P&G Cut 100 Brands and Lost Almost Nothing. That Was the Whole Point.

On August 1, 2014, the world's largest consumer-goods company announced it would get rid of about 100 of its brands.¹ The headline wrote itself: P&G slashes more than half its portfolio.⁵ It reads like an amputation - a company in crisis hacking off limbs to survive. But look at what came off. The roughly 100 brands P&G exited accounted for less than 10% of its sales and under 5% of its profits — the inverse of P&G's own announcement that the retained core generated about 90% of sales and over 95% of profits.⁹ The hard part was never the cutting. The hard part was admitting, after decades of accumulation, exactly which 100 things had stopped mattering.

The story everyone repeats is that P&G dramatically reinvented itself by shedding half its brands. Almost every emphasis in that sentence is misplaced. It did not shed half its value - it shed a long tail that was barely contributing. It did not reinvent the company - it admitted what the core had always been. The discipline wasn't in the knife. It was in the diagnosis.

Half the brands, almost none of the money

Start with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the whole argument. At the 2014 announcement, P&G put its portfolio at about 160 brands and set a target of keeping 70 to 80 of its top performers — a number that the company's subsequent filings settled at roughly 65 across 10 categories.⁵¹ In headline terms, that's slicing the brand count by more than half. In economic terms, it's barely a flesh wound: the exited brands carried under 10% of sales and under 5% of profits.⁹ Which means the retained ~65 brands - the Tides, the Pampers, the Gillettes - were already doing more than 95% of the work. The cut didn't make P&G more focused. It made P&G look on the outside the way it had always worked on the inside.

This is the part the dramatic narrative obscures. A company that derives over 95% of its profit from a core does not face a hard strategic choice when it prunes the bottom. It faces an organizational one. Every one of those 100 brands had a manager, a P&L, a slice of factory time, a line in the marketing budget, a meeting on someone's calendar. The brands cost almost nothing in profit and an enormous amount in attention. Pruning them wasn't about money. It was about reclaiming the scarcest resource a 160-brand company has: the focus of the people running the 65 that pay for everything.

The Coty deal moved scale; the Duracell deal moved taxes

The execution shows the same discipline - and a quieter cleverness in how the exits were structured. The largest single piece was beauty: in July 2015 P&G agreed to merge 43 of its beauty brands into Coty in a $12.5 billion Reverse Morris Trust, a structure that lets a parent spin off a business to shareholders and merge it tax-efficiently rather than selling it outright. It closed in October 2016.² That alone shows the cut was never a fire sale; it was an orchestrated handoff designed to preserve value on the way out.

Duracell is the better lesson, because its popular framing is simply wrong. The story is that P&G sold Duracell to Berkshire Hathaway for $4.7 billion — the reported value of Berkshire's P&G stake at the time of the announcement.¹⁰ There was no sale. P&G transferred Duracell to Berkshire in exchange for Berkshire's roughly 52 million P&G shares, and P&G injected about $1.8 billion of its own cash into Duracell to balance the exchange.³ Net the cash injection against the shares received and the real consideration to Berkshire was about $2.9 billion - structured as a tax-free cash-rich split-off, not a cash sale.⁸ The $4.7 billion 'price' is the gross share value; the actual economics are a third smaller. P&G wasn't just cutting a battery brand. It was retiring a chunk of its own stock and exiting a non-core category in a single tax-engineered move.

Whose strategy was it, really?

There's a small but telling detail in how this episode gets retold: the wrong CEO often gets the credit. The brand-reduction plan was announced and championed by A.G. Lafley, who had returned to the top job and led the analyst meeting that detailed the strategy in November 2014.⁴ The executive most associated with P&G's transformation today inherited the execution, not the design. It's a clean example of how legend reassigns authorship to whoever is in the chair when the results land. The point isn't gossip - it's that the strategy and its execution were separable, and conflating them flatters the wrong moment.

Wasn't this a bold reinvention, given the result?

The honest objection is the one the numbers seem to vindicate: P&G's leadership later pointed to a market cap that grew from roughly $150 billion in 2009 to about $350 billion, alongside the cull from a much larger brand count.⁶ If the outcome was that good, who cares whether the cut was radical? Two answers. First, the bigger figures sometimes quoted for the starting brand count don't square with what P&G's own contemporaneous filings said at the time - about 160 brands, not far more - so the more dramatic 'before' picture should be read with care.⁵¹ Second, and more important: attributing a $200 billion run in value chiefly to dropping brands that carried under 5% of profits gets the causation backwards. You cannot create that much value by removing almost no value. The pruning helped by clearing attention and capital for the core. The core is what compounded. Crediting the haircut for the growth is like crediting a diet for a marathon time - it cleared the way; it didn't do the running.

P&G is still at it. In June 2025 the company announced another portfolio and productivity plan - up to $1.6 billion in pre-tax restructuring over two years, roughly 7,000 jobs, and the divestiture of slower-growing brands.⁷ The pattern repeats because the principle is permanent: a sprawling company's hardest discipline isn't acquiring; it's admitting what has quietly stopped earning its keep. The 2014 cull looked like a dramatic amputation, and that's exactly why it gets misremembered. The brave part was never wielding the knife on 100 brands. It was being honest that 100 of them had already become decoration on an engine that was running fine without them.