volution of Strategy at Procter & Gamble
Founded in 1837, Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble has long been one of the world’s most international of companies. Today P&G is a global colossus in the consumer products business with annual sales in excess of $50 billion, some 54 percent of which are generated outside of the United States. P&G sells more than 300 brands—including Ivory soap, Tide, Pampers, Iams pet food, Crisco, and Folgers—to consumers in 160 countries. Historically the strategy at P&G was well established. The company developed new products in Cincinnati and then relied on semi-autonomous foreign subsidiaries to manufacture, market, and distribute those products in different nations. In many cases, foreign subsidiaries had their own production facilities and tailored the packaging, brand name, and marketing message to local tastes and preferences. For years this strategy delivered a steady stream of new products and reliable growth in sales and profits. By the 1990s, however, profit growth at P&G was slowing.
The essence of the problem was simple: P&G’s costs were too high because of extensive duplication of manufacturing, marketing, and administrative facilities in different national subsidiaries. The duplication of assets made sense in the world of the 1960s, when national markets were segmented from each other by barriers to cross-border trade. Products produced in Great Britain, for example, could not be sold economically in Germany due to high tariff duties levied on imports into Germany. By the 1980s, however, barriers to cross-border trade were falling rapidly worldwide and fragmented national markets were merging into larger regional or global markets. Also, the retailers through which P&G distributed its products were growing larger and more global, such as Walmart, Tesco from the United Kingdom, and Carrefour from France. These emerging