Karina Chávez wanted to start her professional career in the government, but she couldn’t. She wanted to work on income distribution or as she says, “trying to make the pie “greater for all Mexicans.” In the end, this motivated her to study Economics at ITAM and shortly afterward she undertook the trip to London to study for a master’s degree in Development Economics at the University of Oxford. He thought that this way he would have a better chance in a next application, one that seems to have been forgotten.
The reason? In 2008 – a couple of years after returning to Mexico – he joined 3M, the American manufacturer of industrial and consumer products, as Marketing and Public Affairs leader in the country. It was the beginning of a professional path that, in 2011, would take her to headquarter in St. Paul, Minnesota, to lead strategic planning for the entire company; to become Managing Director in Indonesia in 2015 and a year later, to direct the 3M Panama Supply Chain Expertise Center for Latin America.
In 2017, he returned to the US headquarters to take on new challenges as vice president of Customer Operations, which includes operations for the company’s customers around the world. “It was my first global position,” he recalls in an interview with Forbes Mexicoin which he does not hesitate to dimension the size of the challenge he acquired in May of the previous year, as leader of the Consumer division.
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“Everything that is sold at a mass consumption level – what you can find in a Walmart, a Soriana, a Chedraui, what you find on Amazon that arrives at your consumer home – nothing for industrial use (…) Anything that is mass consumption is mine. The sale I have is close to 5 billion dollars,” details the Mexican director.
Consumer is one of 3M’s four business units. The portfolio includes personal healthcare solutions with brands such as Nexcare; adhesive tapes such as Scotch Blue for painters or Post-its, and personal cleaning products with the flagship Scotch-Brite brand, among others. In 2023, this vertical recorded sales of 5,026 million dollars, 15.4%, of the total marketing that amounted to 32,681 million dollars. The Security and Industrial unit contributed 33.5%, the Transportation and Electronics unit with 26% and the Health Care unit with 25.1% according to information sent to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission at the beginning of 2024.
“One of the main challenges since I assumed this position is to prepare the organization for accelerated growth into the future,” he says enthusiastically. And it has to be. For two years, the division has recorded a decline in net sales globally and has seen its contribution to global marketing diminish.
Adapt or die
The trend seems irreversible, at least in 2024. From January to September the division added 3,702 million dollars, 5.4% lower than the same period in 2023, according to the company’s latest quarterly report.
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The channel, according to Chávez, has acknowledged the changes in consumer priorities brought about by the pandemic, including low demand for products during the height of the contingency, high inflation that aroused stress in supply chains and the concern linked to the carbon footprint of products. Before Covid-19, he says, we appealed to messages focused on the emotional and less on the functional. Now it’s the other way around. “Tell me that the fiber will last longer, that it is more sustainable. Tell me it has better performance than others on the market.” The mission, he adds, is to address the issues that can guarantee a return to growth: “That is my mission right now (…) is how we continue to reinvent the products we have.”
For Karina Chávez, the strategy is clear: optimize the portfolio based on consumer trends. While more and more people are concerned about the impact of their purchases, they are also being forced to be more selective in their spending, according to the 2024 Consumer Products Industry Outlook report, prepared by Deloitte, which shows findings from a survey of industry members. .
According to the directive, the key is to follow the consumer, attending to the reality of each market. For the division it is the United States and Canada, followed by Asia-Pacific and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Fourthly, Latin America. “It is my smallest area, but again where we have a greater opportunity to grow, and specifically with the Scotch-Brite flagship brand,” which, he says, “has allowed us to integrate the following categories that are barely growing within the Mexican market.”
“In this position I have to evaluate whether all of our products are still viable. If the consumer, the prices that we are offering for each of the socioeconomic strata of the countries in which we serve, continue to make sense. And from there we begin to evaluate that not everything remains equally viable. All of 2024 what we have focused on is cleaning up the portfolios that are not the most effective to continue building the next 100 years of the company,” he says.
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And he adds that the reinvention of the portfolio remains current regardless of whether it involves transforming legendary brands. In 2025, Scotch will be 100 years old, Scotch-Brite will be 65 and Post-it will be 45: “they are brands that, if they are not innovated, are not reinvented following consumption patterns, they will die. The challenge in the medium and long term is to continue building the next 45, 65 and 100 years of each of the brands we have.”
With information from Beatriz Gaspar.
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