Amati & Associates

29/05/2026

Consumer goods growth is concentrated.

Where to find it, and why it matters now.

29/05/2026

Pain claims lose market share.

The brand that focused on emotional win went from 4th to the leader.

I led the team advising a global CHC on its OTC pain portfolio.
Four legacy brands with longer histories and broader distribution.
One of the largest markets in the world.
Structurally flat.
Low single-digit growth.

The brand sat in fourth place. It had been there for years.

The original positioning was functional.
A real territory.
Also a ceiling.
It told the market exactly who the brand was for.
Nothing more.

The repositioning changed the frame entirely.

Not a pain claim. An outcome claim.

What can you do with your life when you are pain-free?

The brand stopped leading with the ailment.
It started with the consumer who manages life despite it.
Same product. Different identity.

→ Sales grew roughly 20% over four years
→ Market share reached near 30% in a category growing at low single digits
→ Legacy competitors with decades of presence finished behind it

The brand extended into new formats, packaging, and communications without a new product. Positioning first. Portfolio and occasion followed.

The 3 reasons this worked:

1. Outcome over ailment
Functional claims describe what the product does.
Outcome claims describe what the consumer becomes.
One is a feature. The other is identity.
Identity earns a place in the consumer's life.

2. Demand space precision
The brand did not try to own the pain-relief market.
That territory was crowded. It owned a specific occasion.
The consumer who refuses to let pain stop them.
Narrow enough to defend. Broad enough to scale.

3. Positioning before portfolio
New formats and occasions followed the space.
But the brand had to claim it already.
They did not create it.
That sequence matters.
Brands that extend before they own a space dilute.
Brands that extend after they own one compound.

The 3 moves that follow:

First: Diagnose the real problem before redesigning the product.
→ Most fourth-place brands have the same product as the leader.
→ Not the same frame.

Second: Define the demand space you can plausibly own.
→ "Pain relief" is not a demand space.
→ "Life managed despite pain" is.
→ Not what the product does.
→ What occasion it earns the right to own.

Third: Resist extending before the space is clearly yours.
→ Extensions from a weak position dilute.
→ Extensions from a strong one compound.

The hard truth:

Most brands behind the category leader are not losing on product. They are losing on territory.

They compete on function because it feels safer to defend internally. Product parity does not move market share.
Owning a demand space does.

If you are running a consumer health or FMCG brand sitting behind the category leader, the real question is not how to compete harder on product.

It is whether you have chosen a space narrow enough to own and broad enough to matter.

Agree or disagree? Leave a comment

28/05/2026

Working the value gap

How artists help companies see beyond sameness, recognise emerging value, and build the imagination needed to stay distinctive.

27/05/2026

Beyond Beer Drives Growth

As Traditional Beer Volumes Stall

27/05/2026

Molson Coors beat EPS by 63%. Heineken grew 2.8%.

Both got hammered. Earnings had nothing to do with it.

Four of the world's largest brewers reported Q1 2026 in the same window.
The financial headlines looked similar. The market verdicts did not.

→ AB InBev: Revenue +5.8%. Moody's credit upgrade. Buy ratings from GS, JPM, Barclays, UBS, Bernstein, and Berenberg.
→ Carlsberg: +3.6% organic growth. Beat consensus.
→ Molson Coors: EPS a 63% beat. Stock near its 52-week low. Goldman Sachs "Underweight" at $41.
→ Heineken: +2.8% organic sales growth. JPM downgraded to Neutral. Price target cut from €90 to €70.

Same sector. Four companies. Two completely different verdicts.

Investors are not pricing Q1 results. They are pricing certainty.

The 2 types of uncertainty that get you punished

1. Operational uncertainty: You're still a beer company
Molson Coors beat estimates by $0.24.
US market share on Miller Lite fell 60bps.
Glass supply issues in NA. EMEA decelerating.

Goldman Sachs prices the structural story, not the beat.

AB InBev's growth engine is not beer volumes +1.2%.
It is Cutwater RTDs, premium mix, the Beyond Beer bet placed years ahead.

Carlsberg's beat came from soft drinks, not beer.
Beer: +0.4%. Soft drinks: +10%.

Edward Mundy at Jefferies:
"This soft drinks beat clearly highlights the benefits of the multi-beverage model, particularly as Carlsberg becomes the anchor bottler for Pepsi in Europe."

Not a side story. The strategy.

2. Governance uncertainty: no successor, no direction
Heineken posted +2.8% organic growth.
CEO Dolf van den Brink announced his departure for May 31.
No named successor.

JPM cut the price target 20%:
"We see limited re-rating potential given that 2026 risks turning into another transition year."

Solid results. Zero credit.

The 2 moves that matter

First: Beyond Beer is non-negotiable
→ The four of them moved beyond beer years before this moment.
→ Not in crisis. Years before.

Second: Mind of operational signals
→ CEO departure without a named successor is an operational liability
→ Molson Coors is future-proof, but today is leaking: margin and volumes.

The hard truth:
The market is not asking one question. It is asking two.
- Do you have a strategy that works beyond beer?
- And do you have a leadership team stable enough to execute it?

AB InBev and Carlsberg can answer yes to both.
That is why they get upgrades.
Molson Coors and Heineken cannot answer the second.
That is why they get punished, even when the quarterly numbers look fine.

Agree/disagree? Let me know what you think

25/05/2026

RTDs, Conjoint and Consumer Choices | Andy O'Brien | Part 1

Episode 83

25/05/2026

FMCG innovation still runs on guesswork.

Two-year development cycles. Six-month evaluation windows.

Decisions made on instinct because the data arrives too late.
The old trade-off was speed or evidence. Pick one.
That trade-off is disappearing.

Real-time conjoint analysis now delivers structured insight at commercial speed.
Days, not months.

Andy O'Brien from EPIC Insights put it simply: "If you haven't got research moving at the speed that your buyers are working at, opportunities are gonna pass you by."

→ His team runs studies start to finish in 7 to 14 days.
→ Some in under six hours.

The RTD study EPIC, which ran across Germany, France, and Spain, shows what integrated testing reveals.

Consumers don't respond to liquid, packaging, or price independently. Value perception comes from the combination.
Cans drive volume and scale.
Glass enables entry into high-value occasions.
Premium packaging does not substitute for mainstream formats.
It complements them.

Female consumers in France and specific age cohorts in Germany showed reversed preferences when scenarios were properly modelled.
Fragmented research would have missed this entirely.
The 3 hard truths about innovation research:

1. Siloed testing produces wrong answers

→ Product, packaging, and price interact. Testing them separately misses the combination effect.
→ The EPIC RTD findings would have been unreadable any other way.

2. Late data is no data

→ Two-year cycles mean insight arrives after the decision is locked.
→ Intuition fills the gap. Failure gets blamed on the market.

3. Insight functions are running a ten-year-old process

→ Large, infrequent studies disconnected from commercial timelines.
→ Retailers don't wait. Innovation windows close before the research lands.

The 3 moves that actually work:
First: Match research speed to commercial speed
→ 7 to 14 days from brief to finding.
→ Six hours when the window won't stay open.

Second: Test product, packaging, and price as a system
→ Conjoint analysis models how the variables combine.
→ CFOs and supply chain get evidence, not instinct.

Third: Embed learning into commercial operations
→ Continuous insight, embedded in commercial decisions. Not a quarterly study.
→ Intuition gets validated before commitment, not after failure.

The hard truth:

The 90% innovation failure rate everyone quotes should be falling. The toolkit now exists.

The question is whether organisations are adopting it or continuing to run the process from ten years ago.

If you're launching innovation in 2026 and your research timeline doesn't align with your retailer's timeline, you're already behind.

Full conversation on Growth, Brands and More.
Link in comments.

23/05/2026

"You can't have a blanket approach across all countries."

A spirits CEO said it to me last week. And he is acting on it.

He is now transforming his company to operate on local insights.

The spirits' traditional "Build it, and they will buy it" is B/S.

The industry built two decades of growth by exporting playbooks. Best practices from one market, replicated in the next.
If it worked in the US, it would work in Germany.

It rarely does.

The tequila example:

→ Germany: 300K cases total market.
→ The market leader holds 60%.
→ The next five players share 22%.
→ Everyone else is fighting for scraps.

Every major tequila brand wants to be in Germany.
Few understand how it is consumed there.

In the US, on-premise drives tequila.
Bars and cocktails built the category's cultural relevance.
Tequila recently overtook whiskey and vodka as the top-performing on-premise spirits category by dollar sales.

In Germany, tequila is off-premise. Supermarkets. Discount stores.
At-home consumption.
The on-premise exists, but it does not drive volume.

The playbook that built tequila in the US assumes bar culture, cocktail occasions, and on-premise visibility. None of that transfers.

The same pattern appears elsewhere:

→ Italy: 300 gin brands. All liquid-based positioning. None with a consumer-experience approach.
→ Poland: Whisky is the fastest-growing category. On everybody's radar. But the consumption logic is local.

The real diagnosis:

The industry scaled on replication, not understanding. That worked when categories were growing everywhere. It stops working when growth becomes selective and local dynamics determine who wins.

The hard truth:

The playbook is not the problem.
The absence of local insight is.

Most market entries fail not because the brand is wrong, but because the commercial model assumes the wrong consumption architecture. On-premise vs off-premise. Occasion. Price sensitivity. Channel structure.

If you are sitting on a market-entry or category-expansion decision, the question is not whether you have a playbook.

It is whether you have done the diagnostic to know where the playbook breaks.

What should you do instead?
- Walk into a bar.
- Observe what patrons do.
- Don't tell anyboby who you are.
- You are John, Pedro, Nicolas. Just a curious mind.
- Talk to the bar tender. Ask questions. Listen carefully.
- Take notes, even - and especially - when it hurts the most.
- Go to an indiependent store, a caviste, a wine shop. Repeat.

What market entry have you seen fail because the playbook didn't fit the local consumption architecture?

23/05/2026

The Fragility of Beauty Giants

ELC and Puig end their mergers discussions

22/05/2026

e.l.f.: Buying Growth Comes with a Cost

Core Portfolio Volume Resists Price Hikes, Forcing e.l.f. Beauty to Rely on Premium Acquisitions and Global Retail Expansion

22/05/2026

Rhode is outperforming. The core brand is cooling.

Wall Street is watching.

e.l.f. Beauty reported fiscal 2026 results yesterday.
29 consecutive quarters of net sales growth.
Annual revenue up 25% to $1.64 billion.
Q4 up 35%.

The headline looks strong. The composition does not.

Rhode contributed $113 million in Q4.
That accounts for 34 of the 35 percentage points of growth.
Strip out the acquisition, and the core organic growth is ca. 1%.

The breakdown:

→ Pricing and mix contributed +40pp to Q4 net sales growth.
→ The August 2025 price increases are meeting resistance.
→ International surged 75% in Q4. US growth decelerated.
→ Spring 2026 innovation started slower than expected.
→ Unit volumes declined 5pp.

The elasticity test:

Management rolled back Halo Glow Skin Tint from $18 to $14.
The response: 38% volume lift on Amazon, 36% across physical retail, triple-digit expansion on TikTok Shop.

Brand equity is intact. Price sensitivity is real.

The portfolio transition:

This is a shift from single-brand growth to a multi-brand platform. Rhode is now No. 1 in Sephora North America.
Naturium is the fastest-growing skincare brand in the top 50.
Keys Soulcare was offloaded.

The balance sheet absorbed it.
Debt rose to $842 million.
Leverage at 3.22x Net Debt to EBITDA.

The strategic signal:

Andrea Teixeira from JPMorgan highlighted the company's historical outperformance while prompting discussion on the visible shift in their growth dynamics.

But the concerns are on the innovation pipeline:
its spring 2026 lineup did not provide the historical "lift" to core items that investors are accustomed to.

Management is responding with selective price rollbacks, accelerated innovation, leadership restructuring, and international expansion via Rhode's Sephora relationships.

The stock trades near its 52-week low.
The market is waiting to see if fall innovation and pricing adjustments can restore volume momentum.

The numbers were strong.
The question is whether the model underneath still holds.