He has a stable of well-loved brands but the market has never been more challenging. Kevin Havelock talks to Julian Hunt

Working for a massive, western fmcg company in Saudi Arabia in the wake of 9/11 would not have been everybody’s cup of tea. But Kevin Havelock loved the experience. At the time he was chairman of Unilever Arabia and responsible for the company’s business in eight countries across the Middle East. The heightened tension in the region and the threat to the safety of the large numbers of expat employees - never mind the day-to-day business issues - ensured this was one of the toughest postings within the Unilever empire.

Today, Havelock finds himself in the slightly less hostile environs of Crawley. But the 48-year-old executive is, arguably, leading a business facing some equally big challenges - not least around the issues of how best to keep growing in a highly competitive market.

Havelock took up his role as managing director of Unilever UK Foods, the company behind household favourites such as PG Tips, Flora and Knorr, last May. In many ways Havelock was coming home - back to the company where his Unilever career started in 1985 when he joined Brooke Bond as a brand manager.

It was a prospect that he clearly relished. “I was coming back to lead a company I had worked for on a number of occasions,” he says. “Although it had changed through merger and acquisition, it was great to see old friends and colleagues again and I looked forward from day one to driving a growth agenda for our business.”

Growth is a recurring theme of our wide-ranging conversation, which, coincidentally, took place just days before Unilever announced a huge restructuring of its corporate structure as part of its efforts to breathe some life into its top-line sales performance around the globe.

As far as Havelock’s £900m piece of Unilever is concerned, the growth equation is easy to define and articulate. He says it’s all about nurturing some of the biggest and best-loved brands in grocery while developing innovations relevant to consumers, particularly in health and convenience.

Havelock rattles off a raft of recent initiatives, such as the relaunch of Flora with a stronger health message, the roll-out of Flora Proa-activ milk, yogurt and drinks, the way PG Tips is putting on the style to celebrate its 75th birthday and the launch of Knorr Simply Stock.

Exciting stuff. And rewarding too: NPD is said to have generated an additional £10m in sales last year. But nobody is finding life easy in a market where the retail trade is heavily consolidated, competition is fierce and deflationary forces are at play. The trick, says Havelock, is finding ways of adding value and not letting deflation be the overall driver of trade. “It has been a very challenging environment,” he admits. “But we found last year that the new products we brought to market were well supported. The concentration of the market just allows us to work in a more detailed and focused way with those customers.”

And one area where he is keen to see the business working harder with customers is in developing more excitement around the brands in-store - the PG tea caddy promotion being an obvious example.

“It’s really interesting, having been out of the country for seven years, to see how the market has changed. Collectibles, sampling and on-pack offers have all been driven out by price promotion. We are keen to bring back excitement to the retail sector, so that it does not feel that price is the only thing going on,” says Havelock.

“As Unilever, we are the biggest supplier to nearly all of the retailers. If we are not able to bring that sort of excitement to the market, then who can? It’s our role to set new standards in terms of quality of marketing; to break the mould and create innovations that help consumers. At the same time we need to fully understand the strategies of our customers and bring excitement to our market.”

Backing up all of this customer-facing stuff have been big changes to the internal workings of Unilever UK Foods which Havelock believes are key to ensuring it does things better and, importantly, much quicker than before. “We are a big business with a skills base second to none,” he explains. “But what is key is to break that down and create leadership behind each of our brands and categories so our people can express themselves and create their own innovation and excitement.”

This thinking manifests itself in a number of ways; there may be an overall strategy but there’s no formulaic approach to implementing it. Havelock highlights the launch of the Carb Options range, brought to market in less than 20 weeks, as an example of how the business is changing. It continues to nurture the laddish appeal of brands such as Pot Noodle and Peperami. Then there are the small units dubbed The Incs, formed last year and which now have full responsibility for developing brands such as Slim-Fast, Colman’s and Marmite.

“It’s all about leadership, personal responsibilities, speed of action and speed of decision-making,” explains Havelock. His enthusiasm is infectious. And his changes are having an impact. After a slow start at the beginning of last year, the business says it ended the year in growth. “I am delighted with the progress we have made in recent months. I cannot think of any other job where I could be leading a company with an extraordinary set of brands at a time like this. I just love it.”
It was great to see old friends and colleagues and I looked forward from day one to driving a growth agenda for our business



Q&A


Tell us about your career: how did you get one of the top posts in Unilever?

My first job was with Guinness where I enjoyed both sales and marketing. I joined Unilever, via Brooke Bond, five years later. I then had a spell in Germany, before being made marketing manager of Brooke Bond UK. In 1995 I was made marketing director of Van den Bergh Foods. I left the UK in 1997 to take over as head of Unilever Foods in France. Then in 2000 I went to run our business in the Middle East.

Wasn’t the Middle East a bit of a grim posting?

It was fantastic for me personally to be in in a part of the world that was in turmoil. It was exciting to get some better understanding of what was behind all of that. But it was challenging from a leadership point of view - particularly being responsible for large numbers of expats.