A global beauty strategy rarely translates locally as-is. I led the EMEA teams that made it “glocal” – and rebuilt the entire organisation around consumer insight instead of hierarchy. Result: market share grew in South Africa, France and the UK. At the same time, across ten categories.
On paper, Revlon’s global strategy covered everything: colour cosmetics, hair colour, skin care, fragrance, anti-perspirant — ten categories across a dozen brands, from Revlon itself to Almay, Mitchum, Gatineau, SinFul Colors and Charlie. In practice, a strategy written centrally rarely survives contact with a French pharmacy chain, a UK grocer and an Italian department store at the same time, each with its own way of working — and the marketing organisation across EMEA had grown up around local hierarchy rather than around the consumer it was meant to serve.
The situation
Managing the Marketing Directors across EMEA, reporting to the SVP & MD EMEA and the SVP & CMO Global, my job wasn’t to write a better global strategy. Revlon already had one. My job was to make it usable — “glocal” rather than purely global or purely local — inside markets that didn’t share a language, a retail structure, or, often, a way of making decisions.
What we did
I defined and implemented a new EMEA marketing operating framework, which meant reorganising the UK, French and Italian marketing teams around how consumers actually behaved in each market, rather than around the org chart that already existed. It also meant harder conversations: I was a key member of the team restructuring the French operations, which included moving brand production to third-party manufacturers without losing momentum on supply or on the new-product pipeline already in flight — the kind of transition that’s invisible when it goes well, and very visible when it doesn’t.
What happened
Market share grew across South Africa, France and the UK, across all ten categories in the portfolio — not because the products changed, but because the organisation behind them finally matched how the business actually needed to run in each market.
The real shift was cultural as much as structural: teams stopped defending their patch of the hierarchy and started building around the same customer.
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