Nestlé is a global brand with a standard playbook for its products and promotions. Can you share a time when you had to adapt a global or national brand guideline to make it work better for the Philippine retail or consumer context?

Situation

While working on a national merchandising rollout for a Nestlé cereal brand, the global guidelines required a dedicated end-cap display with a premium fridge. Many of our assigned sari-sari store partners in our district did not have electricity or space for a fridge.

Task

My task was to execute the brand's promotional standards while still making the offer relevant and executable for tricycle-accessible neighborhood stores.

Action

I photographed five stores in my route to show the merchandising team that the global plan did not fit. I proposed a localized version using a branded cooler box instead of a fridge and a hanging display rack that used existing wall space. I worked with our local distributor to source the cooler boxes and created a simple one-page visual guide in Tagalog for the store owners. I rolled this out to 20 stores and tracked their weekly reorder rates.

Result

The cooler-box pilot stores achieved a 90% sell-through rate in the first month, compared to 60% for stores that tried to follow the original global display. The district manager later adopted the cooler-box version as an alternative for off-grid stores.