His style isn\u2019t 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\u2019ve respected were objective, smart, driven, and merciless when they needed to be. Navratil fits that bill perfectly.<\/p>\n
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The usual leadership bullshit<\/p>\n
Remember when Unilever\u2019s new CEO opened his tenure announcing a 20-fold increase in influencer marketing?<\/a><\/p>\n Oddly tactical.<\/p>\n Off the pace.<\/p>\n A weird place to start.<\/p>\n And a signal of a general inability to get it.<\/p>\n Navratil did the opposite. No-nonsense thinking with a menacing tone that suggests genuine depth and velocity. \u201cWe will be ruthless in assessing our talent,\u201d he told staff, stressing metrics, accountability, and rewards for delivery. The phrasing startled some. The markets loved it. Within days, Nestl\u00e9\u2019s share price jumped 9%.<\/p>\n Within three weeks of taking the role, he\u2019d announced 16,000 job cuts, roughly 6% of Nestl\u00e9\u2019s workforce, paired with a substantial increase in marketing investment. \u201cThe world is changing, and Nestl\u00e9 needs to change faster,\u201d he told investors. That line could have been clich\u00e9. Instead, it became a rallying cry.<\/p>\n But this isn\u2019t just cost-cutting.<\/p>\n Navratil knows better than to starve the goose that lays the golden KitKat. He\u2019s bluntly said Nestl\u00e9 must build \u201cthe best marketers in the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a deceptively huge statement.<\/p>\n For decades, Nestl\u00e9 was a manufacturing monolith with marketing flapping around like decorative bunting. Great brand names such as Maggi, Nescaf\u00e9, and Purina thrived on legacy and logistical reach, not consumer intimacy or creativity.<\/p>\n Navratil wants to reverse that equation.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \n Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum<\/p>\n The most underreported part of Navratil\u2019s playbook is what he\u2019s doing inside Nestl\u00e9. He\u2019s dismantling the bureaucratic Swiss decision chains that smothered young marketers. White-collar automation will replace busywork, freeing bandwidth for insight and experimentation. He\u2019s clarifying marketing hierarchy, training general managers to understand brand architecture, and insisting P&Ls be shared between marketing and finance. \u201cAccepting that we lose market share is no longer an option,\u201d he recently told his new teams.<\/p>\n Ambition, investment, and better marketers are only part of it. Nestl\u00e9 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\u2019t which brands to kill, it\u2019s the bolder question of which to keep. Navratil is surely eyeing his 31 \u201cbillionaire brands,\u201d the likes of Nespresso, KitKat, and Purina, and asking why Nestl\u00e9 bothers with the long, distracting tail that follows behind.<\/p>\n 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 Nestl\u00e9\u2019s 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 Nestl\u00e9\u2019s portfolio and the strategic implications of its former inertia.<\/p>\n Compared with predecessors who alternated between risk aversion and digital hype, Navratil\u2019s tone is managerial realism: focus, eliminate noise, and back the big bets. It\u2019s a refreshing counterpoint to the purpose-drunk, ESG-ringfenced frameworks that have turned legacy leaders into conference speakers rather than potent competitors.<\/p>\n And analysts are warming to it. Barclays called his debut \u201ca good one,\u201d singling out the raised cost-saving target to almost \u00a33bn as fuel for increased marketing investment. That\u2019s efficiency for growth, not cost-cutting, something FMCG boards often misunderstand.<\/p>\n The ultimate question will, of course, be one of execution. Can Navratil retrofit a century-old giant for agile warfare without breaking its bones?<\/p>\n 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, Nestl\u00e9 will be on course to write a bold new chapter in the FMCG turnaround manual.<\/p>\n There\u2019s delicious irony here.<\/p>\n Nestl\u00e9\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s good news for marketers everywhere.<\/p>\n True marketing-led leadership doesn\u2019t come along very often. Right now, it wears the Austrian\/Swiss expression of someone about to get it done. For once, a CEO isn\u2019t asking marketing to justify its existence. He\u2019s building the company around it. Making this a transformation to watch very carefully.<\/p>\n Mark Ritson is inviting entrants to his MiniMBA in Brand Management<\/a> for the class of April 2026.<\/p>\n Mark Ritson: An almighty shitstorm is coming for UK supermarkets this Christmas<\/a><\/p>\n