Phil White

Phil is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Grounded, where he has turned three decades of agency-side brand innovation and activation experience into a more meaningful mission: Helping brands prove that purpose can drive profit and create value by doing good.

His point of view was forged after years of watching energy and creativity getting trapped inside traditional advertising and marketing agency models, and it deepened through work with P&G, Unilever, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, where he saw that humanity’s biggest challenges, can also be some of business’s biggest opportunities.

That belief became 'grounded' in August 2017, when Phil and co-founder Heidi Schoeneck launched the company on a simple premise; that everything they do should be done with one foot in purpose, and the other in profit.

Today, Grounded is a multi-award-winning, B Corp certified brand activation and commercial innovation agency that helps brands, retailers, startups, and nonprofits around the world turn sustainability and social impact into commercial innovation and business performance.

Grounded works at the intersection of brand experience, innovation, shopper marketing, sustainability, and behavior change, with a specific focus on finding and closing the intention-action gaps between what companies and consumer say they want to do and what they actually do!

Phil’s career spans senior strategy roles across WPP and Publicis networks, including strategy leadership for Unilever across North America, plus brand activation and shopper marketing training for Coca-Cola, Unilever, and GSK. He also helped build the strategy behind P&G Global brand building awards and the MCCA award-winning Pampers/UNICEF One Pack, One Vaccine campaign, which eliminated newborn/neonatal tetanus from the world today.

Phil has coached agency teams to marketing effectiveness award success, won a shelf full of Effies for his work on Unilever, chaired the strategy committee for the The American Association of Advertising Agencies , and been named by Real Leaders Magazine as one of the world’s top 100 most effective leaders in the CSR and social impact space.

Phil’s podcast-friendly angle is that he does not believe that sustainability or social impact should be treated as a cost, side project, a messaging layer, or a moral gesture. His work is built around the idea that businesses can actually close the gap between intention and action by understanding real human behavior, using evolutionary science, collaboration, systems change theory and neuroscience-informed research to make sustainable choices much more commercially viable.

Grounded has developed a series of proprietary tools and frameworks rooted in systems change to do exactly this:

Intention-Action Gap: Finding the biggest gaps. Proving out the business value

Sustain-Agility: Helping brands connect Sustainability goals & commitments into competitive positioning to avoid greenwashing

Brand Activation For Good: Changing consumer behavior through packaging, design, campaigns & experiences

Flywheel of Impact: Building partnerships and communities that scale revenue & impact

Grounded also fuses the latest in neuroscience and technology to build landscape assessment and intelligence tools for clients - regularly running implicit association testing to uncover the unconscious drivers and barriers shaping purchase behavior.

This perspective comes through in Phil’s writing and speaking, where he has focused on topics like activating brand purpose at retail, going circular, and bridging the intention-action gap in sustainable behavior.

He has been a regular speaker and contributor for Forbes, Sustainable Brands, The ANA, Consumer Impact Summit, and Campaign, and he is also an adjunct professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Advertising and PR, as well as an advisor and investor across a portfolio of social enterprise startups.