The Billion Dollar Round-Table
The Billion Dollar Roundtable was created in 2001 to recognize and celebrate corporations that achieve annual spending of at least $1 billion with minority and woman-owned suppliers.
The roundtable has 32 members, including Procter & Gamble, Apple, AT&T, the Home Depot, Bank of America, Honda, Meta, Microsoft and IBM among others.
At P&G, key focus is their impact on generational wealth, economic, empowerment and social and community development. While the program was initially launched in the mid 70s, P&G has expanded to include all sorts of diverse groups to their efforts. In 2017, P&G expanded their program to include global DEI companies.
Jennifer McLachlan, VP Brand Building Purchases at Procter & Gamble and Sharon Patterson, President and CEO of the Billion Dollar Roundtable shared their approach to DEI.
Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) is a force for growth so that we can do more good. Growing our business allows us to invest more in good. If people understand WHY we are involved in DEI, we will all contribute more. Diversity in marketing procurement is different than other procurement categories. In 1998, Jennifer got a question from her boss that changed her focus for the good (pun intended). Her boss asked her why she did not have any diverse vendors in her RFP proposal and said it is her job to better understand the diverse vendors in her category. Since then, Jenifer’s vast experience at P&G has allowed her to move from including diverse vendors in her category buys to being part of developing a program that grows the market — and it is a huge privilege to do this kind of work. Now she asks every procurement manager who is preparing an RFP if they are including diverse vendors. And more importantly, she asks this question for every RFP — diverse vendors make a great fit for all spend categories, not just RFPs targeting a diverse audience. For people who are new to DEI, a great resource is the ANA. AIMM also has a list of diversity led companies. It is also great to network with other companies who has a large DEI spend to learn from them.
At P&G, Jennifer uses data to educate and influence marketers. Over the last ten years, all the US population growth has come from diverse segments of the populations. Her team then looks at each brand and business to identify what the brand share gap is with the diverse segment of the population. As a result, they have identified the value of the opportunity. This has been implemented in the integrated marketing strategy. Jennifer’s advice for beginners in this space is to ask yourself “why not” as opposed to “why”. This work is incredibly rewarding both as an individual and as a corporate leader.
For each of us working with and for marketing procurement, it is key to be educated in this area. Utilize all the resources you have access to. This includs industry associations, peer groups, network events and pure direct email to colleagues, agency partners and friends. Since sustainability is also on the rise, we can often find synergies in the approach to build knowledge here.
