The least glamorous products in a house tend to witness the most. A paper towel arrives after the glass falls. A tissue catches the sneeze, the mascara, the laugh that turns into tears. Bathroom tissue requires no elaboration. Yet for decades, advertising in the category behaved like a nervous host: brighten the room, polish every surface, and keep actual life out of frame.
Susan Irving saw the mismatch. In March 2020, she became Chief Marketing Officer of Kruger Products, responsible for brands including Cashmere, Purex, SpongeTowels, Scotties and White Cloud across Canada and the United States. She had spent more than two decades learning how consumer brands grow, first at Warner-Lambert and Coca-Cola, then through 15 years at PepsiCo. There she moved through Canadian and global assignments, eventually steering names such as Doritos, Cheetos, Sunbites and Quaker.
Her new category looked quieter. Then, almost immediately, tissue became anything but quiet. Demand changed sharply. Supply chains strained. The plan Irving inherited was no longer useful. She later described rewriting the company's plans in real time over the following year. It was an unusually public operating test for a new executive, and it exposed the distinction at the centre of her career: marketing is not the decorative layer applied after a business decision. It is one of the places where the business gets run.
“People think it's just advertising, but you're actually running a brand and a business.”Susan Irving
The brief was hiding in the product
Irving's first major Kruger campaign began with a direct request to the newly formed Toronto agency Broken Heart Love Affair. Bring the portfolio a purpose. Functional advertising would always have a place, she said, but the company needed a reason for Canadians to connect with its brands beyond absorbency, softness or provenance. The answer was already sitting in kitchens, bathrooms and coat pockets.
Unapologetically Human showed the moments the category traditionally edited out: crying, sweating, bleeding, spilling, sneezing and the general untidiness of living in a body around other people. Its products appeared as supporting actors, useful precisely when the polished version of life stopped cooperating. The creative move was bold because it was obvious. Tissue ads had spent years avoiding the evidence of why tissue exists.
The campaign gave four household brands a single emotional platform without erasing their individual jobs. It also delivered a commercial result. Industry case reporting attributed a 2.3-point share increase across the four-brand portfolio to the work, three times the gain of the strongest competitor. The campaign earned a Bronze Cannes Lion and a Bronze Clio. Recognition followed the result, not the other way around.
Irving's explanation is less romantic than the work. Strong brand loyalty, she has said, comes from consumer insight rooted in the role a brand actually plays in everyday life. This is the small piece other operators can steal: purpose works better when it is excavated from product truth than imported from a fashionable cause. The tissue was not a metaphor. It was present in the scene because people use it there.
Art, science and a room full of different people
Irving likes a duality. “I find in marketing there's art and science,” she told the Power in Heels podcast. The art notices the human detail. The science asks whether it changed behaviour and improved the business. Her résumé supports both halves: brand strategy and advertising sit beside P&L management, innovation, media planning, consumer insights and digital work.
There is a third element, though, and she returns to it more often than either: the team. Asked what she liked most about her job, Irving did not name a campaign or a trophy. She named the people and the verbs around them: leading, empowering, collaborating, coaching, mentoring and championing. “Without great people, you will never deliver great work,” she said.
Her most durable career advice follows the same logic. Identify the thing you do unusually well and keep building it. Then surround yourself with thinkers who cover the ground you do not. She warns that a room full of similar people will not produce diverse ideas. This is not a soft principle. It is an operating system for creative quality, especially when a national portfolio has to make sense across different languages, regions and lives.
Begin with the role a product already plays, not the convention its category inherited.
Build around complementary strengths so disagreement can improve the idea.
Connect emotional work to the commercial result the business needs.
Later chapters of the Kruger platform kept testing that method. Love is Messy used the thrills, accidents and heartbreak of relationships to extend the original idea. Multilingual adaptations were developed in Hinglish, Cantonese and Mandarin, treating cultural relevance as part of the strategy rather than a late translation exercise. A Scotties campaign used hypnosis and a Toronto Raptor named Scottie Barnes to play with the brand's often-misremembered name. Different jokes, same discipline: find the behaviour people recognize and let the product belong there.
Approximate tenure based on publicly documented career dates through August 2026.
She learned changing conditions before the C-suite
Long before packaged goods, Irving knew what it meant to read a moving environment. She grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, in a sailing family. Both parents volunteered with the local association. Irving also trained in rhythmic gymnastics, then became a member of the Canadian Sailing Team and campaigned for the 1992 and 1996 Olympic Games. Official rosters do not list her as a competitor at either Games, a distinction that matters. The campaign itself still meant years organized around selection, conditions and marginal improvement.
Sport remained less a biographical flourish than a second workplace. When her sons Alexander and Andrew began playing hockey, she managed both teams. She moved onto the Leaside Hockey Association board, became vice-president in two portfolios, and in 2019 was elected its first female president. Her early move as president was revealing: the association introduced a parent survey to identify what should change and what should remain. Listen before redesigning. It is the same consumer-insight habit at community scale.
She later served on the Ontario Hockey Federation board. In 2021 she joined Canadian Women & Sport, where she chaired the Brand & Revenue Committee and helped launch Get Girl Coached, the organization's first national marketing campaign. She was elected chair of the board in 2025. The arc from volunteer team manager to national board chair is long, but it is not mysterious. She kept accepting larger versions of the same job: make a system easier to enter, clearer to navigate and better able to keep people in it.
The score follows the crew
Awards accumulated after Irving joined Kruger: Strategy's 2020 Marketer of the Year, the Canadian Marketing Association's 2021 Marketer of the Year, a 2022 Canadian Grocer Star Women honour, a 2023 Bronze Stevie for Female Executive of the Year, a 2025 Campaign US Inspiring Women award and a place among the Women's Executive Network's 2025 Top 100. In 2026, the Global Effie Index ranked Kruger Products and Cashmere UltraLuxe first in North America's household-supplies category for marketer and brand effectiveness.
Her public response to recognition is consistent. She names the team, the agencies, the partners and the mentors who supplied both guidance and “tough love.” It may be conventional for a senior executive to distribute credit. Irving's record makes the habit look structural. Her first Kruger campaign was built with a new agency. Her national sport work runs through boards. Her preferred advice is about complementary talent. Even her favourite leadership maxim is collective: if you want to go far, go together.
That does not mean consensus at any price. Unapologetically Human required the client and agency to accept risk. A tissue company put blood, sweat, tears and bathroom life into an elegant film. The commercial bet was that candour would produce affection, and that affection would move share. Trust made the bet possible. Measurement made it legible.
“If you constantly surround yourself with similar people, you will never get to diverse ideas.”Susan Irving
Irving has another image for the life around that work. She calls it a three-legged stool: career, family and friends, and extracurricular activity. Remove one leg and the thing stops functioning. Her weekends have often been spent at hockey rinks, ski hills, football fields or on sailboats. This is not presented as effortless balance. It is a decision filter. A career move has to leave enough structure for the other two legs.
The useful tension in her story is that she is both a brand romantic and an operator. She believes marketing can move people. She also insists it must fuel growth. She wants purpose, but asks the product to earn its place inside it. She backs a creative leap, then looks for the number. Perhaps that is why a category built on disposable paper produced durable work. Irving did not ask people to care about tissue. She asked the company to notice what people already care about, and to be useful when life gets all over the place.