As per case study, Unilever is one of the world’s largest consumer product companies and the world market leader in the ice cream sector. Its ice cream has been sold in over 40 countries. Unilever operates in Europe, North America, Africa, and Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. It includes brands such as Dove, Magnum, Lipton, etc. Unilever has been a decentralized organization, and their operations between its companies were having a common set of management principles, a share desire to succeed on local markets, and a shared corporate culture. However because they head offices found difficulties to develop and implement new ideas, Unilever started shifting towards centralization; it has re-engineered its operations into foods and home & Personal care. According to Nial FitzGerald, Unilever’s co-chairman, Unilever see their future in a portfolio of strong brands with international and local scale. They are determined to deliver a step change in Unilever’s to improve its operating performance Question 1: Consolidated option of ice cream brands
There are different options for the consolidations of ice cream brands, such as single platform, in-home and out-of-home sector, and stand alone brands.
Standalone is a sector that contains a single brand, which help’s company’s customers to know a specific location that they can go to buy a specific product.
The advantages that Standalone sector can have are the following:
Using the Standalone Sector it gives to the company a competitive advantage, since the firm can specialized on only one sector.
A company can easily select its segment, to compete in the market. Since it is only one brand, company can expand to more that one segment and gain more customers. Where on the opposite case, that a company has several brand, it cannot enlarge to more than one segment since it will cost a lot of money and it will confuse its customers.
Using Standalone can also help a firm to save