Procter & Gamble boss rides on top brands to spur growth
Procter & Gamble Services managing director Adema Sangale is leading the firm’s drive to increase its market share in the East African region. Photo/DENNIS OKEYO
It’s a Monday, which means Adema Sangole is in her office.
For many other Kenyan CEOs, this is an unremarkable occurrence. For the 34-year-old mother of two, however, it is the exception rather than the norm.
Every three weeks, her job calls for her to travel to the other regional offices she oversees, putting her out of her home base in Nairobi for a month each time.
On the cusp of such a trip, the unassuming slight figure standing in the corridor waiting to usher me into her offices at Proctor and Gamble’s (P&G) Nairobi headquarters does not bring to mind the image of your typical female corporate executive.
Wrapped in a flowing sweater, hair dressed in almost schoolgirl like braids and wearing flats in the place of the power stilettos you would expect, Ms Sangole gives the air of a colleague rather than the lady in charge of four East African countries, 54 distributors and 30 direct reports.
It is only on close examination, upon listening to her quiet yet confident voice, that you realise that there is more to the diminutive CEO than meets the eye.
Sh240 billion
But then, that appears to be Ms Sangole’s modus operandi. With a quiet determination, she has pulled herself from being a graduate recruit at the firm to regional managing director of a Sh240 billon company.
An alumnus of USIU and later Oxford University, she joined Procter and Gamble as a result of a university recruitment programme.
Her interests led her to the heart of any P&G operation anywhere in the world — its marketing department.
Having served as a brand manager for Always and Pampers in Kenya, Nigeria and Poland, P&G decided to elevate her to the position of associate director of external relations for Africa, based on her passionate yet subtle management style.
Unlike many of her peers, she has only had one employer throughout her career – P&G.
“It’s never been a job for me, it’s a lifestyle. I am a P&G citizen,” she says.
You get the sense that she is not just spewing the company line when she relates a harrowing schedule sees her board a plane every seven days or so.
As she settles into a 20-minute personalised power point presentation (rarely, if ever, performed for journalists by CEOs in this country) that becomes more apparent.
Indeed, as Ms Sangole decides to give an impromptu demonstration of the effectiveness of a new Pampers product, she frowns disapprovingly at the wet stain left on the wooden conference table by the forlorn nappy used to demonstrate the efficacy of Pampers.
“You see what our mothers had to deal with?” she asks, vigorously mopping up water used for the test.
Motherhood appears to hover at the edge of Ms Sangole’s consciousness throughout the interview, as it must with her jobs frequent travel and unreliable hours.
She mentions her family more than 20 times, tellingly more times she talks about the Pampers brand.
You get the feeling that this operation does not take kindly to leaks.
They tend to attack them with the liquid sucking materials and weave cotton that make up their two most popular products in this market; the Always line of sanitary pads and Pampers diapers.
Outside as a relentless sun brings to mind the drought that is currently ravaging much of Kenya, in the cool air-conditioned boardroom at P&G, the quest is to drive away wetness in any form — that is unless the moisture is being used to lather up Ariel, the fighter brand the firm launched last September as part of its strategy to launch an assault on the East African detergents market. Soap has always been an integral part of P&G’s interests.
The company was founded in the 1800s when its two founders — William Procter and James Gamble — merged their candle and soap businesses to form the company.
The firm’s first successful product was Ivory, a bar soap that continues to drive more revenues for the firm than our mobile companies make combined.
Ivory is so central to P&G’s business that its headquarters are dubbed Ivorydale, and staff at its headquarters in Cincinnati, US, are informally known as Ivorians.
But P&G, like many businesses whose core markets are based in developed economies like the US, faces a new challenge as it enters its 174th year of business — how to counter serious challenges such as high commodity costs and weak demand in the US, its home market.
This week, Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller said underlying growth rates in developed markets, which account for the bulk of P&G’s sales, have been essentially flat.
If that sluggishness persists, it could be more difficult for P&G to meet the high end of its four to six per cent sales growth target this fiscal year, she says.
Emerging economies such as the East African bloc are now seen as the salvation for the company, and although P&G has not been as fast as some of its competitors like Colgate-Palmolive to seize upon these emerging markets, it now sees lots of room for growth in places like Brazil and India.
Emerging economies
Analysts paint an especially rosy view for the household care market, where soap and detergent players have been seen scrubbing up on their knowledge of Africa to take advantage of the market growth rates of seven to 15 per cent predicted for the region in 2011.
The trend toward emerging markets has been growing for some time in the soap and detergent markets.
For example, in 2009, 45 per cent of US consumer products group Colgate-Palmolive’s sales were in greater Asia, Africa and Latin America, according to the company’s website.
At an investor briefing mid last year, P&G signalled its intention to capitalise on the growth opportunity by launching a fighter brand in the detergents segment — Ariel.
“We introduced Ariel in Kenya during September as part of our strategy to dramatically increase our presence in East Africa,” says Ms Sangole.
The decision is based on the fact that in most developing markets, fabric care shipments are experiencing double digit growth, with most of the gains being made in Africa.
Ariel is not new to the Kenyan market, and the company needed to instigate a shift from its formally elitist position when it was launched in the 1990s in order to launch a strong offensive against its rivals, namely Toss, Omo and Sunlight.
“We invested in pricing corrections to reduce gaps versus competition and have streamlined our distribution model so that it is more readily available on the shelves,” said Ms Sangole.
Alongside Pampers and Always, the other products the Nairobi office is responsible for, Ariel rounds out the company’s strategic focus for the region; to provide affordable sanitary and household products to the mass market.
With more than 300 brands varying from the Olay skincare range to the Pringles crisps line, Ms Sangole remains coy about any new additions to the stable, but is confident that there will be more in days to come.
Nonetheless, new challenges loom on the horizon. Continued unrest in North Africa threatens to destabilise the firm’s supply chain, with the event’s in Egypt having already affected delivery of Pampers to the Tanzanian market.
In addition, a rise in global commodity prices could set adrift efforts to lower prices for products in this region — a key plank of the firm’s strategy.
This week, the company was forced to admit that it anticipated more than $1 billion in increased commodity costs this year, as prices for diesel and other necessities climb.
P&G told Reuters that it would be increasing prices as it attempts to find ways to absorb higher commodity costs.
“It’s going to be another low quality March quarter,” UBS analyst Nik Modi said, referring to P&G’s current fiscal third quarter, which ends next month.
The company’s fiscal year ends in June.
As she prepares to jet out for her next business trip, as Ms Sangole mops the last of the moisture from the boardroom table after the Pampers demo, I venture the question that has been nagging me through the interview: how do you put up with so much time away from your children?
