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Former president of Kraft Foods Developing Markets and current Kellogg Senior Fellow Sanjay Khosla.

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The Khosla rules

How a focus on consumers helped Kraft crack tough foreign markets


Sanjay Khosla had a problem: how to get Oreos into China.

And Cadbury into India.

And Tang into Brazil.

These markets had been difficult for Kraft Foods Inc. to crack, but by refocusing on the consumer and using his “Growth through Focus” and “Blank Check” strategies, then-President of Kraft Foods Developing Markets and current Kellogg Senior Fellow Khosla turned local insights into global gains. Within six years, he had tripled Developing Markets sales to $16 billion.

In the article below, James Farley/Booz Allen Hamilton Professor of Marketing Strategy Gregory S. Carpenter and co-author Thomas C. Hayes explore how Khosla made those gains by giving his frontline leaders the trust, freedom and resources to put the company’s focus back where it should be: on the consumer.


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First in a series

This article is the first in a new series being developed by the Kellogg School of Management Markets and Customer Initiative to examine the rise of Customer-Focused Enterprise in the digital age. The series is designed to illustrate through real-world narratives how business executives are infusing the consumer perspective into their approach to leadership, strategy development and tactics to gain competitive advantage.
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