SUPERIORITY: A HIGHER
STANDARD OF EXCELLENCE

Superiority matters because it drives category growth, household penetration, strong share positions, and winning sales and profit growth — and builds business for our retail partners.

Four years ago, we established a higher standard of excellence — a standard of irresistible superiority across product, package, brand communication, retail execution, and value.

When we started on this journey, we set the superiority bar high. We wanted to be irresistibly or noticeably superior across each of the five vectors, and not just in a lab or versus our own tests; it had to translate to consumer delight.

To assess superiority, we use a “body of evidence” approach to provide a holistic and transparent evaluation across each of the five vectors, using a mix of tests, data, reviews, and in-market measurements. We look at our superiority versus competition and whether we’re improving. We know we’ve raised the bar on superiority when a consumer has an experience that lifts their expectations and makes it harder to go back to what they were using before.

Today, 75% of our portfolio is judged as superior, and we make continuous improvements in response to consumer needs and changing industry dynamics. Where we feel we’ve achieved 80% or 90% superiority across the five vectors, we use this as motivation to raise our standards again and, importantly, to continue to grow markets.

For example, we’ve been assessing the superiority of our unit-dose laundry detergents versus our competition, and that has worked to help maintain our superiority up until now. In fact, globally today we have an over 70% share of the unit-dose detergent category. But now we’ve raised the bar on how we assess unit-dose superiority, shifting from comparing ourselves versus competition to a higher bar — asking ourselves if our proposition is superior enough for people who use liquid detergent, the most popular laundry detergent form, to trade up to unit dose.

Superiority is an opportunity that never ends — the bar is constantly being raised, by us and our competition. We’re continuously making investments to strengthen the long-term health and competitiveness of our brands, extend our margin of advantage and quality of execution, and improve options for consumers around the world.