft drinks on the beach when she got her break. Now Dina Howell has her marketing teams travel to understand consumers in low-income countries.

Dina Howell, Saatchi & Saatchi X chief executive officer; photographed on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014, inside their Springdale office.
Dina Howell, Saatchi & Saatchi X chief executive officer; photographed on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014, inside their Springdale office.

SPRINGDALE -- Six-year-old Dina Howell stared perplexedly into a hand-held mirror, not so much smiling as baring her teeth.

She had chewed up a red tablet as the Crest toothpaste demonstrator had instructed her to, and to her horror she realized she had stuff all over her teeth.

What was that?

It was her first experience with marketing, that plaque-disclosing tablet, and from that day on she never used any toothpaste other than Crest. As chief executive officer of Saatchi & Saatchi X, a company that specializes in shopper marketing with the purpose of growing businesses and brand effectiveness, Howell, 52, has made her own impact on the marketing world.

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Dina Howell

“Dina’s energy and charisma enable her to make a compelling case for an idea ...”

— Doug McMillon, president and chief executive officer of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

"We help people make the right decision for them right at the shelf," she says. "The best innovations and best solutions are what works for shoppers. The manufacturer and retailer happen to have put that together with an agency, but all that really matters is: Is somebody buying it?"

That's shopper marketing.

At Saatchi & Saatchi X, Howell and her team work to know the human impact of a product, present it in an understandable way on the shelf and base their strategies on the very personal reasons behind a shopper's purchases.

The first executive to follow the founder, Howell has taken Saatchi to new heights in her five years of leadership. In that time, Saatchi & Saatchi X has received 12 Effie Awards--a peer-reviewed award known as the industry standard--and 125 international industry and brand awards.

Last month, the agency was ranked 19th on the 40 best places to work by Advertising Age.

The gusto required to keep an award-winning team and lead them in continued, renewed efforts has earned her a place in the spotlight. Howell made the "Who's Who in Shopper Marketing" list five times, recognition by Advertising Age Women to Watch, Point of Purchase Hall of Fame and a mention in Break the Ceiling, Touch the Sky: Success Secrets of the World's Most Inspirational Women, which was released this year.

"I would call Dina a transformational leader," says Eli Jones, dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. "She has some servant leadership skills. She empowers her people and serves their needs so they can drive the business."

Jones has seen that at work with what he calls Howell's exceptional service on his dean executive advisory board, as well as the board of the Center for Retailing Excellence, which is also part of the college.

"The test of this leadership, for me, is the extent to which she could lead a group of volunteers," he says. "If you can lead people on the payroll, that's one thing, but as a volunteer leading a group of volunteers, that's a true test of leadership."

COMPANY WOMAN

Howell's search for employment after graduation from the University of Toledo was limited. The regional economy was still reeling after the Detroit car industry's collapse.

She was in her fourth year of working retail for The Limited stores when a colleague of her mother's referred her to Procter & Gamble for an interview.

Reggie Fils-Aime, now president of Nintendo, interviewed Howell and made her a brand assistant at the company in 1988. Little did he know, the young manager who was doing promotions on the beach in Southern California for Hires Root Beer and Crush soda accounts would have a long and fruitful career at P&G -- one that wouldn't end until she'd earned the title of vice president of global media and brand operations.

U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Bob McDonald was the vice chairman of global operations for P&G at the time.

"She was very open to learning and I think that was a different style," McDonald says. "You've got to be open to new ideas if you're going to grow, and I was impressed with her ability to do that."

Howell took on Duncan Hines, and by 1992 she was placed in marketing services to train new employees in marketing. She got to know consumers of the many brands P&G represents by visiting them personally in their homes.

She began traveling globally the same year that her first child, Alex, was born.

"Her family is a great accomplishment of hers," McDonald says. "She has great kids. To do what she's done while working as hard as she has is a great accomplishment."

It was difficult for Howell to be away from her family, but she kept in mind that her sacrifices weren't different from those of any other company man.

During her pregnancies, Howell didn't let morning sickness stop her and during her maternity leave P&G had a fax machine installed so she could work from home.

FOUNDING MOTHER

In 1994, Howell began to meet with a handful of other colleagues to figure out how to use the rich marketing history of P&G -- which was more than 150 years of data at the time -- to make it more useful for consumers, the people who use products, as well as customers, the people who buy them.

It was a new concept. Having no blueprints or experts presented a great challenge.

In those early years, Howell says, they worked long hours against incredible odds.

"We had to create this new concept called 'shopper marketing' and then we had to sell it to the world's largest retailer," she says. "We had to find concepts that were creative and inspiring, and build the brands and increase sales, increase the category of business."

The new ground that Howell forged was promising, but it wouldn't have gone anywhere without funding. Within a few years Tom Muccio, retired president of the P&G Wal-Mart Customer Team, asked her to join the team.

"What these people were saying was music to my ears," Muccio says. "I said, 'I'm seeing the same thing. There's enormous power in working together with these retailers in a way that's different from the past.'"

They would test shopper marketing on their largest account -- Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. Howell would have to uproot her family, but she knew that it meant her new concept would be given a fair chance.

Howell arrived in Fayetteville in 1997.

Once there, she won over John E. Pepper -- chief executive officer of P&G at the time -- who provided the money to build a proper marketing team.

"When she came down, she had this incredible energy," Muccio says. "She was very positive, very can-do. Her productivity and resilience [were] amazing.

"Not only did we start getting pretty much instant results, she made great relationships and established trust with key folks. Those are hard things to do. It's easier to lead something than to make something [new]."

The idea of putting a marketer on a customer or sales team was foreign, so it was met with skepticism, too.

"People questioned whether the retail store was a marketing medium and whether we could build brands alongside our customers," says Jeff Schomburger, president of the P&G Wal-Mart Customer Team. "She not only proved it, it provided efficient and effective for brands."

Something about Howell's spirit rallied people around her.

"Dina was dynamic, full of energy, full of life," Schomburger says. "She's very approachable and her sense of humor puts people at ease. As a result, that gives them the confidence to brainstorm and ideate in provocative ways."

They may not have known what they were in for, but they knew they were up for it if she was involved.

"She was a dynamo," says Pepper, now chief executive officer of the Underground Railroad Freedom Center. "She came up with new, practical ideas, growing out extremely close contact with customers to match their needs, and inspired people around her.

"You wanted to work on things she worked on because she had good, fresh ideas but also because she made it clear to work together as a group or team. It was extremely energizing."

Howell earned people's trust by not pretending to know everything. She introduced her concepts, listened closely to feedback and looked to them for knowledge of sales and customer engagement.

They weren't the only ones learning.

The first challenge was finding a marketing agency in the Northwest Arkansas region. They enlisted the assistance of a Chicago-based agency, but the distance was crippling to the work.

Around the time that P&G dropped that partnership, Howell met Andy Murray, founder of Saatchi & Saatchi X.

LEADING THE WAY

In 1997, Saatchi & Saatchi X was not yet the worldwide operation it is today -- with offices in 130 countries to serve a variety of well-known brands and businesses, such as Wendy's, Quaker Oats and Cadbury.

At the time it was a team of three people willing to try new things without a promise of success. When combined with Howell and one of Wal-Mart's rising stars, it was a recipe for innovation.

"We found a very young leader at Wal-Mart who was willing to innovate and take a chance," Howell said of Doug McMillon, now chief executive officer of Wal-Mart. "The first thing he said to me was 'Doing things the same way is not going to really add any value to Wal-Mart shoppers, so we've got to find out how to do things very differently."

So they did.

Among their early collaborations was the first ever Baby Center. In the mid-'90s, a young mother's pursuit of clothes, diapers, toys, food and VCR tapes for capturing those first steps would take her all over the store.

Baby Centers not only put all things moms were already looking for in one place, it also increased sales for Wal-Mart.

McMillon gave Howell a single store for the prototype and clear success criteria. Once it took off, he gave her 10 or 20 more stores. To this day, he sees that model expanding to still more countries.

"Dina's energy and charisma enable her to make a compelling case for an idea," McMillon says. "But, more importantly, she does her homework and knows what she's talking about."

Howell's status as a global traveler has informed her experience in creating shopper marketing.

While visiting consumers all over the world, she racked up 2 million air miles. She travels so much that she holds two U.S. passports; she got the second to have in the interim while she was waiting for a visa to be approved.

She views it as necessary.

"A big part of understanding retail and understanding shoppers and consumers is making sure that you're not just learning about them through research reports and what other people say," Howell says. "You've got to be in their homes; in stores."

By getting to know shoppers and consumers and realizing the hard decisions they have when making a purchase, she came to realize how businesses could serve them more effectively.

She makes the same level of insight possible for her team.

"I've sent teams out to do this," she says. "People come back changed. They really begin to understand what it's like to walk in their shoes -- to have to feed and clothe a family on $2 a day.

"It makes you think differently as a marketer."

When searching for solutions near home, colleagues say, Howell will walk into any store and ask customers point-blank why they chose the product they lifted from the shelf.

If she had to do it over again, Howell would still go to great lengths for that valued shopper marketing information so consumers, brands and businesses can benefit from it.

Howell retired from P&G in 2010 to take the reins from Murray at Saatchi & Saatchi X. The two already had a close partnership and Murray remained chairman emeritus as a safety net for her first year as CEO, but the effort has been a challenging one nonetheless.

"I had a long history with the company," Howell says. "I appreciated it and it's always great to work someplace you know a lot of the employees and the work happening there. It's still very hard to follow a founder. They built the company in the way they wanted it to be.

"You're taking their baby. ... You want to honor them but also want to keep the company moving and growing and changing."

Now that Howell has led the way in shopper marketing, she continues her leadership in innovation by focusing energy into two areas -- developing the ecommerce outreach of Saatchi & Saatchi X and helping more women come into leadership through the 30 Percent Coalition, which has a goal of women holding one-third of board seats across public companies by the end of 2015.

Howell says being at Saatchi & Saatchi X is very much like coming home.

"Working with this agency in a different capacity as a CEO is really a joy," she says. "P&G was an amazing career and I was able to have chapter two. I never dreamed that I would be able to become a CEO."

High Profile on 12/14/2014

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