When brands lead every major decision, RGM has to shape growth without becoming the function that only says no.
RGM with L'Oréal
In many CPG businesses, RGM still sits close enough to the numbers to audit decisions but too far away to influence them. That creates a familiar failure mode: pricing, promotion, mix, and launch choices are debated in brand and commercial forums, while RGM is asked to validate the outcome after the fact.
This session approaches the problem differently. Using L’Oréal UK & Ireland as the context, Tim Beckett sets out what it takes to make RGM matter inside a brand-led organisation: where the team sits, what capabilities it needs, how success is measured, and how RGM becomes part of the operating rhythm rather than a specialist function called in at the end.
What You’ll Learn
-
Put RGM where decisions are made, not where decisions are reviewed.
-
Hire for commercial influence as aggressively as you hire for analytical depth.
-
Define success with guardrails, not with single-minded price ambition.
-
Set brand targets in a way brand leaders can recognise as supporting growth, not constraining it.
-
Treat RGM as a continuous decision partner across premiumisation, valorisation, and democratisation rather than the team responsible only for price increases and promo cuts
About the Speaker
.png?width=100&height=103&name=20260304%20Webinar%20Tim%20Becket%20LOreal%20(2).png) |
Tim Beckett
Revenue Growth Director at L'Oréal
|
Tim Beckett is Revenue Growth Director at L’Oréal UK & Ireland, leading RGM across the Consumer Products division. He brings experience spanning pricing strategy, channel leadership, and private brands at Amazon, with a focus on embedding RGM into brand-led decision making and driving commercially disciplined growth.
Session Highlights
RGM becomes more influential when it stops acting like an auditor and starts acting like a co-owner of category outcomes.
The strongest shift Beckett describes is structural: moving RGM out of a siloed lever-based model and into category teams, while retaining reporting into the RGM function. The point is not org design for its own sake, but ensuring RGM is present during planning and activation rather than reviewing decisions after they have already hardened. [10:45]
Brand-led organisations do not need less RGM independence; they need the right kind of proximity.
Beckett is clear that embedding RGM directly into brand is not automatically the answer. In L’Oréal’s case, category gives RGM enough influence to shape outcomes while preserving the commercial independence needed to remain credible in debates about price, mix, and investment. [12:39]
The future RGM profile is not the pure analyst or the pure commercial operator, but the leader who can do both.
Technical expertise matters, but it is not sufficient. The more durable advantage comes from people who can create robust analysis, translate it into business language, and influence senior stakeholders to act on it without drowning them in detail. [13:39]
Good KPI design prevents RGM from becoming detached from either market reality or consumer reality.
Beckett’s framework uses inflation as a lower benchmark, market share as a non-negotiable business priority, and explicit guardrails to avoid overextending on price. The result is a definition of success that balances ambition with realism instead of defaulting to blanket net price growth. [16:54]
Brand alignment improves when targets reflect how each brand expects to grow, rather than applying one flat ambition across the portfolio.
Rather than handing every brand the same pricing expectation, Beckett describes a more nuanced model that combines brand strategy, competitive context, price indexing, momentum, and insight work. That makes the target-setting process easier for brand leaders to buy into because it connects RGM ambition to their own growth logic. [21:49]
RGM loses credibility when it only champions premiumisation and price; it gains credibility when it also knows when to support democratisation.
One of the sharper points in the session is that RGM should not only be the custodian of higher prices and lower promo intensity. In categories or brands where the growth path is broader recruitment, channel expansion, or lower entry price points, RGM needs to help design that route too, even when it dilutes margin percentage while adding absolute profit. [25:43]
Q&A
How do you balance market share growth and margin when the two are pulling in different directions?
Beckett’s answer is that the tension is constant, not occasional, so the only workable response is to be explicit about it in decision making. The goal is to define the level of growth needed to support market share while continuously searching for more efficient uses of spend and applying clear return thresholds such as “golden ratios” for investment decisions. [33:32]
How did you build an RGM team that influences commercial decisions instead of only facilitating them?
His view is that the model is shifting away from hiring only classical RGM specialists. He is increasingly looking for people with evidence of leading change, landing projects end to end, and influencing senior stakeholders, on the basis that some technical RGM capability can be taught more readily than commercial influence. [35:27]
Does RGM’s influence depend on where the function sits in the organisation?
Partly, yes, but Beckett does not present structure as a silver bullet. His position is that organisational placement is one efficient route to influence because it helps secure a seat at the decision-making table, but if a company already has that access without a major structural change, there is no value in reorganising for optics alone. [37:11]
How should local and international RGM structures work together?
At L’Oréal, Beckett describes both regional and international RGM teams, with local structures intentionally mirroring the broader setup. The benefit is that capability building at international level can connect more naturally to category-level work in markets, including the reuse of insight across countries with similar consumers or category dynamics. [38:25]
What role do AI and advanced analytics currently play in RGM decision making?
Beckett takes a pragmatic line rather than a promotional one. He sees value where AI can materially reduce time, accelerate routine decisions, or improve the speed of analysis, but he is cautious about layering it on without clear productivity gains and expects some decisions will still need validation against real consumers rather than a modelled proxy. [40:00]
How do you stop RGM being seen internally as the price increase team?
His answer is to broaden the value creation conversation. That means making RGM visibly responsible across premiumisation, valorisation, and democratisation, so the function is recognised as a partner in total category growth rather than a specialist voice called in only to raise price or cut promotions. [25:33]
