The former Global COO of Reckitt talks about his experience leading the Southern team of

India as General Manager South, which involved managing direct sales teams and
distributors for four states and driving business in 125,000 stores at the age of 27. He
discusses the company's strategy with triple coils for mosquito repellents and how the
idea seemed perfect in theory but ended up being perfectly wrong in practice. This resulted
in consumer suspicion and loss of sales for the brand. The company brought the former COO
back to salvage the brand, which had gone from making 3-4 million pounds to 20 million
pounds in just a few years but then declined again due to the triple coils incident. His
experience of selling Mortein in India. Despite not making much money from the brand due
to high competition, trade importance, and spending on promotions, there were still 1.3
million retail stores distributing Mortein in India. The insight here was that as retailers go
lower in price, they only stock one brand of a category because they do not have
enough money to stock more options.  To increase the number of retailers only stocking
Mortein, they stopped all promotions and cut prices but shifted 40% of the savings to
wholesale promotions instead. By spending a lot of money on media and pushing
aggressively through wholesale promotions, Mortein India became the number one brand in
pest control in India and became the number one growth driver of the company in the world
from 2001 to 2005. 

His experience working on the global brand marketing for Finish, a dishwasher brand that
was the emotional heart of Reckitt. He explains that this particular category worked in a way
that as more and more people started using dishwashers, the profit pool got larger, making
it a fantastic business to be in. On the company's success models for growing brands, which
were applicable everywhere, and it eventually led to more people using their product more
often at a higher price.

Being sent to China to turn around a small business that was losing $15 million. The CEO
explained that he prioritizes growth over size and saw the potential for doubling the
business in China every year for many years. He highlights the differences in their economies,
with China having a 4.5 trillion dollar economy in 2008, compared to India's 15-year-later
opening up of their economy in 1991. He then explains how the company's business model
in China was based on creating small categories with high gross margins and
disproportionate shares of the profit pool. By investing more in marketing, Reckitt was able
to establish its brands as the gold standard in their respective categories and drive
innovation. the importance of consistency and emphasizes that this model goes against
traditional approaches to building businesses based on large markets and pricing and the
benefits of negative working capital, which Reckitt achieved by reducing costs and
working on cash flow. negative working capital, which means paying suppliers later and
receiving payments from customers beforehand. Maintaining cash flow and scaling the
business requires a clear framework for working capital management, which was set up
successfully by the management team 

Building a business based on a relationship market in China, disruption of account

relationships resulted in a decline in sales. He shares how his team was able to create a
successful marketing campaign for the Durex brand using a new social media platform, By
throwing a Valentine's Day party. they marketed Durex in China with quirky but innovative
campaigns. They developed a voice for the brand, a calendar and tried to take a Durex view
on anything happening in the world. They created fun games, such as Flappy Sperm and
Durex Baby, and an app that became one of the top five apps on the Chinese app store for a
while. They also had a campaign called "Travel with Love", which involved a couple traveling
to six cities in China and bartering their way while carrying sacks full of vibrators. 

How his team built a culture of innovation in China, where they had high ambition but low
resources. They focused on building awareness and availability through social media since
they were unable to afford dominant advertising.With China alone having a billion-dollar
business, of which over 70% comes through e-commerce.  D2C conversion rate in China
grew from 0.15 to 14 percent, which is attributed to the growth of traffic, basket size, and
transactions.He notes that China had to produce in such large volumes that it had to keep
prices low for the rest of the world so they could consume and buy, indirectly subsidizing
their own industries. he observes that India needs to create opportunities to avoid wasting
the demographic dividend and rise similarly to China. Company focused on digital
technology for marketing. Discusses the integration of Mead Johnson into the rest of the
business, which made Reckitt the two-division company it is today. During the COVID-19
pandemic and how it affected the supply chains of major companies. companies had built
supply chains that were highly globalized and that the shutdowns of ports and lack of
necessary materials caused chaos in the early days of the pandemic. He explains how they
were forced to learn how to take a global supply chain and make it local in a short period