Nicola Buck, Senior Vice President Marketing, bp is a global leader in marketing and customer management, driving transformation and nurturing talent. With extensive experience at bp since 2004, she led fuels marketing, brand development, and launched bp Ultimate. She also served as VP Marketing for bp Fuels, North America.

In an insightful interaction with Global Woman Leader Magazine, Nicola shares her insights on the impact of workplace diversity in connecting with diverse consumer demographics, the role of cognitive diversity in decision-making and innovative practices for integrating diversity into brand identity. She also talks about the evolving significance of inclusivity in retail and branding over the next decade.

Given the diverse global consumer base in retail and convenience markets, how does internal workplace diversity enable a company to authentically connect with different consumer demographics?

We serve millions of customers across the world every day that span a wide range of demographics, ages and cultural backgrounds. Only by having a team that truly reflects the diverse needs of our customers, can you authentically connect with customers wherever they are in the world.

I believe in the concept of ‘lived experience’, making sure that you either have people in your teams that can help you make decisions that consider the distinct needs of different customer groups or by directly tapping into and testing products and services that you are developing with your customers. This is essential in ensuring that you will truly connect with the customers you serve.

How do you perceive the role of cognitive diversity such as different problem-solving approaches and perspectives within high-performing teams?

Cognitive diversity or diversity of thought is equally as important as any other form of diversity when running high performance teams. Embracing cognitive diversity ensures we avoid the pitfalls of ‘group think’ and ensures that you are considering things from different perspectives. For Type 1 decisions that can be made quickly, cognitive diversity can find new ways of doing things by embracing the challenge that there are always different ways of doing things or avenues to encourage people to get things done faster. For Type 2 decisions, where more thought is needed, embracing diversity of thought can ensure that you are not overlooking an important perspective and therefore mitigates the risks of overlooking something that someone else has seen from their vantage point. It is essential that you are creating an environment where everyone can ‘speak up’ and sometimes it is important as a leader to go the extra-mile to help encourage all the voices in the room, which can avoid serious issues down the track, especially safety related incidents. It is often the quietest voices in the room who are listening more, understanding the full picture and therefore able to pinpoint a risk and proactively identify avenues to mitigate it. So, by encouraging these voices who are often listening to everyone’s perspective, creates an invaluable perspective that can avoid some really challenging situations.

What innovative practices have you seen (or implemented) in international retail organizations to integrate cultural and demographic diversity into the brand identity itself?

Running global brands in international retail organisations is always challenging. It is important to ensure you build your brand through consistency to make the brand successful and at the same time find the right balance of adaption to local customer needs and preferences. This is especially true in a business like ours, where for example, convenience retail needs to adapt to local market flavours and tastes of our offer.

Food is an excellent example of this, where what will appeal to the palette of our customers in Poland will be dramatically different in offer to that of what our Indian consumers would be looking for when on the road. Ensuring teams are diverse together with people that ‘live and breathe’ our brand, alongside reflecting the customer bases we serve is critical.

Ensuring consistency in the look and feel of a brand whilst allowing for local market nuances is what ultimately makes global retail brands successful - is not only external offers but how they take these offers to market that makes the difference – this is why you will find wonderful samos as at our Wild Bean cafes in India and freshly prepared halloumi, egg and avocado baps included in our new menu in the UK – albeit brought to markets through the same look and feel known across the world.

It is not just food however – for our Castrol range we ensure customers in India can access bike products for varied needs ranging from essential engine protection to superior performance, which allows us to serve customers across the urban and rural demographic of India. Whereas in Europe, you will find a lot less bike products and more car specific engine productsdeveloped to exceed the highest European performance standards.

How will the role of diversity evolving in the retail and brand sectors over the next decade?

I think the challenge for all brands is to ensure that they continue to embrace diversity of how we work, how we operate and how we think. If you look at the life trends that we are seeing across the world – consumers want to be seen as individuals. It is important to consider the notion that consumers will judge their experience with your brand not by what they’ve experienced from your competitors but against their last greatest experience.

For us in the retail and convenience environment, this means that consumers are judging their expectations not against a gas station or where they are buying lubricants but with, for example, their experience with a brand like Amazon. An experience where they can have things delivered to them on their terms at any time and in any way. So, we as brand owners, must live up to that and make sure that we are adapting to deliver customer experiences and brand experiences in a way that our customers want and expect and ultimately that feels personalised to them.

However, at the same time, the other challenge that all kinds of big brands face are operating in a cost-conscious manner and finding a way to deliver things consistently wherever possible in the world. It is also crucial that we are as efficient as possible in the way that we bring our products and services to life. Diversity will lead us to that successful intersection of finding things that you do once well, to make sure that you run your business on a global scale as efficiently and effectively as possible. At the same time finding the things that really matter to the customers to personalise those experiences for them in a way that they consume your brands at a local level. Again, to me, it is the diversity of people that you have working on your brands globally and locally around the world, ensuring this reflects diversity in backgrounds of thought, age and culture that will ultimately bring your brand to life in a successful way.