Mark Ritson argues that former brand auditor Philipp Navratil’s unapologetic, marketing-first leadership might finally shake Nestlé out of its corporate malaise.
When Philipp Navratil walked into Nestlé’s Vevey headquarters last month as its new CEO, the air must have felt heavy. The world’s biggest food company had just burned through two chief executives in a year. Was he going to make it third time lucky?
Navratil isn’t some parachuted consultant or a rebuffed senior executive from one of the company’s rivals. He’s a Nestlé lifer with 25 years across the Anglo-Swiss giant’s operations. He speaks multiple languages, holds an MBA, and has the steely look of someone who isn’t here to fuck about. More importantly, he’s done both the country GM path, successfully running Honduras, and then the HQ role, eventually leading Nespresso. He knows how the machine works. His announcement interview immediately sets the tone.
His style isn’t the performative empathy beloved of LinkedIn leadership gurus. None of that soft, mushy bollocks that portrays managers as myopic efficiency bullies in contrast to selfless, empathetic leaders who combine Joan of Arc with Mahatma Gandhi. That nonsense always rings false with me. The leaders I’ve respected were objective, smart, driven, and merciless when they needed to be. Navratil fits that bill perfectly.
The usual leadership bullshit
Remember when Unilever’s new CEO opened his tenure announcing a 20-fold increase in influencer marketing?
Oddly tactical.
Off the pace.
A weird place to start.
And a signal of a general inability to get it.
Navratil did the opposite. No-nonsense thinking with a menacing tone that suggests genuine depth and velocity. “We will be ruthless in assessing our talent,” he told staff, stressing metrics, accountability, and rewards for delivery. The phrasing startled some. The markets loved it. Within days, Nestlé’s share price jumped 9%.
Within three weeks of taking the role, he’d announced 16,000 job cuts, roughly 6% of Nestlé’s workforce, paired with a substantial increase in marketing investment. “The world is changing, and Nestlé needs to change faster,” he told investors. That line could have been cliché. Instead, it became a rallying cry.
But this isn’t just cost-cutting.
Navratil knows better than to starve the goose that lays the golden KitKat. He’s bluntly said Nestlé must build “the best marketers in the industry.”
It’s a deceptively huge statement.
For decades, Nestlé was a manufacturing monolith with marketing flapping around like decorative bunting. Great brand names such as Maggi, Nescafé, and Purina thrived on legacy and logistical reach, not consumer intimacy or creativity.
Navratil wants to reverse that equation.
Behind the rhetoric sits…