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Powermarkets focus

Higher focus on Powermarkets

In addition to our highly successful ‘Powerbrands’ strategy, we have identified 16 ‘Powermarkets’ for increased focus and investment, most of which are in emerging markets. These are markets where we see the highest absolute growth potential and where we already have a good platform on the ground to take advantage of that potential. These markets will be the spearheads of growth in the neighbouring geographic region and will attract a disproportionate deployment of talent and financial resources.

A new organisation structure will drive strategy

To deliver accelerated growth we are going to substantially increase our focus on six of the world’s highest growth geographic clusters of consumers. These are built around the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC), as well as Africa and the Middle East – the latter two market cluster opportunities are also very significant. We have created two new Area organisations to manage these high-growth emerging market clusters, instead of just one. The first Area is called LAPAC and covers Latin America, North Asia, South East Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. The second Area is called RUMEA and covers Russia & CIS, Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and Sub-Saharan Africa.



Developed markets remain important, even if the economies are growing more slowly. They continue to represent significant growth opportunities but need to be tackled differently. We are seeing increasingly homogenous consumer, trade and competitive environments in developed markets. Therefore we will manage them as one Area called ENA, comprising North America, Central Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe and Western Europe. North America will now be led by a senior, fully dedicated management team. The Europe regions and North America will report into one Area lead to drive increased speed to market and to get scale efficiencies to drive higher growth.

This new geographic focus will be driven by a redeployment of investment and management abilities. Currently we have 36% of our management focused on the 6 billion consumers in emerging markets, versus 64% focused on the 0.9 billion consumers in developed markets. This will shift significantly and we have located our leadership of these Areas in the respective market, effective 1 January 2012, so that we can be even more responsive to consumer and customer needs and faster in execution.

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