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Diageo North America appoints PepsiCo and AB InBev veteran Sebnem Erim as CMO; Unilever sells Gen Z brand Welly; German trade bodies fight proposed sugar tax.
Diageo installs an unconventional CMO as North America posts its weakest 2026 results, Unilever quietly exits a Gen Z bet, and eight German trade bodies declare war on a sugar tax that could reshape European beverage marketing.
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The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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Also from Marco & Klara: The Digital Commerce Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Good morning — three stories on the table today that are all about brands under pressure.
Klara: A new CMO walks into a struggling Diageo. German food and drink trade bodies go to war over a sugar tax. And Unilever quietly lets go of a brand it bought to win over Gen Z.
Marco: Big moves, real stakes. Let's dig in.
Marco: Diageo has just brought in a new marketing chief for North America — and the choice of person tells you everything about the state of the business.
Klara: So let's set the scene. Diageo is one of the world's biggest spirits companies — think Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Tanqueray. North America is their most important market. But right now, that market is struggling. The results coming out of Diageo North America are the weakest they've posted all year.
Marco: And into that situation, they've appointed Sebnem Erim as CMO — that's Chief Marketing Officer, the person responsible for how the brand speaks to consumers. What's striking is where she comes from. Her background is PepsiCo and AB InBev. Soft drinks and beer. Not spirits.
Klara: Which is unusual. Spirits marketing has traditionally been its own world — heritage, craft, occasion-based drinking. Companies in that space usually hire from within the category. So bringing in someone with a broad FMCG background is a deliberate signal.
Marco: A very deliberate one. When a company's numbers are down and they go outside their own category for a CMO, they're not tweaking the playbook. They're questioning it. Erim knows how to grow brands at scale, across mass markets. That's a different muscle than luxury spirits positioning.
Klara: I'd see it slightly differently though. The spirits category genuinely has specific challenges — regulation, on-trade relationships, that's bars and restaurants, age restrictions. Deep category knowledge matters. You can't just apply a cola marketing model to whisky and expect it to work.
Marco: True. But sometimes an outsider sees the obvious things that insiders have stopped questioning. If the current approach isn't working, fresh eyes have real value.
Klara: Fair enough. We'll be watching whether this appointment shifts the trajectory for Diageo's North American numbers.
Marco: Now, on to our next story.
Marco: Eight German industry groups have just joined forces to push back against a proposed sugar tax — and this is a significant moment for anyone selling drinks in Germany.
Klara: To set the scene: sugar taxes are nothing new in Europe. The UK introduced one in 2018. France, Norway, and others have had versions of it for years. The idea is simple — tax drinks with added sugar to encourage manufacturers to reduce sugar content and nudge consumers toward healthier choices. Germany has so far resisted, but that's now looking less certain.
Marco: What's changed is the scale and coordination of the opposition. Eight trade associations — covering everyone from soft drink producers to juice makers to RTD brands — have launched a joint public campaign against the proposed tax. They're calling it an information campaign, which is the standard framing when industry wants to influence political opinion before a law is passed.
Klara: And Germany is not a small market. It's one of the biggest beverage markets in Europe. Brands like Coca-Cola, Danone, and countless smaller players have serious revenue on the line here.
Marco: For brand managers, this raises a real question. Do you back the coalition publicly? Stay quiet and let the trade bodies carry the fight? Or do you use the uncertainty as cover to start reformulating — reducing sugar now, so you're ahead of the tax if it does land?
Klara: My instinct is that reformulation is the smarter long-term bet. Sugar taxes in Europe have a way of eventually passing, even when industry pushes back hard. And if you've already reduced sugar by the time the law arrives, you're in a stronger position with both regulators and consumers.
Marco: I'd say that's true for big multinationals, but smaller brands may genuinely need this coalition to buy them time — reformulation costs money and takes years to do properly.
Klara: A fair distinction.
Marco: Our third story is up next.
Marco: Unilever is selling Welly — its colourful, design-led first-aid brand — to a private equity firm called Forward Consumer Partners.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to know what Welly was supposed to be. Unilever bought it as a bet on younger consumers — Gen Z shoppers who actually care about what a plaster looks like. Welly had bold packaging, a fresh identity, and real shelf presence. It was exactly the kind of challenger brand that big FMCG companies struggle to build from scratch.
Marco: So Unilever went and bought one instead. And now they're selling it. No financial terms were disclosed, so we don't know what they paid or what they're getting back. But the direction of travel is clear. This is part of Unilever's wider portfolio rationalisation — which basically means they're trimming the brand list, keeping what scales, cutting what doesn't.
Klara: And that's what makes this interesting. Welly wasn't some dusty heritage brand they'd neglected for decades. It was a deliberate strategic acquisition. The fact that it's now on the way out suggests that even the "future-facing bets" aren't safe if they don't grow fast enough.
Marco: For brand managers across the industry, this is a useful reality check. A lot of FMCG companies have spent years building what they call incubator strategies — buying or nurturing small challenger brands and hoping they grow inside the big company structure. But big company structures are slow, expensive, and not always kind to small brands that need room to experiment.
Klara: I'd actually argue Welly might do better under private equity. Smaller ownership, faster decisions, less corporate overhead. Forward Consumer Partners can focus entirely on scaling one brand.
Marco: Possibly. But the harder question is whether Unilever — and companies like it — need to rethink how they absorb challenger brands in the first place. Buying something is the easy part. Letting it thrive inside a giant is much harder.
Marco: Today's stories share one quiet warning — leadership changes, regulatory battles, and portfolio exits all look like separate decisions, but they're usually symptoms of the same thing: a strategy that drifted before anyone admitted it.
Klara: So ask yourself honestly — where in your own brand are you managing a problem instead of solving it?