A belief in the power of our brands is at the core of the Growth Game Plan. We have learned that when we combine effective brand messaging with consumer-driven innovation, we can achieve attractive growth yields. That’s why we have amped up our investment in advertising and promotion, placing more creative campaigns in the market than at any other time in our history to support our brand positions and innovations. In 2014 we doubled our advertising spend versus the prior year and increased our advertising and promotion spend ratio as a percentage of sales 70 basis points to 4.3 percent. We plan to push that ratio higher as we reinvest a majority of the cost savings generated by Project Renewal in brand building and other growth initiatives.
To maximize our messaging efficiency, we streamlined and restructured our marketing, advertising and promotion strategies to spend smarter and leverage the scale of the Newell Rubbermaid enterprise. The result has been a notable increase in the quality and effectiveness of our advertising, with the overwhelming majority of our ads garnering best-in-class test scores.
Check out our fun and creative television ads:
Check out a sample of our major print advertising campaigns:
Our investments in growth-enabling capabilities are starting to pay dividends. In addition to advertising and promotion, we have significantly increased funding in the areas of consumer research, design, innovation, marketing, e-commerce and customer development.
Our innovation funnel value has doubled versus prior year. We increased our consumer research headcount by 50 percent and doubled the research budget. We also introduced a new, more rigorous new product development process, which is yielding bigger and better quality ideas. In 2014, we opened a state-of-the-art design center to foster collaboration and creativity across our brands. The design center also features immersion labs for evaluating prototypes, an on-site model shop and a usability lab to enable interaction with consumers and end-users to create better product experiences. We are making tangible progress towards our ambition to be a design- and innovation-led company famous for design and product performance.
We have diversified and upgraded the talent of our marketing teams, organizing them around global hubs in the U.S., Brazil, China and the U.K. With 35 percent of our marketing professionals now outside of North America, along with 25 percent of our research and media spending, we are also creating a more global perspective and building a solid foundation for geographic expansion.
Our investments also extend to the digital world, where more and more consumers are shopping. To better serve our online channels, we announced plans to open a new global e-commerce hub in New York City in early 2015. The strengthened analytics capability it affords will provide us with deeper analysis and insight into digital consumers’ purchasing behavior. This transformative building block of our Growth Game Plan will help expand the company’s e-commerce business and accelerate online sales growth worldwide.
On the customer development side, we are investing in shopper marketing programs to fuel growth via brand building, equity-driving promotions and improved in-store visibility. We are partnering more strategically with our retail partners to help support major in-store initiatives and drive consumer consumption. These efforts have helped us win incremental distribution and shelf space across the portfolio and improve point-of-sale growth, a win-win for us and our customers. As a result, Newell Rubbermaid won “vendor of the year” awards at several of our key retailers, a validation of our ability to drive Every Day Great Execution.
