A 100-year-old pharma
learning to act like a consumer brand.
We’ve done this transformation before, and we’ve done it in your markets.

We helped Bayer Consumer Health move from a sales-driven model to a brand-centric one, and built the capability for the org to live it.

Bayer Consumer Health, like Novo, sits at the intersection of pharma DNA and consumer reality. The brief wasn’t a campaign or a positioning exercise. It was the bigger problem: how do you transform an organisation where marketing has historically been a downstream function of sales, into one where brand is the engine of growth?

We delivered TB4L, a new way of marketing, alongside the operating philosophy, the capability framework, and the change management to roll it out. The work spanned strategy, capability uplift, and the practical machinery of getting senior commercial leaders to back a brand-led model when the institutional muscle memory says “sell more, faster.”

What we built isn’t exportable PowerPoint. It’s the playbook, the workshops, the assessment tools, and the change management arc that takes an org from “marketing is a thing we do” to “brand is how we grow.” This is the closest analogue we have to your consumerisation programme.

We’re sharpening Carlsberg’s Marketing Model and executing the transformation globally, while building a new media operating model in CEEI.

Carlsberg came to us with a brief Novo will recognise: a Marketing Model that needed to evolve, a global transformation that had to land in markets with very different realities, and a structural question about how teams and agencies should be shaped to actually deliver against the new model.

In the CEEI region (Central Eastern Europe & India) in particular we’re building a fit-for-purpose media operating model, restructuring the way teams and agencies are shaped at every layer: global, region, and local. It’s the work that sits underneath the marketing model and decides whether the model can actually run in market or just look good on a slide.

This is the proof that we’re not just execution partners. We’re strategic partners who can sharpen a Marketing Model, then re-engineer the org around it so the model has somewhere to live.

We landed in the UK and the Nordics twice, to outflank Pepsi. Two SWAT missions, in market, with the system, ending in a single aligned plan.

In Mission Starlight (UK&I), we helped Coca-Cola Great Britain build a challenger plan to defend Coca-Cola Light leadership against Pepsi’s ongoing share gain, a problem the GB system had been trying to crack for a decade. We ran in-depth research, dozens of stakeholder interviews on both the company and the bottler side, then brought the system together for the first time in years in a design sprint. The output: alignment behind a common strategy, ruthlessly prioritised goals, challenger ideas to feed execution, and a new approach to ways of working, covering consumer, shopper, and customer.

A year later, Black Mission (Nordics): same brief, different market, different system dynamics. We problem-framed with the local team, ran a design sprint with CCTM, and re-energised the challenger approach for the Nordic context.

This is exactly the shape of the lighthouse pilot we discussed. One cooperative market, one defined challenge, one in-market sprint, with a usable plan plus alignment when we’re done.

In-market sprint · REBORRN with CCEP & CCTM

Healthcare is our passion point. Through BORRN, we’ve spent the last eight years building healthcare startups alongside the founders.

This isn’t a tangent. It’s how we keep our hands close to the patient, the regulator, and the realities of a category where consumer experience and clinical credibility have to coexist. The pharmaceutical and healthcare context shapes how we think about Novo. We’ve sat on both sides of the table.