Bayer shakes up the traditional agency-client model to produce unforgettable campaigns.
If you’ve recently seen a memorably provocative consumer healthcare campaign and thought, I can’t believe they went there, chances are you were looking at a brainchild of Patricia Corsi.
She’s the Chief Marketing and IT Officer at Bayer Consumer Health, part of Bayer AG, the global healthcare leader that recorded more than $50 billion in revenue in 2021. Corsi knows that creating a successful marketing campaign often requires taking people outside of their comfort zone. As a result, she’s helped many Bayer brands not only disrupt the consumer healthcare field but break through the white noise of an oversaturated marketing world.
A native of Brazil, Corsi is a paragon of marketing, brand, and consumer insights, having spent more than two decades shaping iconic consumer brands. Prior to joining Bayer, she was SVP/CMO of the Heineken Company Mexico and VP of Marketing for Unilever UK and Ireland. Among her many accolades, she was one of Adweek’s Top 30 CMOs in 2021 and this year's finalist for the WFA (World Federation of Advertising) Market of the Year awards.
During a recent episode of the CleverTap Engage podcast, my co-host and fellow Forbes writer, John Koetsier, and I spoke with Corsi about how she’s shaking up the traditional agency-client model to produce unforgettable campaigns, and directly confronting society’s awkwardness around normal, everyday bodily functions and healthcare concerns. [Disclosure: CleverTap curates content for the global marketing community and retains my services as an online talent and content consultant.]
Working within the tightly regulated consumer health industry, Corsi has pushed back against the conventional view from health-related brands “where there is no conversation with the consumers, only with the doctors,” she told us in our interview. Traditionally, health marketing has been “about product delivery and science and not about the whole story of the brand.” Nor, she adds, has it been about the personal and emotional component behind purchase decisions.
How Unleashed Creativity Broke a Taboo Around Women’s Health
Corsi has developed a process with her agency partners that respects the science and complies with regulatory frameworks, while crucially elevating the personal and emotional impact that comes from making people’s lives better. It represents both an organizational mindset change and a roadmap for how brands can get the most out of their relationships with agencies.
“We have a process in Bayer, something that I started doing in my days at Heineken, called Creative Unleash,” she said. “Our partners come with ideas; there is no briefing. It’s for the sheer love of our brands and knowing our strategic objectives and our consumers.” In other words, no pre-set agenda, no rules. Simply free-flowing creativity.
At one of these Creative Unleash meetings, a Bayer creative partner, AnalogFolk, brought up a concept for an educational campaign to run in various global markets, built around Bayer’s Canesten brand, which treats intimate skin conditions. They called it the Vagina Academy. At first, admitted Corsi, “I was very, very uncomfortable. Then someone from the team said, ‘This looks great. This is exactly what we need to do. Can we change the name?’ At that point, I said, ‘We can never change the name because we are uncomfortable. The name [has] that stopping power.’”
For Corsi, the Vagina Academy campaign—and the process that produced it—speaks to “the courage to do things that matter. We got a really powerful piece of data saying that less than 50% of women will mention the word vagina with their gynecologist. If in the confidential place that you have with your doctor, you don’t feel confident to talk about this, how are you going to get better? So first, we made ourselves uncomfortable. We wanted to break the taboo.”
Improving Lives Is Number One, Even When the Topic Is Number Two
If the Vagina Academy hasn’t opened your eyes, how about “Workstipation Reform.” It’s a campaign for Bayer’s MiraLAX brand, designed to help ease the anxiety of workers who have returned to the office post-COVID and are feeling a little reluctant to, well, go in an office bathroom stall around others. Developed by BBDO through the Creative Unleash process, the campaign includes printed materials that workers can actually arrange inside a bathroom stall to increase privacy and reduce embarrassment.
“You have to have a marketing team that has the courage to do [things like this] for the benefit of the people that we serve,” said Corsi. “At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if we are embarrassed. What matters is that, in health, we have one job: to make people’s lives better as much as we can.”
The Agency Side: Getting Past Risk Aversion
For a sense of how Creative Unleash works on the agency side of the coin, I separately spoke with Lindsay Pattison, chief client officer for the global advertising giant WPP, which is a major media planning and buying partner for Bayer. Pattison works closely with Corsi on a number of brands; she described Corsi as the kind of client who pushes an agency, in a good way. “She’s very comfortable with making people feel a little bit uncomfortable—and then you realize it’s fine to be a bit uncomfortable,” Pattison told me. “She pushes and has amazing big ideas, yet she’s also methodical. She has this brilliant mix of IQ and EQ.”
While WPP does not handle creative for Bayer, it is an integral part of Corsi’s Creative Unleash process and collaborates with Bayer to develop innovative campaign activations and media strategies. “We’ve now got the ability to activate ideas in so many ways we could have only dreamed up a few years ago,” Pattison said. “The challenge is that consumers don’t want us to connect with them constantly. We have to create value. We have to understand the channel and the mindset of that consumer and then think about how we engage with them in that environment.”
This is where Corsi’s Creative Unleash process is particularly valuable. “The greatest challenge for unleashing a creative mindset in consumer health,” explained Pattison, “is this perceived risk aversion that comes from being a science-based company and an evidence-driven culture. Something that Patricia is driving is, yes, there’s an evidence-driven culture, but there’s a belief in the value of imagination, ideas, and exploration.”
Pattison’s advice for brands: “You don’t want to research [ideas] to death. You can discuss, you can challenge, you can provoke, and that’s what Patricia does. It’s that balance of IQ and EQ.” The IQ, Pattison said, involves rational decisions, and the fact that “a company like Bayer has to have a huge amount of science—evidence-based—and trust.” The EQ, meanwhile, is “understanding the consumer and linking to their imagination, to their beliefs.”
Create a Bigger, Better Experience
In our separate conversations, Corsi and Pattison both offered similar views regarding how brands can deliver experiences that not only meet revenue objectives but foster deep and meaningful connections with customers. On the agency side, Pattison told me, “You can’t follow a formula anymore because our world moves and changes so quickly.” On the client side, Corsi encouraged brands to break from convention: “Deliver something that is unexpected. There is always great potential to make someone’s experience different, better, bigger.”
To hear more insights from Patricia Corsi, including her golden rule of customer retention, listen to the entire episode of The CleverTap Engage podcast.
