With our strategic business plan ‘Creating the New’, we have developed a new game plan aimed
at accelerating our growth trajectory until 2020 by significantly increasing brand desirability. And
while officially this plan only kicked in at the beginning of 2016, Creating the New has already
set free a lot of positive energy within our Group during the past year. This is the result of a
completely new mindset – brands first – which we are living internally and which is also reflected
in the reorganisation of roles and responsibilities within our sales and marketing organisations.
Following the implementation of ‘Brand Leadership’, today our Global Brands organisation has a
centralised role when it comes to key decision-making relating to the appearance of our brands and
products around the globe. With this approach, we ensure that our product offering enjoys a high
level of commonality worldwide, while at the same time we guarantee that major initiatives such
as product launches and communication activities are managed centrally before they are executed
locally by the markets. I have absolutely no doubt that this new consumer-obsessed mindset and
organisational structure spurred our success in 2015 as it helped us to be much more impactful
vis-à-vis the consumer in many areas of our business.