Preliminary Report with Top Ten Countries in Terms of Population Size

Creating a focused external affairs strategy and the team to execute it

With a better understanding of the issues affecting its industry, a beverage company strengthens its external affairs organization

Challenge

An international beverage company felt that its reputational risks were rising. It had heard the public’s concern about the health effects of its products, and it faced the same issues as many other multinational corporations in emerging markets, including concerns about environmental sustainability as well as “digital attacks” on social media. At the same time, powerful global forces were reshaping the client’s industry, and evolving policies on taxation and regulation were putting significant value at risk. The client wanted to better understand the key trends and policies, and to design a strategy and organizational structure that could help it respond consistently and effectively, so they asked McKinsey for help.

Discovery

The team began by combining McKinsey’s proprietary research on the major forces affecting the global industry landscape—such as demographic shifts, environmental limits on agriculture, and the rise of digital communications—with its research on specific trends in consumer packaged goods, such as the billion new middle class consumers in emerging economies. After conducting interviews with experts from within McKinsey and externally from the industry and public sector, the team built a set of detailed scenarios so that the client could identify which priorities should become the focus of its external affairs strategy.

The client quickly realized that broad forces, such as the growth of social media, and narrower trends that affect its industry more acutely, such as a growing gap in global water demand and supply, should all be part of its external affairs strategy. Moreover, that strategy would have to be created from scratch, as only operating plans were in place at the time.

We helped the client identify its objectives, and...