Who Gives A Crap’s David Titman on becoming third-largest toilet paper brand in UK

I did a Geography degree, specializing in climate change. And with hindsight, that has perhaps informed my choices on the sorts of businesses that I’ve been a part of, and particularly where I am now. I have always been aware of the environmental impact of brands and of consumerism.

At university, I had no idea what I wanted to do, but at the beginning of my third year, there was a one-day course laid on by the Institute of Direct Marketing, where they took you through a number of challenges: it was the best bits of marketing squashed into a day.

I found it really interesting. My takeaway was that I found myself able to engage with concepts more naturally than some of the others who attended. From that point on, marketing was on my radar.

The first job I managed to get after university was a six-month contract as a brand assistant at Marmite for Unilever. After that, another role became available and thus began my 15-year career of moving between Unilever brands.

Somebody very much took a punt on me and I’m forever grateful. After my Marmite role, I ran the marketing for a portfolio of brands across a number of markets, including Cyprus and Malta, among others. You had to get into detail very quickly and cut your teeth on the basics of marketing – because that’s all you had time for.

Within Unilever, I moved across home care and personal care. For five and a half years, I worked on Lynx and Sure For Men. Unilever acquired the Dollar Shave Club business and I moved there and set that up in the UK before taking on some of the global responsibility as marketing director for the global team.

From there, I moved into a role at Pladis – formerly United Biscuits. I looked after the McVitie’s portfolio for a year and learned a huge amount during that time. Then, there was this role available at Who Gives A Crap, which was a better alignment for me in terms of my personal values. But it also allowed me to stretch my wings as I needed to build a team, plan and processes from scratch. And I’ve been very happy here for two years.

Could you please summarize your offer at Who Gives A Crap?

Who Gives A Crap is a toilet paper company that launched just over 10 years ago in Australia. We make eco-friendly toilet paper. 50% of the profits from the company are donated back to charities and NGOs, who are bringing sanitation (fresh water and clean toilets) to the 2 billion people around the world who don’t have access to those things. At its most simple, we are a toilet paper company that helps build toilets.

What are your responsibilities in your current role?

My responsibilities are for the whole consumer journey. It’s unique in the company in that that doesn’t exist in other parts of the business. Until about 2.5 years ago, there wasn’t a team based in the UK. Everything ran centrally through two hubs: one in Australia and one in the US. Everything was run remotely for the UK.

My team’s responsibility is to work on marketing across the entire consumer journey: how do we localize and create even more relevance or even more ‘bang’ from our resources and the effort that we’re putting in?

We partner with the teams that are in the weeds and doing the day-to-day, and we advise on how we can connect the dots to make everything work a little harder. We’ve got this one singular overview of the consumer journey, which our global teams don’t necessarily have because they’re focused on – for example – customer service or Meta performance management. My team brings everything together into a much more singular and holistic consumer view.

How big is your team and how is it structured?

We are a small but mighty team of three. Our team mirrors the organization. We have a global, direct-to-consumer team that manages short-term delivery of performance and media. I have a consumer growth director who works on that.

We also have a global marketing team who are looking much more at the medium to long term: PR value, driving brand building initiatives, and I have a marketing manager responsible for that in my team, too.

WGAC is seeing rapid UK growth. There’s been considerable investment secured. It’s a direct-to-consumer business that has added operations in 40 countries, including the US and Canada. Headquartered in Melbourne and owned by the Australian distribution firm Good Goods Ltd, revenue grew 18% in the 12 months ending up to June 30 – a considerable increase on the last year and 50% of your profit is dedicated to efforts to improve water sanitation. So, with all of that in mind, what’s coming up for you in the next year? What does your marketing look like?

As you say, ‘we’re on a roll,’ pun intended. We’re now the third-largest toilet paper brand in the UK. We’re really proud of that. Our focus is very much to build on that foundation. You could say that we’re ‘the largest toilet paper brand that nobody’s heard of.’ So, there’s this huge gap in our brand awareness: 7/10 people still couldn’t identify us in a lineup.

I’ve broken that down into three parts: first: we need people to know the name: Who Gives A Crap. Once they know who we are, then, second, we need to get them to know what we do: we sell toilet paper. The third thing is to explain why we are different – that we donate 50% of our profits and that our products are more environmentally friendly than the equivalents.

We’ve been careful not to knee-jerk into big awareness initiatives, driving big campaigns and then going completely silent. We need a more sustained and measured approach to make sure that we are talking to the right people in the right ways and building all three of those drivers.

We’ll continue to invest in possibly weird, slightly bizarre ways of getting our message across. One of the things that is fabulous about this company and the brand is that we have emotion built in. The fact that we donate our profits is fundamental to our business. We know that we have a real impact on the world. We help real human beings.

We’re also not denying what our product is: it is toilet paper with a punchy name. Occasionally, this is a double-edged sword. I remember early conversations about getting our ad on TV after the immediate Clearcast response of, “Sure guys, you can do that, but it’s after the 9pm watershed.”

Ultimately, we found a way around that, but we don’t shy away from being disruptive. The reason we’ve gotten to be one of the largest in the category is because we’re doing things differently.

What is your first memory of a marketing success that you were part of, where you felt: ‘This is me. This is the career for me.’

It was my first week in my role as brand assistant of Marmite, feeling like a little bit of a fraud – massive imposter syndrome. I was not marketing trained and I was sitting in a meeting with my new boss and an advertising agency, listening to conversations that I was not following.

We were looking at ad concepts of pictures drawn in Marmite and we were trying to decide which of these things were going to be the out-of-home campaign and which one was for the scrap heap.

I sat in silence for an hour of this conversation. Right towards the end, they turned to me and said, “What are you thinking?” I remember making a point around certain drawings being easier to interpret, like I could understand what one image was more easily than another.

Everyone around the table took in what I was saying and went: “You’re right.” In that moment, I thought that maybe I did understand it and perhaps I had a slightly different way of thinking about things. Maybe this would be something that I could learn to rely on a little bit more. It was only day four in my new job, but I really remember feeling: “Actually, I think I can do this.”

How do you rate the value of emotional connection with campaigns?

The brand Who Gives A Crap is very much built from a foundation of doing things differently: being a bit creative, being disruptive. The reason it has been so successful and will continue to be successful is because it has ‘standout factor.’

We push ourselves ‘to look beyond’. The founders tell a fascinating story about making that first decision to wrap our toilet rolls. That decision was a complete tangent to the category norms, and it’s now become one of the most important elements of the brand.

We talk about every roll being a billboard for the brand. You may find them in a bathroom when you are around for a dinner party at a friend’s – and future customers get that immediate brand exposure, which you wouldn’t get if all you saw were naked rolls bought from the supermarket – which are also often covered in plastic.

Emotional connection is absolutely core to the brand. That also means that there’s pressure to make sure that everything is up to standard for a brand that has consistently delivered at a high level. But that’s part of the challenge. That’s also why I’m here and why I love it.

How do you value creativity in advertising?

Nobody wants to talk about toilet paper. We are an inherently dull category. I’m more than happy for the category to be dull. But disruption is in our brand DNA. When you have something to say beyond just: “It’s soft,” (which all the other category brands say), being creative is a necessary requirement of doing our job well. None of our competitors can talk about the great stuff we are doing for people and the planet, which allows us to be more creative and invite customers to connect emotionally with our brand.

Why should brands balance the long and the short?

The obvious answer to the question of ‘why?’ is because it’s scientifically proven. There’s so much data out there to show that this is the way to grow brands and businesses in the long term.

The challenge is that no matter how much science there is, there are always immediate demands – board members, or whoever it may be, saying: “We’ve got X amount of money to spend now. How do we make sure that we are deploying that finite spend for maximum gain, because we want to have more money in the bank now so that we can reinvest it next year.”

One of the things that we’re doing at the moment is really looking at how can we start to prove the benefit of ‘the long.’ We want to be able to show that media spend X drove Y amount of return, but also what we think it will drive in two or three years’ time.

Probably most of the people that are compelled to do something as a result of having seen our ad may not purchase immediately. It might be a case in which you're initially entering their consideration set, and then, in six months’ time, you might convert them.

So, if we can show there is a small, short-term impact but a relatively larger medium-term impact because people have visited the site, then we can then talk to them in six months’ time and target them more efficiently. For example, on Meta, we can start to show the effects of the short, medium and long-term benefits of media spend.

Of what initiative, delivered on your watch, are you most proud?

There are two I’d like to share. First, there’s a campaign I ran while I was working on Lynx called ‘Bigger Issues.’ The Lynx brand was mostly associated with 13-year-olds and school changing rooms. We relied on humor for our communications.

I set up a relationship with Calm (Campaign Against Living Miserably), the suicide awareness charity that was at that time relatively unknown and which has now gone on to do amazing things.

We ran a digitally fueled campaign where we applied ‘social listening’ (monitoring social media) to find topics of conversation that were happening on X (formerly Twitter) that were being talked about more than male suicide was. Our point was that male suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45. We fed the campaign into digital billboard advertisements in real-time.

We changed the creative every two hours, which was the average length of time between each male suicide in the UK. The campaign drove a 45% increase in awareness for male suicide. Calm was invited into The Royal Foundation. They were part of the Heads Together program, which was talked about in Parliament. I was really, really proud of that one.

Also, at the time, I was personally in a really dark place. I was battling with depression myself, and the campaign meant a lot to me, but it was also a risk for the organization. There were a lot of people who I had to convince to get everything aligned – but we did it.

The other one is much more recent. It was when I managed to convince Clearcast to let us air a WGAC advert with the word ‘crap’ in it before 9pm in the UK. I think I’m the first and thus only advertiser to air an ad with the word ‘crap’ in it – pre-watershed.

A much more flippant achievement, but great nonetheless. I put together what I thought was a very well-considered proposal, which I’m very grateful to say that Clearcast agreed with, and our advert was shown 18 months ago, before 9pm – and included the word “crap”!

How do you navigate the whitewater rapids of marketing’s fast-moving technology and tech platforms?

Really, there are two things that matter: one is the business objectives. And the other is the consumer lens. Anything that intersects the two of those is a very interesting territory. In the past, I have been guilty of figuring out ways of getting more reach at the expense of really understanding if that’s the right way of talking to the consumer.

Equally, there’s been some stuff that I’ve done that was definitely ‘creative for creative sake’ or ‘media for media sake.’ Work that is a really nice, ‘pat me on the back thing’ that I can point at… but about three and a half people saw it and it’s not actually done anything of real meaning to drive business impact.

In my role right now, I have a much more holistic view of that consumer journey than anyone else in the organization. My team sees the whole picture and how it all comes together. We can see if there are certain gaps or certain drop-offs that need attention.

One of the things that we are working on now is gaining a much greater understanding of all the consumer interactions with our brand. We want to use particular tools, technology or media that are right for the consumer but also to plug those gaps and help fulfill our business objectives.

Sign up for your
Daily Dose of
Marketing Insights

Sign up now

What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?

There’s a big myth outside of marketing that marketing is just creative. Creativity is a huge part of it – but I think there’s a real lack of understanding of the full impact of marketing, from diagnosis to strategy to implementation and results.

What advice would you give to your younger self if you could go back in time?

Be bold and trust yourself. Be prepared to say: this is my gut instinct. It could be right, it could be wrong, but it’s my gut instinct. There’s real power in that. I wasn’t as confident when I was younger.

I spent the first couple of years of my career at Unilever in a team where ‘being different’ was their kind of our raison d’etre. The brands we worked on weren’t ‘strategic,’ so we were encouraged to do things differently and prove that we could grow them faster than a ‘mainstream’ brand.

If we needed to break things along the way, then we were encouraged to do so. So that’s what I learned. That was a hugely valuable to me. All of the work that I am most proud of comes from moments where I’ve had to make considered but bold decisions. The Calm Lynx campaign – viewed from the outside - was risky. It was a big change of direction from a brand that previously had used humor to communicate.

I was confident in it because I had a 28-page escalation and response document mapping out the risks, so if anything were to happen, I’d already thought it through. So, I felt really comfortable that regardless of how it lands, I would know exactly what to do, what process to follow, or what response to make to ensure this is a success. I’m actually quite risk-averse as a person. But some of the best marketing I have done has come from a place of being bold.

The question posed by a fellow senior marketer for you is: what’s the hardest business decision you’ve had to make, and how did you do it

I’m a bit of a planner. So, even if a decision is tough, I know I have thought it through from a myriad of different angles. As a result, I feel confident in the direction, even if it has come from a difficult place.

I’ve refined that muscle over time, and I’m more able to trust my gut instinct – but even then, I always surround that instinct with supporting evidence, documentation, data or a response plan. I am always prepared – which minimizes the impact of hard decisions.

What question would you like to ask the next senior marketer in this interview series – you don’t know who it is, but what would you like to ask?

I have a question that I love asking in interviews and I think it gets to the core of a person. Can you give me an example of what I call a ‘crucible moment’ in your life: something that’s happened to you as an individual could be in your home life, could be in your work life - but something that has changed the way you approach certain situations?

When you are not marketing, what makes you tick?

I love people. Obviously, I enjoy spending time with friends and family - going for dinner with people, catching up, asking difficult questions and having ‘deep and meaningfuls’ but equally, I love finding out about people. I love getting to understand people. I’m actually quite shy as a human. I find networking events tricky, but put me in front of a waiter, or someone at a checkout, or someone doing their shopping and I love understanding people and understanding a little bit more about what makes them tick.

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…

It’s a really overplayed adage, but I still think it’s not heeded enough: you are not your consumer. One of the things that I’ve been really keen to do throughout my career is get closer to the consumer and their whole journey with your brand, product or service.

At Lynx, I used to sit the team down with our social media manager and do social media moderation – just to immerse ourselves in the lives of actual consumers – to better understand the people who are posting on our Facebook page. At WGAC, we do the same. I spent weeks at Dollar Shave Club, becoming as competent in Zendesk as the customer service team was. I would respond to tickets myself.

You can go with your gut instinct for a time, but to fuel your gut feel you need to immerse yourself in the lives of your customers. As marketers, we all need to remember the first week we spent working at our current business. That’s what the consumer knows about your company.

By the time you’re two months in, you know many times more about your brand than anyone else in the public domain. You can’t trust yourself at that point to make the same decisions as ‘Helen, who lives around the corner.’

People forget that. People get stuck in the now, the mythology and the lore of the brand, which the average consumer does not know about. I had my own personal experience of this: I’ve been a WGAC customer for about six years – so I was a customer for a number of years before I joined the company.

One of our core marketing calendar moments is that we launch Limited Edition toilet rolls. These are rolls that are wrapped differently. I remember thinking while I was just a customer: ‘Who on Earth would want a limited-edition toilet roll wrapper in the bathroom?! That is ridiculous; it is not what I bought the product for.’

Since joining the company though, it’s become really clear just how many of our customers do want a limited edition wrapped toilet roll! Plus, it also performs a really important function for us as a business as they allow us to talk and to tell stories about really intimate topics (like impact or our purpose) in a way that’s really engaging and that works for a good proportion of our customer base.

The one thing I know about marketing is that you are not your customer, and you must remember that the average person knows a fraction of what you know about your brand.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Tim Healey is founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet-up.