In sum, there were three critical where-to-play choices for P&G at the corporate level:

• Grow in and from the core businesses, focusing on core consumer segments, channels, customers, geographies, brands, and product technologies.

• Extend leadership in laundry and home care, and build to market leadership in the more demographically advantaged and structurally attractive beauty and personal- care categories.

• Expand to leadership in demographically advantaged emerging markets, prioritizing markets by their strategic importance to P&G.

At P&G, where to play choices start with the consumer: Who is she? What does the consumer want and need? To win with mom, P&G invests heavily in truly understanding her—through observation, through home visits, through a significant investment in uncovering unmet and unexpressed needs. Only through a concerted effort to understand the consumer, her needs, and the way in which P&G can best serve those needs is it possible to effectively determine where to play—which businesses to enter or leave, which products to sell, which markets to prioritize, and so on.

One final consideration for where to play is the competitive set. Just as it does when it defines winning aspirations, a company should make its where-to-play choices with the competition firmly in mind. Choosing a playing field identical to a strong competitor’s can be a less attractive proposition than tacking away to compete in a different way, for

different customers, or in different product lines. But strategy isn’t simply a matter of finding a distinctive path. A company may choose to play in a crowded field or in one with a dominant competitor if the company can bring new and distinctive value. In such a case, winning may mean targeting the lead competitor right away or going after weaker competitors first.

Like the home-care team, it attacked in an area of least resistance—men’s fragrances and younger, sportier scents, rather than in the heart of the most intense competition in women’s prestige brands. The team found new ways to win by creating brands based on specific consumer needs and wants, partnering in distinctively successful ways with fragrance houses and designers. In doing so, the fine-fragrance business became part of P&G’s larger how-to-win strategy, another way to differentiate brands along a dimension that consumers care about and to leverage the benefits of global scale.

Industries with fewer rivals and with competitors that seek to serve different parts of the market with unique offerings are more attractive than those in which a number of competitors compete fiercely for the same consumers in the same way. P&G favored beauty and personal care, including feminine care, because these were industries with low capital cost in which highly fragmented rivals attempted to differentiate their products in unique ways.