Focus and simplification are very much in vogue in many of the world’s biggest consumer products companies. For example, Procter & Gamble’s concentration on its largest brands, largest customers and largest markets since 2000 has been a major driver of growth, and Unilever has embarked on a similar strategy of focusing on its top 50 brands.

But focus brings inevitable challenges as well. What happens to the products that don’t make the cut. Do you sell them off? Do you run them as cash cows? Or do you encourage your teams to grow them without corporate support? And what about the marketing and research personnel who aren’t in the focal group: do you encourage them to move on, or do you continue to look for ways to motivate and engage them? These are tricky strategic challenges, and they require thoughtful managerial responses.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Consumer Healthcare is a fascinating case in point. To ensure that its lower-priority brands continued to develop, it created a community of marketing and R&D people around the world that came to be known as the Spark Network; it used the word “spark” because...

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Publication/Copyright: London Business School