Henkel Hungary

The Problem

I was the Marketing Specialist for Henkel Hungary's adhesives portfolio — Loctite (industrial) and Teroson (automotive aftermarket) — reporting to the Business Unit Manager. The category looked mature, but the buying behaviour had quietly shifted online: mechanics were searching part numbers before they called a distributor, and our digital footprint was a static brochure site. Trade promotions assumed a sales rep would close the loop. The distribution chain reported sell-in to wholesalers, not sell-through to workshops, so the team had no read on which campaigns moved end-user demand. Sales were flat against a category that should have been growing with the post-2010 vehicle parc.

The System

The team built the first integrated trade and consumer programme for the portfolio. I owned the digital and lead-generation mechanics: I rebuilt the product taxonomy around mechanic search behaviour, set up Google Ads against part-number queries, and ran technical YouTube content with workshop demos. Offline I ran trade workshops with distributors and instrumented co-op promotions with redemption codes that tied every wholesaler shipment to a workshop pull-through metric. Salesforce tracked the distributor relationships; the Business Unit Manager owned the QBR cadence with the top 20 distributors and tied the data back to sell-out, not just sell-in.

The Outcome

The portfolio grew against a flat category. Sales lifted 10% YoY in 2011 and 6% in 2012, measured at wholesaler sell-in and triangulated against workshop redemption data on the lines I instrumented. The digital programme I owned generated 200–300 trade-qualified leads per month against a sell-through model, which the sales team converted into distributor orders inside a 60-day cycle. The shelf-space and Nielsen category-grower wins on the brands belonged to the Business Unit Manager and the country team — I want to be clear: my contribution was the digital-and-trade pull-through instrumentation that fed the country result, not the result itself.

What Transferred

The component I expect to translate to the next role is the sell-through instrumentation — a B2B2C portfolio only grows when marketing measures the end-user pull, not just the wholesaler push. The Henkel role also taught me the limit of my own ownership at a junior title; the discipline of saying "I contributed to the country number, I didn't run it" is the same discipline that keeps the senior-role attribution honest now.