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140 Corporate Communications in Practice

Box 5.1 Case study: Sara Lee/DE – organizing
communications in a multinational corporation 31

Sara Lee/DE, headquartered in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is a subsidiary of Chicago-
based Sara Lee Corporation, and is a global group of branded consumer packaged
goods companies. The DE part of the Sara Lee/DE name goes back to the Douwe
Egberts (DE) brand, a Dutch coffee and tea producer that was taken over by Sara Lee
in 1978. Initially, the situation for the organization that formerly traded under the DE
name changed little through the take-over. But, early in the 1980s, Sara Lee also
acquired the Dutch company Intradel, a household and body care merchant, and
decided to merge this newly acquired company with the existing DE organization.
Having merged these two companies operating in very different sectors, Sara Lee
finally decided in 1989 to change the structure of the newly formed organization.
A corporate holding was established carrying the name Sara Lee/DE with two divisions:
Coffee and Tea, and Household and Body Care. Together, these divisions now (in
2003) encompass around a hundred business units operating in more than 40 countries.
Within this holding structure, responsibilities are devolved to each of these business
units so that local businesses can respond to and meet local market needs in the best
possible way.

SARA LEE CORPORATION

SARA LEE / DE

INTIMATES & UNDERWEAR HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTS FOOD & BEVERAGE
HOUSE HOLD DIRECT
& BODY CARE SELLING COFFEE & TEA

As a result of the restructuring in 1989 communications responsibilities became
split into a central corporate public relations department at the group level of Sara
Lee/DE, and smaller communications departments and professionals being placed
within the various business units.
The split seemed a logical division of tasks, and is typical for many multinational
corporations, but almost immediately brought clear tensions with it about responsibil-
ities and procedures concerning communications. Particularly in the area of media rela-
tions, managers and professionals from across the organization duly talked with the
press on their own initiative, in the absence of clear procedures for media relations.
These tensions and debates about responsibilities and procedures have since led to
the implementation of two formal initiatives that aim to ensure that the central corpo-
rate public relations department maintains its policy making and coordinating role in
an organization where communications responsibilities are largely decentralized to
the level of the individual business units. The first initiative, supported by the execu-
tive board, is that corporate public relations offers the general strategic framework
for communications to business units. This basically means that the general corpo-
rate strategy of the Sara Lee/DE company is translated into a set of communications
values and procedures by the corporate public relations department, which are then