The business was losing share and losing money when I took over marketing for the Czech and Slovak Republics. I turned the P&L around top and bottom line, brought Finish, Airwick and Woolite back to growth, launched Dettol into the No. 2 share position in three months, and grew the OTC portfolio’s margin by integrating two new acquisitions.
I joined a new leadership team brought in specifically to turn around a business where the P&L was in decline and market share was under threat, across a portfolio running from Finish and Vanish to Airwick, Dettol, Nurofen and Strepsils – fifteen people reporting to me, a lot of well-known brands, most of them moving the wrong way at once.
The situation
A turnaround like this doesn’t fail on strategy – it fails on consistency. Every brand had its own story for why it was underperforming, and the business needed to stop treating each one as its own fire to fight.
What we did
We started by rebuilding how the business was actually steered: a new marketing operating model and processes, and clear KPIs benchmarked against best practice from other RB markets, covering in-store execution, promotions, above-the-line and digital investment. We drove the teams against that same standard across the whole portfolio, rather than letting each brand set its own bar. We also leaned hard into the OTC portfolio specifically, since it carried the best margins, and integrated two newly-acquired brands, Scholl and Durex, into that push. Alongside the strategy work, I restructured the marketing organisation itself, recruiting new talent where the team needed sharper skills to actually execute the turnaround, not just plan it.
What happened
The P&L turned around, both top and bottom line. Finish, Airwick and Woolite went back to share growth. Dettol’s whitespace launch reached the No. 2 share position within three months. And a new detailing strategy took the OTC business up 8%, with Nurofen and Strepsils each gaining a minimum of 300 basis points of share.
Turnarounds are rarely one big move. They’re a dozen ordinary decisions, made consistently, across a portfolio that’s stopped agreeing on what “good” looks like. Getting everyone pointed at the same KPI was half the job.
