Author: Philip Kok 

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a failed mega-merger. It’s a silence that speaks louder than any press release. When the talks between Unilever and Kraft Heinz evaporated, the financial world looked for technical excuses — valuation gaps or legal hurdles. But they missed the real point.

The fact that these giants were even at the table trying to force a merger tells us everything we need to know. They are trying to engineer growth through consolidation because organic growth has stalled. Even now, with rumors of Unilever entering new talks with McCormick, the pattern remains the same. It is a desperate move to stay relevant by just getting larger. The real story is not that a specific deal fell through It’s the clear signal that the old strategy of winning purely on scale is officially dead.

The Hollow Middle: "Bigger" is no longer "Better"

For fifty years, the FMCG playbook was simple logic: you built massive scale to rule the supply chain, you used that scale to dominate the retail shelf, and you used the margins to buy mass media. It was a perfect circle. But we have hit the ceiling of that model. Byron Sharp under pressure.

Today, the "mass-market middle" is disappearing. On one side, smart private labels are good enough or equal for most people. On the other side, agile challenger brands are winning with better stories and real customer experience for their niche products. In the center? The traditional A-brand: widely available and well-known, but totally interchangeable. This isn’t a marketing hiccup; it’s a structural crisis.

Efficiency is not the same as "Mattering"

When growth slows and consumers choose meaning over availability, scale stops being an asset. It becomes a burden. The typical corporate reflex is to grab the structural tools: sell the off-brands, simplify the portfolio, or reorganize the business units. These moves might be necessary for survival, but they are 100% defensive and not the solution.

They solve for efficiency, but they don't solve for mattering. You cannot restructure your way into a customer’s heart. And you definitely cannot get back to brand preference if your model is built on ‘renting’ relationships from retailers instead of owning them yourselves.

Stop Renting, Start Owning

The hard truth: most A-brands don’t actually know their customers. They know the Nielsen data from retailers. They know the segments or target groups from the research agencies. They know shopper behavior as a percentage on a screen.

They have spent decades focusing on presence (being on the shelf) while neglecting preference (being wanted). They focused so much on the "Fast-Moving" part of FMCG that they forgot the consumer is a human being looking for a coherent and relevant experience. By outsourcing the relationship to retailers and platforms, these brands have effectively given up their right to own and grow.

From Distribution to Real Connection

Reclaiming the A-brand requires a shift from a distribution-model to a relationship-model. The real growth today isn't in the middle of the retail space. It’s happening at the edges. It’s where A-brands build their own ecosystems and design experiences instead of just new packaging.

These brands have stopped fighting for centimeters of shelf space. Instead, they are fighting for something far more valuable: attention, emotion, and memory. They don’t win because they have the biggest trucks or the loudest ads. They win because they are closer to the person using the product: the consumer. In a world of infinite choice, distribution or shalf space is just a commodity. The only sustainable margin left is the depth of your connection with the consumer and your community. If you don’t own the brand experience, you don’t own the brand. It’s that simple. Building awareness with massive ad spend is just investing in the exposure side of your brand and definitely not the experience side.

We are reaching the end of the industrial era of FMCG. The question is no longer How do we restructure our portfolio? but How do we make our brands matter again? Reclaiming the A-brand means moving beyond the "product-in-a-retail-system" mindset. It’s about becoming an experience that people actively choose. When scale stops working, don't try to get bigger. Get better. Get sharper. And above all: get closer to the people you exist for.