Finish existed as a different brand in nearly every market it operated in – including as Electrasol in the US. I led the centralisation of the global innovation pipeline and built RB’s first global equity campaign, transitioning every local brand onto one platform and taking it into whitespace markets across Asia and Latin America along the way.
Finish’s dishwashing detergents and additives ran under different names and different campaigns in nearly every market – the US knew it as Electrasol, not Finish, and other markets each carried their own local brand proposition. RB wanted Finish to be the first brand in the company to centralise its global innovation pipeline and its global equity campaign development. That meant asking a lot of local teams to give up brands with real history, and real equity, of their own.
The highest-risk piece of the whole project was the US: Electrasol had decades of its own brand equity, and there was no guarantee a switch to Finish would carry that value across cleanly.
I led the transition of all local brands – the US, France, Germany and beyond – onto one global brand proposition, developing a single global brand platform and centralising campaign execution rather than letting each market keep building its own. That became the Diamond Standard campaign, rolled out globally with “glocal” execution only where a market genuinely needed it, not as a default. I led the US transition hands-on, through to a clean handover with no loss of share of market or brand equity metrics. In parallel, I led the concept, development and launch of a new global product pipeline, including Finish Quantum and Finish Max, and drove the consumer insight work behind entering whitespace markets across Asia-Pacific and Latin America, including a full relaunch in Japan and Korea grounded in local research.
Every local brand transitioned successfully onto Finish. The Diamond Standard campaign became RB’s first global equity campaign. The US moved across without losing share or brand equity – the outcome that was genuinely at risk going in. And through all of it, Finish held on to its No. 1 and No. 2 share positions in its markets, strengthening brand equity metrics even as P&G entered the European market head-on.
The hardest sell wasn’t to the consumer – it was internal. Getting a market to retire a brand name it had spent years building, in favour of one brand everyone would own together, took as much work as any campaign.
