Mark Ritson argues that former brand auditor Philipp Navratil’s unapologetic, marketing-first leadership might finally shake Nestlé out of its corporate malaise.
When Philipp Navratil walked into Nestlé’s Vevey headquarters last month as its new CEO, the air must have felt heavy. The world’s biggest food company had just burned through two chief executives in a year. Was he going to make it third time lucky?
Navratil isn’t some parachuted consultant or a rebuffed senior executive from one of the company’s rivals. He’s a Nestlé lifer with 25 years across the Anglo-Swiss giant’s operations. He speaks multiple languages, holds an MBA, and has the steely look of someone who isn’t here to fuck about. More importantly, he’s done both the country GM path, successfully running Honduras, and then the HQ role, eventually leading Nespresso. He knows how the machine works. His announcement interview immediately sets the tone.
His style isn’t the performative empathy beloved of LinkedIn leadership gurus. None of that soft, mushy bollocks that portrays managers as myopic efficiency bullies in contrast to selfless, empathetic leaders who combine Joan of Arc with Mahatma Gandhi. That nonsense always rings false with me. The leaders I’ve respected were objective, smart, driven, and merciless when they needed to be. Navratil fits that bill perfectly.
The usual leadership bullshit
Remember when Unilever’s new CEO opened his tenure announcing a 20-fold increase in influencer marketing?
Oddly tactical.
Off the pace.
A weird place to start.
And a signal of a general inability to get it.
Navratil did the opposite. No-nonsense thinking with a menacing tone that suggests genuine depth and velocity. “We will be ruthless in assessing our talent,” he told staff, stressing metrics, accountability, and rewards for delivery. The phrasing startled some. The markets loved it. Within days, Nestlé’s share price jumped 9%.
Within three weeks of taking the role, he’d announced 16,000 job cuts, roughly 6% of Nestlé’s workforce, paired with a substantial increase in marketing investment. “The world is changing, and Nestlé needs to change faster,” he told investors. That line could have been cliché. Instead, it became a rallying cry.
But this isn’t just cost-cutting.
Navratil knows better than to starve the goose that lays the golden KitKat. He’s bluntly said Nestlé must build “the best marketers in the industry.”
It’s a deceptively huge statement.
For decades, Nestlé was a manufacturing monolith with marketing flapping around like decorative bunting. Great brand names such as Maggi, Nescafé, and Purina thrived on legacy and logistical reach, not consumer intimacy or creativity.
Navratil wants to reverse that equation.
Behind the rhetoric sits data. Marketing spend will climb to almost 9% of its revenue this year, up from 7% in 2022. Global CMO Aude Gandon has already aligned creative output. About 70% of investment now goes to digital, with first-party data coverage reaching 400 million people.
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The most underreported part of Navratil’s playbook is what he’s doing inside Nestlé. He’s dismantling the bureaucratic Swiss decision chains that smothered young marketers. White-collar automation will replace busywork, freeing bandwidth for insight and experimentation. He’s clarifying marketing hierarchy, training general managers to understand brand architecture, and insisting P&Ls be shared between marketing and finance. “Accepting that we lose market share is no longer an option,” he recently told his new teams.
Ambition, investment, and better marketers are only part of it. Nestlé has become dusty and needs an urgent purge across its two thousand brands. The numbers point to a lethal outcome in early 2026. The key challenge of brand consolidation isn’t which brands to kill, it’s the bolder question of which to keep. Navratil is surely eyeing his 31 “billionaire brands,” the likes of Nespresso, KitKat, and Purina, and asking why Nestlé bothers with the long, distracting tail that follows behind.
The former auditor knows that 80% of his profits derive from fewer than 40 of his brands. His subsequent logic will be as brutal as it is simple. Sell some big brands like Perrier and Gerber. Delete hundreds of smaller ones. Cut costs. Immediately bolster profits. Then, as Nestlé’s best marketers invest more focus and greater spend on its 30 star brands, grow revenue too. Less has never been more in marketing. Expect at least 1,800 brands, yes, 1,800, to be disappeared or divested very soon. Such is the scale of Nestlé’s portfolio and the strategic implications of its former inertia.
Compared with predecessors who alternated between risk aversion and digital hype, Navratil’s tone is managerial realism: focus, eliminate noise, and back the big bets. It’s a refreshing counterpoint to the purpose-drunk, ESG-ringfenced frameworks that have turned legacy leaders into conference speakers rather than potent competitors.
And analysts are warming to it. Barclays called his debut “a good one,” singling out the raised cost-saving target to almost £3bn as fuel for increased marketing investment. That’s efficiency for growth, not cost-cutting, something FMCG boards often misunderstand.
The ultimate question will, of course, be one of execution. Can Navratil retrofit a century-old giant for agile warfare without breaking its bones?
So far, the signs are promising. Organic growth climbed to 4.3% from 2.9% in the first half. Not fireworks, but momentum. If his February 2026 update maintains this trajectory, Nestlé will be on course to write a bold new chapter in the FMCG turnaround manual.
There’s delicious irony here.
Nestlé’s salvation hinges on becoming the marketing powerhouse it never believed it had to be. For too long, the company relied on distribution, shelf power, and portfolio breadth, with marketing an afterthought. Navratil is now betting on insight, marketing, and brand coherence.
That’s good news for marketers everywhere.
True marketing-led leadership doesn’t come along very often. Right now, it wears the Austrian/Swiss expression of someone about to get it done. For once, a CEO isn’t asking marketing to justify its existence. He’s building the company around it. Making this a transformation to watch very carefully.
Mark Ritson is inviting entrants to his MiniMBA in Brand Management for the class of April 2026.
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