September, 2026.- Jose “Pepe” Gorbea worked with Hyperquake as a client before joining as VP of International Growth & Development. He trusted Jim Stengel as a mentor and leader, and when he was planning to launch his own business, Stengel introduced him to Colin Crotty, Hyperquake’s CEO. Gorbea quickly saw Hyperquake’s belief system behind purpose and the strong quality of its people—confident, humble, great collaborators with a mindset to solve business problems first and build creative solutions second.
In this interview, Gorbea discusses how human-centered creativity balances commercial results with doing good. He collaborated with the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) to analyze close to 10,000 campaigns over six years. When you co-create and combine physical and digital touchpoints, you not only build stronger equity but are able to almost double sales uplift. Love and sense of belonging are universal needs that brand leaders sometimes forget to prioritize.
Gorbea also reflects on transforming Manpower’s brand storytelling. The challenge was creating and infusing a culture of purpose-led co-creation first, then executing the plan once marketing teams understood the strategic value. Hyperquake turned around four big creative ideas across the UK, Italy, France, and the US in just one month of workshops.
On sustainability, Gorbea notes that changing human behavior is the bigger problem to solve. For Nestle Mexico, Nescafe’s Tributo campaign featured 20,000 coffee farmers on jar labels, with QR codes connecting consumers to farmers. Key equity metrics grew from 44% to 72%, and the campaign earned a Global Big Effie Award.
1. From HP and Client to VP at Hyperquake: You worked with Hyperquake as a client before joining as VP of International Growth & Development. What did you see as a client that convinced you this was the right agency to join, and how does that perspective shape your approach to growth?
First, I trust Jim Stengel as a mentor, human being and leader. As I was presenting to him my plan to launch my own business, StoryMaking4Good, he was the one who quickly connected the dots and introduced me to Colin Crotty, Hyperquake’s CEO, as I was looking for support in a project with Manpower. There, CMO Ruth Harper had asked me to develop a plan to help them humanize their brand communications strategy behind purpose-led co-creation. Colin quickly answered the call and he showed me not only the belief system of Hyperquake behind purpose, but most importantly the strong quality of its people, leaders, and experts that are confident, humble and great collaborators with a mindset to solve business problems first, build creative solutions second. This set us on a two-year journey we are still in, delivering strong results for this customer across four markets. This really allowed me to immerse myself into their culture, their philosophy and their people. The rest is history as it was a perfect fit for me.
2. Human-Centered Creativity: You said “human-centered creativity” has always attracted you to “do business while doing good.” How do you balance the need for commercial results with the commitment to doing good, and what do you say to a client who thinks those two things are in conflict?
In today’s volatile world, marketers have become data and algorithm managers instead of true brand strategists. This is the mounting pressure they face from their CEO and CFO to drive short term ROI; I know that as I’ve been there myself many years. For me one thing is not in conflict with the other. Having said that, I have become a vivid reminder to many brand leaders of how doing good pays back twice. Why do I say this? Well, I have been able to design research on the creative effectiveness of co-creation in collaboration with the World Advertising Research Center (WARC), where we analyzed close to 10,000 campaigns over a six year period across the globe and benchmarked campaigns driving co-created narratives versus regular ‘monologue’ driven campaigns. We quickly saw that when you co-create and combine physical and digital touchpoints in doing so, you not only build stronger equity, but you are able to almost double sales uplift as a consequence because of a very simple insight which takes me back to Maslow’s pyramid: love and sense of belonging. This is a universal need we all have and brand leaders sometimes forget the strategic importance to prioritize and celebrate the opinion of their target audience as this significantly increases engagement, word of mouth and yes, sales. Many people add user-generated content in their content strategy but what they miss is the fact that UGC already exists on its own. When you truly know how to tap into co-creation and activate the voices of people by giving them a real purpose, that’s where you win. That’s where I’ve become an expert over the last decade in helping brands from the likes of Nestle, Mondelez, Manpower, and Converse, to name a few.
3. The Manpower Transformation: You asked Hyperquake to help humanize Manpower as a brand, and the work has been rolled out across four markets. What was the biggest challenge in transforming a global staffing brand’s storytelling, and what did that project teach you about the agency’s capabilities?
Great question.
Simple answer is that I was able to start from the top. Two years ago Manpower’s CMO Ruth Harper attended a co-creation workshop I hosted during climate week in New York in collaboration with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). She immediately came to me and said: “Pepe, in 25 years in this company it has never occurred to me that the real narrative I need to elevate and prioritize is from the thousands of people we employ. Every day, we get stuck talking about our brand instead of truly crafting stories of success, failure, resilience, etc with all of them. How do we start?”.
So, the brand innovation framework I had needed fine tuning to better serve her ask, as we had to create and infuse a culture of purpose-led co-creation in her company first and then execute the proposed plan once her marketing teams truly understood the strategic value of putting co-creation high in their marketing mix.
Once a brand leader gives me one hour of their time to talk, we turn them into co-creation ambassadors quite quickly because it is not on their radar and they quickly realize it should be. This has opened many doors for me through the years.
Last but by no means not least, Hyperquake’s capabilities truly showed me what Jim Stengel and Colin Crotty have talked about: an unmatched resilience and confidence to make work that works. As the agile co-creation process I run puts stress on creative teams to turn around creative work in 24 hours, they were tested and answered the call confidently and strongly with four big creative ideas across UK, Italy, France and the US in just 1 month of workshops. This is a true testament to their capacity to be creatively agile, strategic and effective. Coming from more than 40 years of experience they have across plenty of industries and plenty of business problems they have solved through outstanding creativity.
4. From Client-Side to Agency-Side: You’ve held senior leadership roles at HP, Bimbo, Kraft Foods, Nestle, and Mondelez. What’s the biggest difference between driving growth from the client side versus the agency side, and what advantage does your client-side experience give you?
Three key points on this.
First, you need to put egos to the side (which in marketing and advertising is not easy). I always got annoyed from agencies who were doing a hard sell of their services and putting creative awards very high on their agenda; that to me speaks about agencies with egos and not with a humble approach to genuinely help their customer, so these are the ones I quickly learned to de-prioritize.
Second, driving profitable business growth as a mindset. This is what every company is ultimately looking for in any industry sector, big and small. So the conversation I usually start with when people ask me ‘why are we talking to you?’ is because we are uniquely positioned to help businesses accelerate their vision and humanize their growth strategy, building short and long term sales impact. This is exemplified by one of my favorite case studies I developed with Hershey’s in Brazil the #hershe platform where we turned a small chocolate brand into a symbol of hope for young women in Brazil to become artists through 320,000 stories of women who have overcome the adversity of a macho culture in that country to truly do what they want. This campaign launched as a symbol of women’s progress in Brazil came to be in a workshop I organized to put co-creation at the heart of their communication strategy and the rest is history as the platform continues to drive sales: From 2019 to 2023 they actually grew their sales by 6X, achieved 100% positive sentiment in social media and won a couple of Lions in their journey. I have examples like these in my career where I can explain to customers how growth materializes from these activities in the short and long term.
Third, the ability to cross-collaborate. Not many agencies are good at this as they quickly get jealous and this impedes progress for customers. This is not a problem at Hyperquake; on the contrary, it is a difference maker and a true strength.
5. Sustainability Innovation at HP: You led sustainability innovation at HP. How does purpose-driven marketing translate into actual business results, and what’s the most compelling proof point you’ve seen?
We need to understand first that sustainability means many different things to different companies. In my case I started immersing myself into this eight years ago, as HP’s digital print technology is a difference maker for brands who want to de-carbonize their packaging and remove pack waste. Quickly I understood that the environmental side was a marginal opportunity and not the bigger issue to solve for, given that making packaging more circular and net positive is already high in the agenda for brands and there is so much to offer out there.
By partnering HP with Sustainable Brands, where I met their founder KoAnn Skrzyniarz, I discovered that changing human behavior is the bigger problem to solve. By bringing my purpose-led co-creation mindset to the mix, we created a playbook where we accelerate the ability of brands to drive sustainable behavior change through co-creation, crafting campaigns that enabled significant social impact as an outcome. Three key proof points to quote:
- I had the chance to work with Reckitt’s Dettol brand in India to build the behavior of washing hands with children through the pandemic where the platform #dettolsalutes was born. They were so courageous to even remove their own logo from the bottles of anti-bacterial gel and replaced them with close to 200,000 stories we co-created of real people helping each other and sharing tips and tricks on every bottle to achieve this. The results spoke for themselves as they grew double-digit in the first six months and achieved their highest ever equity metric on “Dettol is the most effective brand in eliminating bacteria and virus.”
- For a liquor brand in South Africa (Amarula), we developed a campaign called #namethemsavethem to empower humans to protect elephants from poaching as they will disappear in five years if this continues. There, consumers co-created elephant designs and named 400,000 elephants in Africa. Once they did this, Amarula partnered with an NGO to put tracking collars on each elephant that got designed and named, which you could follow on social media and donate $1 per co-created name and design. This gave consumers ultimate power in helping this mission and authentic visibility in the value chain to help protect them. In the USA alone, this platform drove +139% of sales growth.
- As I worked for Nestle Mexico, I had the right connections in the team to empower their first initiative into co-creation: Nescafe’s ‘Begin To’ campaign around co-creating New Year’s Resolutions through Mexicans who wanted to become better at the beginning of the year. The success this had led to a more important campaign to support their sustainability efforts across coffee farmers where we helped them deliver the concept of Nescafe Tributo, a tribute to the 20,000 farmers they support by putting their faces and names on the labels of the jars. Knowing HP tech, we enabled 60 million jars printed across 5 years to tell 20,000 stories. The real value of co-creation here is that consumers could connect with each farmer via a unique QR code and send them an email; their responses changed everything as Nescafe grew a key equity metric on “I believe Nescafe is a socially responsible brand” going from 44% in 2019 to 72% of Mexicans believing that in 2021. Importantly, this campaign also earned them a Global Big Effie Award as the most effective marketing platform in 2022 due to maintaining double-digit sales growth across more than three years, increasing market share and increasing equity metrics. This for me was the final proof I needed to fully commit and become an agent of change to drive co-creation with purpose with any brand leader I am able to talk to and work with.
6. Hyperquake’s Growth Aspirations: Hyperquake is growing over 40% year-over-year and expanding internationally. What’s the biggest opportunity you see for the agency’s global growth, and what’s the biggest risk you need to manage?
The biggest opportunity is the biggest risk at the same time. What do I mean by this? The pace of growth and number of opportunities we have because of our unique approach to brand building creates the tension to build our infrastructure at an increasingly rapid pace across different locations. So I need to be very smart to balance what I love doing with brand clients versus being a true GM in continuing to develop the infrastructure and investing in quality partnerships with the skill set to execute many projects we have in our pipeline outside of North America.
We understand our challenges very well and are set-up to succeed under the great leadership of Colin and everyone who is part of Hyperquake. I’ll just say this from experience: If you give us just one hour of your time to help you understand how to win with purpose-led co-creation, it will be your best investment in growing your brand or business in 2027 and beyond.
