Always the firebrand Clones are out at Kimberley-Clark, but Ian Jones personifies its well-defined culture, as Karen Dempsey discovers The headquarters of Kimberly-Clark in Kent are built on an old spitfire site and sometimes the building rumbles to the rhythm of unexploded bombs. And not only from the echoes of wartime ones, either. What with Procter & Gamble's Charmin assault on KC's toilet tissue territory, the guy in charge at KC, Ian Jones, has needed all the weaponry he could muster as his enemies lobbed grenades (well, OK then, loo rolls) over his trenches. The first battle ­ where KC fought alongside other members of the Association of Makers of Soft Tissue Products ­ forced P&G to retreat and reformulate its product and now they are having "constructive dialogues" on various issues. In the meantime, KC had to go to the trade with a price increase earlier this year which, with the current appetite for EDLP, was a tough one to get buyers to swallow. But Jones and his team somehow managed it. "I sometimes think I missed my calling as a fireman because I'm a bloody good firefighter by definition after all the experience I've had," says Jones. But his experience is entirely a Kimberly-Clark one. Jones, 42, started at KC as a graduate trainee in 1981 ­ "I've been here in excess of 19 years now, man and boy some would say, boy and boy others would say" ­ working his way up through the various ranks of brand management for 10 years until he became European marketing director for the bathroom tissue business. A year later there was a restructure of the business and he was approached by his bosses to become UK sales director "as we need marketing people to have a much more customer based perspective on the business". His initial horror became reluctant acceptance and in retrospect he says it's the best thing he ever did. "I think there are too many marketing people who don't have a clue about what really makes customers tick. Marketing people tend to go to customers for a cappuccino and a continental chocolate biscuit to do a product presentation. But the real fun and games happens afterwards. The one thing I learned during that period was to have respect for both buyer and seller in terms of the sheer stresses and strains they go under to try to reach a satisfactory conclusion for either business." He was then appointed general manager at the end of 1995 when KC merged with Scott ­ "it was the job to which I'd always aspired but in my heart of hearts wasn't ever quite sure I'd get to". And then early last year he became vice president, customer management, northern Europe. But it's not only customers he needs to manage. Current internal situations at KC means he's having to mastermind ­ and take the flak for ­ various battleplans. On the one side there's the customer management structure, in place since April last year, where instead of organising the company on a country basis it's done by creating dedicated customer business units and developing reporting relationships on a global basis. So the German Wal-Mart team reports to the Asda Wal-Mart team in the UK as Leeds has been nominated as the European HQ. The company is also setting up a shared service centre in Brighton (to handle all the administrative and transaction based activities from one location), meaning that one in three people in the Kent offices could be affected. He insists that everyone has been kept informed all the way down the line, rather than presenting it as a fait accomplie. His management style is honest, upfront and a little bit blunt, but that's all part of the way the KC culture has developed. "We like to think there's no such thing as a KC clone," he explains, "but there is one common thread through us all and that's we like to call a spade a spade ­ though some would call it a bloody shovel. "The one thing I think defines the UK management style is one of open directness to the point of being blunt. And rather than knife you in the back they'll do it in the front and you'll see them coming from 50 yards away." Not everyone warms to his style, however. He admits that he's "mastered the art of e-mail screaming" and says he was shocked to discover 18 months ago that there was a group of people in one of the European offices that was scared to death of him because he'd let fly during a meeting. "It wasn't a temper tantrum, it was a simple statement of the facts as I saw them and my view of what the remedy should be, but I don't think they were used to people talking to them in quite such a direct fashion." His critics would describe him as being too blunt. But his friends might say he's too modest and self-deprecating. He says he strives to be "a good corporate citizen" by which he means he has to bite his tongue sometimes. He says: "It's not a question of the guy with the most pips on his shoulder who shouts the loudest who gets his own way ­ that would be a real shame if that happened and counter the culture because we try to get everyone to contribute their views. "I don't have a monopoly on knowing everything that's going on in this place, far from it." What keeps him awake at night is the results orientation that KC has at the heart of its business. "To use the soccer analogy [after the US merger] we went from being a Fulham or a Watford, to not quite a Manchester United in the Unilever or Procter league, but certainly a mid premier league company. "However we are quite often guilty of being our own most serious critics. As a company it's one of our constant failings but it's also one of our constant strengths ­ we are harshly critical of our own performance. Even when we do tremendously well we turn the page of history too quickly and get on with the next challenge. "If you set your sights high enough, how far can you really go? If you set the bar to a height which is currently out of reach but could be attainable if you made the right adjustments and made the right changes then it's quite an interesting mindset shift and big cultural change. It's very British to say, oh we can't possibly do that and here are the rational 99 reasons why not'." But Jones will give you 99 rational reasons why he can make a success out of an extremely cut throat tissue business. His favourite brand has to be Andrex. For the record, he loves dogs but the puppies he has at home aren't labradors, they're Jack Russells ­ "they're big dogs in little dogs' bodies and I have tremendous respect for that," he says. While he may have risen through the higher ranks as a salesman, it is brands that are at the heart of his business, and his life, judging by the passionate way he discusses loo rolls. "People outside the business tend to think of toilet rolls as a commodity market based on commodity materials. How can anyone possibly build true brand equity in something like a toilet roll? And yet Andrex is just phenomenal from that point of view. I think it's a sort of beacon for many of the global businesses we have in terms of trying to build some of that equity because we have historically struggled in some markets." He continues: "Andrex has amazing power and amazing leverage. Having said that we have to be careful, we are stewards of a very important but equally very fragile thing in the brand equity of Andrex. And the way we addressed their [P&G's] impending launch, I think we got it about right. "We didn't want to do anything that jarred with consumers or you start to cause fractures to appear. So we stuck to our guns, we sent very clear and relevant product messages on Andrex, we used promotional activity creatively and we've come out of it reasonably well." So is he complacent? Not a chance. "No, the war's not over, and it's not going to go away. The battle between KC and Procter historically has been fought and will continue to be fought on the basis of superior products and superior marketing ­ and not on giving the damned stuff away which is what people's last resort tends to be when things aren't going very well." His 19 years with the business have not dulled his taste for battle. By all accounts the Jones guns will be blazing for some time to come. Just be careful to duck the debris. {{PROFILE }}