Jan Gooding is a breath of fresh air in so many ways. She’s always been something of a rarity among corporate marketers in that she’s candid and honest, and willing to talk to the press. As clever and reflective as she is frank, she’s always been a go-to contact for a pithy quote. 

Gooding has the gift of imbuing her business perspectives and insights with the personal.

The intellect has obviously always been there – she read economics at Cambridge – but no doubt the reflection has increased over the years. For Gooding’s path through life – both professional and personal – has twisted and turned, to reach a point where some of those experiences have collided.

It’s not hard to see why Aviva asked her, when she was working as its global brand director, to take on the role of global inclusion director – “I was offered diversity director, but diversity becomes men versus women, pink versus the blue team; we want an inclusive culture for everybody” – or why the Market Research Society invited her to be its president this year, taking over from Dame Dianne Thompson. 

Gooding’s first career, in advertising, was brought to an abrupt halt when she was sacked after having a baby. “It’s one of those scandalous stories that I can’t believe happened – but it did. I was on the board, went on maternity leave, developed postnatal depression – and I genuinely think my fellow, all-male board directors thought they were doing me a kindness. There were no role models then, and none of their wives worked. I felt very vulnerable at the time, but, actually, I think it’s been the making of me.”

This dire situation prompted Gooding to set up her own marketing consultancy, which proved to be a roaring success. However, when the opportunity to move client-side came with a job at BT, she took it – she was in her early 40s. 

“I was bluntly advised that I was too old to go back into an advertising agency. I was absolutely astonished.” So that’s sexism and ageism ticked. 

She stayed at BT for three brutal years, and while she learned a lot – and worked with many people she respected, including current CEO Gavin Patterson – Gooding was ready to leave. “BT years are like dog years; a year at BT is seven anywhere else. I decided big corporates are not for me. I felt lost in it.”

It was only later, when she joined British Gas, that she realised it wasn’t big corporates that weren’t for her – just BT. While Gooding is very proud of the work she did at British Gas, the significance of that 10-month interim posting extended beyond market strategy, because – while she was there – Gooding fell in love with a woman. “I’d been married for 16 years, and had two, almost-teenage boys. That was a big drama for me, as I’m sure you can imagine.” 

As well as the personal turmoil, the imperative to be financially secure after her divorce was part of the motivation to take on the global operations director role at Aviva. She came into the financial services company at an interesting time – it was rebranding from Norwich Union and the banking crisis had just happened. 

“It has been a period of self-examination – of revisiting values,” Gooding explains. “We’ve just come out of a period of fixing the balance sheet and getting back on the front foot, but it’s been exciting because our chief executive [Mark Wilson] has an agenda – not just to reduce cost, but to disrupt the market.”

At the start of every executive committee meeting, somebody reads out a customer letter or email – a practice introduced by Wilson. “It was a ritual of making sure you had a customer conversation before you did the rest of the business,” explains Gooding. “I’ve seen this very authentic, genuine intent to get back to the customer. It’s hard to do in financial services; we’re actuarial; we have finance and we have risk and compliance – functions that are numerate and rational.”

What’s so interesting about Aviva establishing a global inclusion director is that it’s not driven by a particularly altruistic agenda, or a corporate social responsibility box-ticking exercise – but by a commercial imperative. 

“Our customer base has not increased for years,” says Gooding. “We’re sort of stuck: we do really well; our existing customers are increasingly buying more things from us; we get new customers in and they replace the old; but, overall, the number of customers we serve has been pretty static, and we want to grow. 

“You are not going to be intuitive and empathetic about your customers if you can’t represent them inside your own organisation.”

Inclusion and diversity are often used interchangeably, but Gooding is precise about the distinction – inclusion is the strategy and diversity is the outcome; an outcome that will have measurable dimensions across age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, race and ethnicity.

“Gender is the only aspect where, in every market, we should be aiming for a balanced workforce. All the others will vary – the age demographic in India or Singapore will be different from the UK,” she explains.

It’s only as we delve deeper into the strategy that the complexity of her job becomes fully evident. Every country in which Aviva operates has its own demographic mix, as well as political and legal framework, so a universal strategy is meaningless and potentially dangerous.

“Each chief executive will set their own ambitions about what they want to change. I’ve already had chief executives very interested in socio-economic mobility, which is very important. My difficulty, in a global role, is that I cannot measure that in a common way. In the UK we talk about free school meals – but that’s particular to the UK.”

Essentially, there are three models that businesses can adopt when championing diversity: the ‘when in Rome’ model – if you choose to do business in a country with oppressive regimes, you don’t challenge it for risk of putting your staff in danger; the ‘embassy model’ – despite the law of that country being hostile, your workplace can at least be a place of safety; and the ‘advocacy model’ – organisations are vocal about the need for change.

“You have to do the analysis, market by market – what’s the legal context; the cultural context; how big a voice are you?” says Gooding. 

“You have to be intelligent about which of these strategies you deploy and consult with the people who live there.

“Organisations have a huge role to play, because they’re concerned about their staff and about their customers. That can be a real force for good and change, because governments might listen to big business in a way that they won’t listen to a little NGO [non-governmental organisation] or an activist group.”

Gooding has an unusual perspective on some aspects of diversity. Walking in someone else’s shoes to understand prejudice or discrimination is not just a concept for her. 

Having lived and worked as a straight woman and a gay woman, she has experienced the differences first hand, with the added complication of coming out later in life, and the impact this has on friends and family as they readjust their perception of you.

“When I understood myself to be a straight woman, I had no issue with someone’s sexual orientation and, because that was my personal view, I had no idea I needed to vocalise it,” she says. So allies are vital – whether that be individuals within an organisation, men championing women, straight speaking out for LGBT colleagues, or on a corporate level where brands are associated with inclusive events.

“There are stigmas about mental health, about your socio-economic background. When leadership is inclusive, you encourage people to be visible about whatever their thing of difference is. 

“In exactly the same way, organisations and brands can behave as allies,” says Gooding, who cites Aviva’s support of Team Pride and its distribution of rainbow laces. “We gave them away to our customers and staff. That’s people saying, ‘This doesn’t mean I’m gay or trans; this means I don’t have a problem if anybody is’. It’s showing there is no issue here – that change is the culture.”

But to achieve a culture of inclusion and a diverse workforce, recruiters must recognise that market research favourite  – unconscious bias – and how we end up making decisions habitually. “I joke, it’s called ‘brand loyalty’,” Gooding says. “Uniquely in our industry, we have understood about unconscious bias – we just never applied it to this subject. 

“It is very enlightening to understand that we all have biases and we’re all doing this to each other. Unconscious bias explains how we got here; the big, interesting bit is, what do we consciously need to do to make the material differences that are going to effect change? 

“There are all sorts of experiments going on in recruitment – not showing names, not showing gender, not showing schooling. I think some of them may be gimmicks; rather than removing names, how about just being conscious that that’s one of the things people do? How can we say we’re celebrating difference, then deny people the opportunity to show who they are? Intellectually, I find this quite challenging.”

Dame Alison Brittain, CEO of Whitbread, who recently won the Businesswoman of the Year Award, has said she favours targets over quotas because targets send a signal within an organisation that this is important. So where does Gooding sit in this debate? 

“I have been known to say – when I’m sufficiently angry – it’s time for quotas. I’m part of the generation that thought this was all going to change because of meritocracy, and it hasn’t. 

“But I think it’s right to have targets because you’re trying to be realistic; you will only get vacancies emerging – and the opportunities to create change – over time. The problem with quotas is that they just create resentment – and it’s very reductive just to pick one aspect of identity, and then impose this incredibly stern punishment on an organisation.” 

There are so many myths around diversity that being clever with the data and analysis is essential. For instance, a common assumption is that women are held back in their careers because of taking maternity leave, but – at Aviva – the evidence pointed to discrimination against women beginning at the start of their careers. “The momentum of men being promoted at Aviva – across the group – starts right with going from A, our most junior grade, to B. By the time you get to middle management, the ratio is quite disproportionate. 

“We begin with more women than men; in middle management, when equal numbers of men and women leave, we over-recruit men. So we replace men and women with more men, and then the ratio is unbalanced. When a role is advertised internally, disproportionately more men go for it than women.”

There is so much work to be done in creating diverse workforces across corporations, the market research industry and beyond – but, hopefully, if companies such as Aviva are investing money and resource into it, progress will be made. 

“It’s a simple message: acceptance without exception. It’s not about gay people or trans people getting something other people want and don’t have; there’s no hierarchy in it. There are all sorts of different solutions for people to be who they are. That’s all we want – to be ourselves at work.”