What is the motivation behind creating a companywide design center?
Having a purpose-built design center for all of our industrial and graphic design places Newell Rubbermaid in an exclusive club of companies that emphasize great design as a competitive advantage. This state-of-the-art facility is designed to foster creativity and maximize sharing of ideas and technologies among our brands and process partners. It will allow us to achieve both size and scale. It has advanced studios for all of our priority segments, plus brand immersion labs to facilitate interaction with the rest of the business. Here, design, marketing and manufacturing teams will evaluate product prototypes and imagine the possibilities of future product road maps. We also have brought in new talent in specialty areas like ergonomics and interaction design, which will further enhance the design and functionality of our products.
In early 2014, Newell Rubbermaid’s state-of-the-art design center will open in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The facility will be roughly 40,000 square feet and includes a large, open studio plan to better facilitate designer collaboration.
And likewise, what is the reason for setting up a separate technology group?
The new technology organization is able to flex to where the greatest technical needs and opportunities exist to support the Growth Game Plan. This group is comprised of five functions — packaging, materials & coatings, advanced technology, design engineering and program management — and is organized around technology platforms or workflow disciplines in order to strengthen our capabilities. It’s an opportunity to create scale benefits across our brands. We’re excited about the early wins the technology group already has achieved, including support for Irwin’s Big Bang Brazil campaign with the introduction of more than 500 new SKUs. The campaign demonstrated R&D speed and agility and was a significant improvement in the team’s ability to drive on-time programs, best cost, superior performance and incremental sales. Another win for the technology group was the new Rubbermaid Commercial Products Executive Series, a line of cleaning solutions for the hospitality industry designed to elevate property image and enhance staff productivity through discreet cleaning products that reduce noise and conceal supplies. The team successfully drove project management, packaging, design engineering and materials work for this product launch.
What is the new innovation team concentrating on?
The team facilitates the generation of new ideas for our innovation funnel and supports concept development. The ultimate goal is to focus our new product development investments on fewer, bigger idea platforms with the best chance of delivering significant returns and runway to grow in the future. Through our InnovationNOW! process, the team increased the innovation funnel value 260 percent in 12 months while reducing the total number of product ideas in the innovation funnel by 60 percent.
What are your next priorities in Design and R&D?
We expect 2014 will be our biggest year of innovation to date, with major programs across all of our business segments. The team will also continue to invest in filling our innovation funnel with bigger, better ideas — enabling faster, more effective ideas to move from concept to product development. Finally, we will be able to fully leverage our new design center, allowing great design and cross-functional execution to give us a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
“ We expect 2014 will be our biggest year of innovation to date, with major programs across all of our business segments.”
— chuck jones
How has the Growth Game Plan influenced the new Customer Development organization?
To deliver against the Growth Game Plan, we must elevate our customer relationships and become the partner of choice for growth. To accomplish this, we must do four things: build a Customer Development “All-Star” team that has best-in-class talent, create intimate customer connections forged on win-win outcomes and shopper insights, develop leading-edge capabilities that drive category growth and finally, leverage all of these to become an execution powerhouse. We have funded significant investments in these initiatives by simplifying our organization and reducing redundancies. As a result, we are beginning to put some points on the board.
How does Customer Development work differently under the new structure?
There are many differences, but I believe the largest one is our marketing approach. Our channel marketing teams have been refocused into trade marketing teams, which are centered around categories. These teams create national merchandising plans to build brands and then integrate those plans with customer strategies through the Customer Development organization. This approach ensures that we leverage repeatable market development models across channels that will help us more efficiently build our brands.
What has been your initial focus as part of restructuring Customer Development?
We have focused initially on streamlining the organization and reducing costs to enable us to build core capabilities that create shopper demand through customer collaboration. We will drive these results by improving our category management, shopper marketing, in-market coverage and shopper analytic abilities. Doing this will make us a more valuable customer partner and provide state-of-the-art tools for our selling teams.
How have you redefined your field organization?
By simplifying the organization and reducing layers, we moved our best leaders closer to our larger customers. This has helped us improve customer focus and has also enabled us to invest in more “feet on the street” with both our distributor and retail customers. These new representatives will collaborate with customers to build categories and drive more sell-through of Newell Rubbermaid products. To optimize our new coverage, we have created a common incentive and information system to unify our approach, but have tailored our coverage approach for each channel. For example, we’ve aligned with a leading sales and merchandising specialist to provide in-store sales and merchandising support for key home center customers. This has allowed us to increase store coverage, thus driving better results.
The Furious Five promotional campaigns were a big win in 2013. What’s the strategy behind them?
Our successful Furious Five promotion in 2013 resulted in an incremental $50 million in retail sales.
We initiated Furious Five because we saw an opportunity to offer shoppers key solutions throughout the year with Newell Rubbermaid’s products. To do this, we built quarterly events around consumer behavior — The Super Bowl and Projects Made Possible in the first quarter of the year, Summer Entertaining in the second quarter, Back-to-School in the third quarter and Holidays in the fourth quarter. These Furious Five events resulted in an incremental $50 million in sales. Our shopper marketing team helps develop insights and then leverages this intelligence to create marketing campaigns for the benefit of both Newell Rubbermaid and our retail partners. We believe the shopper marketing approach demonstrates a fresh way of thinking about discretionary consumer products that distinguishes our brands from competitors’.
How has the new Customer Development organization been received thus far?
Although we still have a lot to accomplish, the Customer Development organization has been well-embraced thanks to a strong leadership team and good field selling professionals. The new organization has received enthusiastic support throughout the company, and the success of efforts such as Furious Five has attracted the attention of customers as well. In 2013, we were named Partner of the Year by The Home Depot, Vendor of the Year by Babies “R” Us, Supplier of the Year by Walmart, and both Supplier of the Year and Power Tool Brand of the Year from the PRO Group — a national buying group comprised of regional hardware distributors. In addition, we saw a 43 percent improvement in our results versus last year from the Kantar Retail PoweRanking® benchmarking survey, in which retailers rank manufacturers. This was a good step forward!
What are your priorities for 2014?
We are focused on exceeding our business targets by gaining market share and deploying our portfolio to new channels. To assist these efforts, we will leverage our expanded distributor sales team, increase our shopper marketing programs and use our new category management capabilities, while continuing to explore ways to improve our trade spending return on investment. In addition, we plan to accelerate our growth in e-commerce by working with all of our customers to optimize this tremendous opportunity. We are also working to extend these strategies and capabilities globally, starting first in Australia and Canada. Our strong 2013 U.S. sales growth of 3.2 percent, despite tough macros, gives us confidence that we are on the right track and that the Customer Development team can be a key driver of the Growth Game Plan.
“To deliver against the Growth Game Plan, we must elevate our customer relationships and become the partner of choice for growth.”
— joe Cavaliere
As you build out Newell’s marketing capability, what are your goals?
Marketing is focusing on big brand ideas that create large-scale platforms for sustainable growth. We want Newell Rubbermaid to deliver high-impact, disruptive innovation, and communicate that innovation to users and choosers using creative and effective marketing. Paper Mate® InkJoy® is a good example of a successful brand supported by an impactful marketing campaign. We created strong advertising with traditional media, social media, in-store activation and samples.
How has the Company’s market research function changed and why
We’re now investing in consumer understanding in a more meaningful way. We have created a larger, independent consumer marketing insights function that provides a foundation for our design, innovation and brand plans. We increased our research budget by more than 100 percent, our headcount by more than 50 percent and strengthened marketing research leadership through a blend of internal and external hires with significant international experience. In addition, market research now has unprecedented authority to determine when a product concept or ad idea is ready for testing with consumers.
How will consolidating marketing help drive results?
Marketing was previously run at the business unit level, so projects and spending weren’t always aligned with company priorities. Our consolidation into a single marketing department enables us to increase our consumer insight investment while reducing our overall spend. Our global marketing teams are now housed at three hubs: Atlanta, Huntersville, North Carolina and London. That creates a richer team environment that promotes greater collaboration and creativity, and will help generate the big ideas that drive growth. We can move people to work across categories. We can offer better career opportunities. And we can adapt approaches that work in one category much more easily to others.
Why did the Company reduce the number of external marketing partners?
We consolidated our global agency relationships into one lead creative partner and one media partner. Both firms are among the best in the business. Through these partnerships, we now have the power to achieve much greater scale, reach and above all, impact.
How is the Company changing its advertising campaigns?
Our spending is more focused behind brand support to help drive growth. We reduced the number of brand activities to concentrate on fewer, more impactful ideas. Overall, we increased advertising and promotion spending by 50 percent in 2013 for our top three priority categories — Tools, Commercial Products and Writing. These investments are slated to grow even more in 2014.
Click the image above to view our Paper Mate® InkJoy® television ad.
What have been some of your success stories to date?
The marketing campaign for Irwin Tools in support of National Tradesmen Day was very well played, resulting in our biggest and best event to date. We encouraged people to post compliments about tradesmen on Facebook and Twitter, had a billboard campaign and set up compliment walls for the public. Irwin also launched the largest TV ad campaign — and biggest media investment — in its history for the annual event, which is now celebrated in a number of countries worldwide, from North and South America to Australia. In total, we hosted 4,300 events and distributed National Tradesmen Day apparel and Irwin tools to 125,000 deserving tradesmen, thus reinforcing the Irwin brand to its primary target consumers.
Another success was a series of special events we organized for Irwin in Brazil that we called Big Bang Brazil. The first wave began in July with an event for our top 100 customers and a sales convention that rallied our 250 representatives in Brazil. We also invited customers to visit our factory in Carlos Barbosa in southeastern Brazil to see our impressive manufacturing process. This Big Bang Brazil campaign resulted in nearly 1,000 new points of sale for Irwin. Our strong merchandising program placed more than 4,500 point-of-sale displays at retail outlets to promote Irwin’s point of difference. In addition, 33 branded merchandising vans visited retail outlets to place and demonstrate the products, yielding a nearly 40 percent conversion rate. One of the stars of this campaign was the Irwin® Dupla™ Double-Sided Hacksaw Blade. We kicked off a free sample program and achieved our goal to distribute 1 million samples by the end of 2013.
What priorities will marketing focus on during the next 12 months?
This will be our biggest year ever of brand campaigns and brand investment. Our activities will center around support for our Win Bigger categories — Tools, Commercial Products and Writing. In addition, e-commerce will be marketing’s single biggest growth initiative, as we’ve more than doubled the e-commerce budget and hired a new, experienced executive leader to spearhead the initiative. In addition, consumer insights will increasingly focus on our key emerging markets — Latin America, China and Southeast Asia — to sow the seeds for future growth long-term.
“ Marketing is focusing on big brand ideas that create large-scale platforms for sustainable growth.”
— Richard Davies
What are your objectives for the new Supply Chain organization?
Our mission is to build and transform Newell Rubbermaid’s supply chain operations into a world-class system that enables growth, drives customer satisfaction and achieves a sustainable competitive advantage globally. We will achieve supply chain excellence by establishing a consistent approach to the company’s global operations, unlocking the trapped capacity for growth through improved productivity and working capital management, and optimizing the network to support our emerging market expansion. By building a competitive infrastructure, synchronizing supply with demand — including locating operations closer to our markets and consumers — broadening distribution and investing in technology, we can jointly develop business plans with our retail customers to drive satisfaction, grow our categories and capture share.
How have you structured the new Supply Chain organization?
The new organization was created around five key pillars: Plan, Source, Make, Deliver and Serve. We are focused on driving strategic sourcing through the leverage of common categories, taking a holistic manufacturing view of our product lines, improving the deliver pillar through warehouse consolidation and strategic management of freight, and consolidating customer and consumer service to drive efficiency, enhance the experience and reduce total cost to serve. We are also driving the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process to improve working capital and service, enable more efficient delivery and optimize manufacturing. We are partnering with the Customer Development organization to improve the customer experience by reaching out to the supply chain organization at key customers and jointly working on productivity programs. This will make us more nimble, enabling us to meet our partners where they are — and where we can accelerate growth. Additionally, we have added new capabilities in LEAN/Six Sigma, Quality Management and Value Analysis/Value Engineering (VA/VE).
What are some of the changes you’ve made in Europe, the Middle East and Africa?
We’ve had to make some difficult decisions in the region to improve profitability, but our goal is to maximize supply chain capabilities and to redirect spending where it has greater impact. We are unlocking value by moving manufacturing to low-cost countries and consolidating warehouses across the region. Eliminating unproductive expenses makes our supply chain a source of new funding — freeing up trapped resources that can be reinvested in growing our brands and business segments in priority markets.
What was the objective behind redesigning Customer Service operations?
Supply Chain focused on customer and Consumer service to redesign our service operations because it’s an area where Newell Rubbermaid has a tremendous opportunity to drive efficiency through simplification. Most importantly it’s an opportunity to move away from our previous segmented customer service model to a more centralized model that cuts across all our businesses and improves efficiency and effectiveness. We now have five functional teams: Strategic Corporate Accounts for key customers, Key Segment Accounts for business-specific concerns, Account Services, Customer Administration, and Consumer Care for consumer call activities. In addition, the company has made a significant investment in Salesforce.com, which will drive integration with the Customer Development organization and enhance the overall customer and consumer experience.
Where did you see the biggest results in 2013?
The biggest accomplishment for 2013 was the delivery of targeted savings through restructuring initiatives, enhanced sourcing and productivity improvements. We established a monthly productivity process that coordinates activities across the Delivery and Development organizations. We also created a quarterly supply chain forum, keeping everyone on the same page and executing against the same metrics. Our focus on Every Day Great Execution resulted in improved service levels of 97 percent. We initiated a VA/VE program to help drive bigger savings projects and improve product quality. During the year, we also established an integrated supply chain community that enables talent development and enhances career paths for all of our people. We have attracted terrific talent to our organization, which will help accelerate performance. We also created a five-year strategic plan that gives us a road map for the people, processes and technology necessary to achieve our Supply Chain ambition.
What are your priorities for 2014?
2013 was mostly about establishing the pillars and strategic plans that will enable us to deliver accelerated performance. 2014 is about driving our plans into action. Our work to unlock costs across the entire supply chain will help fuel brand investments to enable the big ideas that will flow through Newell’s significantly enhanced innovation funnel over the next several years. We expect significant savings from our direct sourcing organization, building on our initiatives to reduce indirect spending across the company. The Deliver and Serve pillars of the organization will work to complete the operational consolidations in Europe and North America. The S&OP process will improve working capital, and the Monthly Productivity Forum, Quality Management programs and VA/VE efforts will drive an enhanced pool of cost savings opportunities. Lastly, our strategic manufacturing initiatives in key areas will start to deliver in the latter part of the year. I feel very confident about our plan and our progress.
“ Our mission is to build and transform Newell Rubbermaid’s supply chain operations into a world-class system that enables growth, drives customer satisfaction and achieves a sustainable competitive advantage globally.”
— Meri Stevens
