Linda Rendle: Yeah. 2% to 4% percent organic sales growth and 0% to 2% from a reported is what we’re expecting now. And that is slightly below what we want from a long-term perspective. But, just to put that in perspective, of course, if you look at our four-year CAGR and our strategy period, we did deliver in the midpoint of that range at 4% and again, 4% this year. This year coming up is a kind of a tale of two halves, is the way I would talk about it. And we expect stronger growth in the front half as we continue to lap the two price increases that we have. And then in the back half, we expect it to get tougher for consumers. And right now, our expectation is a mild recession. So when you put those things together, I think in aggregate, we feel good about the top-line that we’ve committed to.
In addition, that includes about 1 point of a headwind from our vitamins, minerals, and supplements business. As we spoke about, over the last couple of calls, we have re-engineered that plan to focus more on profitability, and we’ve done that at a trade-off from a top-line perspective. So that does include a 1 point headwind. And, over time, we would expect that that wouldn’t be the case and that, that would help us return to getting in within that 3% to 5%. The way that I would think about this, as we march through the year, we are expecting, again, lapping two price increases, we are expecting our elasticities to be more normalized as we go through the course of the year. We’re expecting trade promotion to normalize as well, and then we’re expecting a mild recession in the back half.
Those are all of our assumptions in forming that growth. And if those come true, we feel this plan is a very balanced plan, but we’ll be watching really carefully as we move through the year. If any one of those assumptions change, and we need to adjust our plan, that could impact both, on the high end and the lower end of us delivering against what we put out there from an outlook perspective.
Anna Lizzul: Thank you. And just wanted to ask a follow-up on just on marketing spend versus promotional levels, you’ve mentioned that advertising as a percent of sales, you intend to spend about 11% in fiscal ‘24 versus about 10% in fiscal ‘23. Do you feel this is the right level of investment given a ramp in marketing spend versus some peers in the space? And also just in terms of the balance of advertising spend versus promotional in fiscal ’24, it does sound like you’re ramping back up on promotional levels. And is this an intention to get back to pre-COVID levels with promotion as well? Thanks.
Linda Rendle: Sure. So on the marketing spend, as you rightly noted, we’ve spent about 10% of sales on advertising and sales promotion over our history. And there’s times we’ve spent more than that. This year, we’re targeting 11% and we think that’s a prudent investment given the pressure the consumer is going to be under from a macroeconomic perspective, the fact that we are coming off of four rounds of pricing, significant price increase, obviously cost justified, but we want to continue to support the consumer as they transition through that. And so we think 11% is the right number. And you have two data points that give us confidence that 11% is the right number. During the pandemic, we took our advertising spending up, even at a time when we couldn’t fully supply.
That increase in advertising led to stronger superiority ratings for our brands, and that gave us the confidence to take the four rounds of pricing that we took. So we think again, in a time where consumers are pressured and stressed, investing that additional point of advertising makes a lot of sense. And then the second data point I would give you is that we’ve been on a journey to get to know 100 million consumers in the US, and that allows us to personalize to them, which was part of our IGNITE strategy. We’ve nearly met that goal, and that has led to a return on investment in our advertising being the highest it ever was. We reached a high point year. So we feel really good about putting that extra point in because we know what we’re going to get from a returns perspective in addition to supporting the superiority of our brands.
And again, we’ll continue evaluate this moving forward. Doesn’t mean it will necessarily be 11% the year after. This is really a roll up of what we think our general managers need to best support our brands during this time. And then from a promotion perspective, promotions continue to be lower than they were pre-pandemic, but are ramping up. Our expectation is throughout the course of the year, we’ll return to more normalized promotions, so similar to what we were pre-pandemic. And, we’ve assumed to be fair, though, this year, it would ramp up faster and it hasn’t. But based on what we’re seeing in the data, we think that’s a fair assumption. And again, we wouldn’t be targeting going beyond what we were pre-pandemic, but just returning to those levels that we had.
