Joe Arcuri assumed the position of Chief Commercial Officer at the beginning of 2016 after serving as President of the company’s Home Solutions business segment since 2014. In this capacity, he was instrumental in actively managing the Rubbermaid brand portfolio for growth and profitability, driving growth in the food storage area while exiting less attractive categories within the segment. He also brought increased commercial innovation and category management-driven insights to further enhance the Calphalon®, Goody® and Rubbermaid® brands.
customers /
Executing
With Excellence
to Accelerate
growth
Q&A With Joe Arcuri,
Chief Commercial Officer
The company recently created a Market Delivery Organization as part of the Delivery function. How will this change impact the company?
The formation of a single Market Delivery Organization will allow our Delivery team to more consistently unleash the key capabilities of our trade, customer collaboration, shopper and customer marketing groups. Before the change, our Delivery organization had been multi-pillared with Trade Marketing, Customer Collaboration and Shopper Marketing as stand-alone organizations, adding unnecessary complexity. Our new structure will allow us to significantly unlock trapped capacity for growth as outlined in our Growth Game Plan. The Market Delivery Organization is focused on three key deliverables: commercialization of product innovation plans, creation and acceleration of year two new product growth plans, and creation and execution of core business growth plans. As a result, the Market Delivery Organization will deliver more holistic selling solutions to our customers, driving category growth, step change distribution and share-of-shelf gains, and impactful in-store marketing of our brands. This will, in turn, deliver a better in-store experience forour consumers and drive accelerated point of sale and market share gains.
Building
eCommerce
Capabilities
We put consumers first in everything we do. And, we all know that today’s consumer is increasingly turning to the Internet to shop, making e-commerce a critical strategic thrust for us. Since 2011, our point of sale in e-commerce channels – including pure-play e-tailers, the dot com sites of our brick and mortar retailers, and direct-to-consumer – has grown exponentially, with a nearly 60 percent compound average annual growth rate. In 2015, we opened a new global e-commerce hub in New York City, taking our drive to enhance online analytic capabilities to the next level. With this move, we set the course for global e-commerce with an omnichannel approach for our brands, increasing collaboration and growth with our customers, fostering new business development opportunities and creating a seamless experience for our consumers. Our strengthened analytics capability will provide deeper analysis and insights into digital consumers’ purchase behavior, which is critical to unlocking this fast-growing opportunity.
Why is it important for the Delivery organization to put the consumer at the center of everything?
The Market Delivery Organization uniquely owns the experience when consumers interact with our brands and innovations at either the retail or distributor touchpoints. These consumer interactions are critical trial opportunities, and how our brands are presented and communicated will determine our success in the marketplace. As a result, everything we do as a Market Delivery Organization has to be consumer-centric in order to win consumer trial and win versus the competition.
What steps are you taking to become the partner of choice for your customers, and how does the consumer fit into that equation?
Our Shopper Marketing program is a great example of a capability we offer to customers that our competition is not currently providing. This program seeks to understand the behavior of consumers, specifically why people make purchase decisions and what’s involved in that path to purchase. This provides us with the knowledge necessary to properly focus advertising and promotion funds at retailers and more effectively target specific shoppers to turn them into buyers. Our goal is to find shoppers wherever their path to purchase, whether they are on mobile devices, shopping in-store or shopping from home.
How does the Shopper Marketing program tie in with brand marketing?
It starts with Brand Activation. We establish national messaging and then decide how to commercialize that across channels. From there, we work with our customer teams and build out programs, knowing what brands and campaigns within the Newell portfolio we want to promote. We work with our retail partners and ask, “What can this look like for you?” Then, we bring the promotion together in a collaborative way that meets their needs and ours. This collaboration helps drive sales for both parties and represents how Newell can become the partner of choice for growth as laid out in the Growth Game Plan.
What are the top priorities for your organization this year?
Our top priorities are to execute with excellence our commercial and product innovation agenda, service our customers better and more economically through improved planning and expand our Win Bigger categories like Writing and Creative Expression, Rubbermaid Commercial Products and Food & Beverage across our international power cells.