Consumer GoodsRetail TechLeadershipExecutive SearchAIIndustry Insights
The Consumer & Retail Leadership Reset: What Boards Are Still Getting Wrong
After years of placing C-suite leaders across European consumer goods and retail, Leonie Fehr shares what the data confirms — and what she sees boards consistently missing.
Every year I speak with dozens of boards, CEOs, and investors across European consumer goods and retail. And every year, a version of the same conversation comes up: “We need a CMO who understands digital.” Or a CDO with retail experience. Or a CGO who can “drive growth” in a difficult environment.
What almost never gets asked — until it’s too late — is the harder question: what does this company actually need from its next leader, given where the market is going?
The data we’ve been tracking across Deloitte, EY, BCG, McKinsey, and KPMG research throughout 2025 and 2026 paints a picture that’s more disruptive than most boards want to acknowledge. Consumer behaviour has undergone a structural reset. AI is no longer a strategic initiative — it’s an operating reality. And the leadership required to navigate this environment is genuinely different from what built the incumbents that dominate European retail today.
The Drift Nobody Wants to Name
EY calls it “Negative Drift”: a gradual but relentless erosion of confidence, innovation, and consumer trust across incumbent consumer goods brands. It’s the most accurate diagnosis I’ve seen of what’s actually happening across the FMCG leaders I work with. 78% of consumers now notice pack sizes shrinking while prices hold. Private labels are matching quality at better value. Challenger brands are faster, more agile, and more trusted by the very consumers that mass-market incumbents spent decades building loyalty with.
- Leonie Fehr, Key Search
What EY’s research captures so well is that large incumbent CP companies tend to see their competitive landscape as zero-sum — competing for competitor share rather than genuinely growing or reinventing the category. That is a leadership problem before it’s a strategy problem. And it’s precisely the kind of problem that a conventional replacement hire will not solve.
Value-Seeking Is Not a Low-Income Behaviour
This is the data point that surprises the most people when I share it: 47% of consumers globally are now persistent value-seekers — and that includes 35% of high-income households. Deloitte’s ‘Retail 2026: Consuming Differently’ report, drawing on 330 retail executives, is very clear on this. Value-seeking has become structural, not cyclical. Consumers are not spending less; they are spending differently.
The commercial implication is significant. If you built your career on trading consumers up into higher-margin products, the environment has shifted underneath you. The premium pricing assumptions that drove commercial strategy for the past decade are structurally less reliable. And yet: 40% of brand value perception now comes from non-price factors — quality, service, checkout ease, loyalty. The opportunity is still there. It just requires a different kind of commercial leadership to capture it.
- Leonie Fehr, Key Search
The AI Performance Gap Is a Leadership Gap
BCG’s ‘Retail Rewired’ report from February 2026 has a data point I find myself quoting constantly: AI leaders in retail generate 1.7× the revenue growth, 1.6× the EBIT margin, and 3.6× the three-year total shareholder return of retail AI laggards. Three-and-a-half times the shareholder return. This is not a rounding error. This is the defining commercial variable in the sector.
KPMG’s Global Tech Report 2026, drawing on more than 250 consumer and retail leaders, sharpens the picture: 88% are embedding agentic AI into workflows and 74% report AI delivering measurable business value — but only 24% have reached the highest AI maturity level, against 68% who have set it as their 2026 target. The gap between ambition and execution is enormous. And in my experience, that gap is almost always a leadership gap first.
- Leonie Fehr, Key Search
McKinsey’s research on AI in retail merchandising is the most precise quantification I’ve seen: AI-assisted merchandising can unlock approximately 40% additional capacity in buying and planning, deliver 2–5% revenue improvement, and generate 2–4% EBITDA lift in the merchandising function alone. The VP of AI Merchandising who can implement this — sitting at the intersection of data science, commercial strategy, and retail operations — does not come from conventional retail talent pools. We find them by looking harder, in different places.
The Profiles Boards Actually Need — and Where to Find Them
The most in-demand profiles in European consumer goods and retail right now are: Chief Growth Officer (category expansion and genuine innovation, not competitor share capture), Chief Marketing Officer who has rebuilt consumer engagement for an AI-discovery environment, Chief Data Officer with first-party data strategy and AI-readiness at scale, VP of AI Merchandising, Chief Sustainability Officer who can integrate ESPR and EU packaging regulation into genuine commercial strategy, and COO who understands omnichannel operations and AI-assisted fulfilment.
What most boards have in common when they describe these roles is that they frame them in terms of experience at a named company or in a named function. What actually matters — and what our search process is designed to surface — is whether the candidate has genuinely redesigned something. Not managed it. Not optimised it. Redesigned it.
- Leonie Fehr, Key Search
What the Brief Stage Actually Reveals
The most important conversations I have in this sector happen before we begin a search, not during it. When a board says they need a new CMO, the real question is: what is the specific commercial challenge that the right CMO would solve? And is CMO actually the right role, or is there a structural problem that a different executive — or a restructured leadership team — would address better?
EY’s Negative Drift diagnosis is clear: the skills and instincts that built today’s incumbent consumer goods brands are not the same skills required to defend and grow relevance in the AI-mediated, value-seeking consumer environment of 2026. That means the reference profile from the last search is often the wrong starting point for the next one.
- Leonie Fehr, Key Search
What This Means for Your Next Hire
If you are a board or CEO preparing to make a senior leadership hire in consumer goods or retail technology in 2026, three things are worth sitting with before you write the brief.
First: the profile you are looking for probably does not come from a direct competitor. The candidates who have rebuilt consumer relevance in genuinely disrupted environments — who have closed the AI execution gap, not just described it — are more likely to come from adjacent industries or from the intersection of retail domain depth and AI-native operating experience.
Second: the distinction between a leader who has managed AI transformation and one who has led it is not visible on a CV. It requires a search process and a reference process designed specifically to surface it.
Third: the BCG data — 3.6× TSR for AI leaders versus laggards — means the cost of getting this hire wrong is not a bad quarter. It is a structural competitive disadvantage that compounds every year.
If you’re working through a senior leadership decision in consumer goods or retail and want to talk through what the market looks like right now, I’m happy to have that conversation.
Key Search
Key Search specializes in expansion hires across Europe, the US, and transatlantic searches. To find out more about our US and North American hiring capability, visit us below.
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