The Campaign for Sustained Leadership

Few would argue that Sharon Fordham is a lifesaver.

The president of Global e-Business for Nabisco Inc. has led a series of key turnarounds in her nearly 20 years with the food giant, including resuscitating the venerable but ho-hum LifeSavers candy line and staving off an onslaught of competitors during the “cookie wars” of the 1980s.

Today, Fordham, WG’77, takes on her most interesting project to date: creating and implementing Nabisco’s e-business strategy, an area that includes online grocery retailing, Internet communications (including online advertising, marketing and consumer relationship marketing), as well as creating new Internet-based revenue streams and overseeing something the company calls “worldwide e-productivity.”

When Fordham assumed her new role about a year ago, the e-business unit was essentially undefined. Companies like Nabisco realized they couldn’t ignore e-commerce and the Internet, but were unclear what focus they should take, and how.

“My first mission was to create order from chaos,” Fordham says. Thankfully, her previous experience creating the candystand.com website as president of Nabisco’s LifeSavers unit gave her a good starting point. Today, under Fordham, Nabisco has a clear e-mission.

“We’ve pretty much broken it down into three areas: e-business is all about leveraging the Internet as a powerful new communications medium, a new transaction medium and a productivity tool. We’ve fashioned our strategies in support of that view of the world,” she says.

As a result of those strategies, Fordham says Nabisco has established a powerful online lead. The company’s two primary websites –candystand.com and nabiscoworld.com – “lead the industry by far. We’re 50 percent larger than the largest packaged goods company (Procter & Gamble)and five and six times larger than other major competitor sites in terms of traffic and stickiness, or duration of average visit.”

Why? Early on, as president of LifeSavers, Fordham believed that “destination” or content sites would hold visitors and bring them back far better than websites filled with “brochureware,” which offer little more than product descriptions and company histories. “We are also providing information to consumers, but in a very subtle way,” Fordham says.

For instance, the candystand site offers state-of-the-art games, for free. But an advertising platform is at work: a basketball game is not just a basketball game, it’s “Bubble Yum” Basketball, while hockey is “Ice Breakers” Hockey and billiards is “BreathSavers” Billiards. “When you think about the amount of time you spend playing one of our games, the brand message is constantly on the screen helping to propel brand awareness and image in a way we’ve never seen before, even in the off-line world,” Fordham says. The nabiscoworld.com site takes a similar approach, swapping games with entertainment via a virtual amusement park of sorts. “We felt that we wanted something that would bring people back.When we tried to envision the future, we felt the Internet was going to evolve along the lines of the TV economic model, so we were sure that providing content (much like a TV show)was the way to go,” she says.

“The biggest pressure is the incredible speed of the Internet and the clash of mass marketers trying to adapt to a world of mass customization and one-to-one marketing,” Fordham adds. “Another challenge is creating a personal relationship with consumers when we’ve historically been more of a one-to-many, versus one-to-one, promotion and advertising agent.”

Fordham has a long history of new product and turnaround work at Nabisco. In 1994,she took on the task of reinvigorating an ailing LifeSavers subsidiary,where profit and sales volume had dipped. “Believe it or not, the number-one issue we had was a customer service problem where we were not shipping our products in a timely fashion,” Fordham says. “So before we could even fix problems with our core brands, we had to do something as mundane as straighten out the customer service difficulties we were having.”

Fordham tackled the company’s other problems systematically and introduced multiple new hit products, such as Ice Breakers gum and CremeSavers candy. Within three years, profits had more than doubled, net sales had increased significantly, and the candystand website was launched.

As a senior marketing leader, Fordham managed Nabisco’ defense during the “cookie wars” of the 1980s when several corporate powerhouses, including Procter & Gamble, aggressively flooded supermarkets with new cookie lines. Fordham fought back, launching a line of soft cookies that ultimately helped Nabisco prevail on supermarket shelves. Fordham went on to introduce several other products that became major hits for Nabisco, including Teddy Grahams cookies and SnackWell’s.

The affable Fordham, who will only admit to being “in my 40s,” grew up the youngest of four children in central New Jersey. She earned her BA from Rutgers University and is an avid golfer and a passionate musician who put herself through college giving clarinet lessons. Not surprisingly, Fordham ultimately aspires to a top leadership post. “Obviously my ambition is to run a company and we’ll see how that unfolds. But I’m optimistic that those opportunities are there — it’s just a matter of time.”

[Editor's Note: In January 2001, Sharon Fordham was appointed Chief Executive Officer of WeightWatchers.com, Inc. She will develop future Internet strategies for Weight Watchers and oversee the 2001 launch of new WeightWatchers.com sites around the world.]