Kimberly-Clark SWOT and PESTLE Analysis

Strength

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Weakness

1. Rising Input Commodity Costs Impacting Margins: The price of wood pulp which is the main input for manufacturing of tissues has adversely impacted Kimberly-Clark’s margins, consumer tissue division generating a third of the organizations revenues. According to IBISWorld, the price of wood pulp is likely to increase by a CAGR of ~5% till 2019. Kimberly-Clark needs to increase usage of alternative sources of low cost raw materials for tissues and decrease reliance on natural forest products, else it would be forced to increase prices to sustain margins.

2. Lack of Diversity Compared to Key Competitors: Kimberly-Clark is mainly into personal care segment which includes feminine hygiene, baby care and consumer tissue products. However, its major competitors such as Procter and Gamble (P&G), Unilever and Johnson & Johnson have a diversified set of product offerings across personal care and other fast moving consumer goods segment. They have the advantage of divere market footprint and global supply chains across segments which they can extensively leverage upon to strengthen their market and launch new products.

Opportunity

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Threat

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Political

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Economic

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Social

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Technological

1. Social technologies for customer collaboration: Close collaboration with customers on a real-time basis helps a company improve its product offerings, and increase customer loyalty. Further, this is all the more important in an industry such as FMCG. Kimberly-Clark has started to use Marketing Cloud which enables it to talk to its consumers, identify influencers, establish benchmarks, and builds community. The company’s products receive thousands of mentions on platforms such as Twitter and it leverages Marketing Cloud to build R&D reports from the social data to identify product issues and generate insights.

2. Usage of analytics to address gender diversity: Analytics usage has also allowed Kimberly-Clark to address issues regarding gender diversity. In 2009, the company has just 17% of its director-level-or-higher employees as women while more than 80% of its customers were female. Being a female-consumer centric organization, this was a serious issue. Using workforce analytics, Sue Dodsworth the company's global diversity officer addressed the problem and by 2014, 35% of those in middle management and higher roles were women.

Legal

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Environmental

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