What a selection of the world’s top brands had to say about their performance and outlook during the first quarter of the 2026 calendar year.
Companies:
P&G (22.01.26):
What’s the top line? Procter and Gamble is doing well in international markets, but struggling on its home turf. The Latin American market saw the most organic growth worldwide at 8%, followed by China at 3% and Europe at 1%. But organic sales in North America fell 2%, driven by a 3% fall in volume. Management were optimistic about the outlook for the rest of the year and the company’s positioning within the sector. They do not expect to increase media spending year on year.
Any interesting insights? In the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call on 22 Jan, chief financial officer, Andre Schulten, and chief executive officer, Shailesh Jejurikar, both described the last five years as having been all about price, and posited that 2026 is the beginning of a new landscape for the category.
Procter and Gamble, they said, is positioned to take advantage of the more fractured media landscape. With a ‘data lake’ of consumer insights gathered over the past five years, Jejurikar argued, the company can ‘mine for insights that lead to new product innovation, brand ideas, performance claims, marketing campaigns’.
He added that ‘AI and Gen AI capability help our teams discover consumer-relevant insights at every step of the consumer path to purchase’, and help to translate ‘deep insights’ into ‘a compelling brand idea repeated wherever consumers engage’ to make the brand more memorable and worthy of its price.
Schulten said there was a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity to leverage the shifts in the landscape and our unique strengths and capabilities to set ourselves apart’, saying that the company needs to ‘adjust the kind of innovation we do’ to take advantage of it.
Jejurikar highlighted campaigns in China and Latin America which had focused on local values to advertise baby products like Pampers as success stories for the company’s consumer insights and marketing teams.
‘The retail landscape is changing,’ he concluded. ‘More concentration, but also brand proliferation. Retailers are becoming media platforms. And media platforms are becoming retailers. In summary, the consumer path to purchase is changing every day, is nonlinear, and littered with millions of possible distractions. We expect an even more intense pace of change in the next three to five years.’
Main image by Joshua Hoehne.