“On the volume side, look, I think the effects that we described that are holding us back in the current quarter, the inventory effect in the U.S. of 2 points, which is a point on a global basis, I don't expect that to hold. So I expect the U.S. to continue to grow in terms of volume beyond the 3% that we're seeing in the current quarter.”

In context

“om Dara Mohsenian with Morgan Stanley. Dara Mohsenian: We just touched on pricing. Maybe we can switch to the volume side. Can you just talk about your level of visibility and perhaps a bit of magnitude that you're expecting in Q4 in terms of returning to volume growth going forward? Obviously, a flat result this quarter, but there were some items that depressed volume, they get better going forward in terms of U.S. inventory, SK-II weakness, etcetera. So just looking for some perspective going forward, particularly as pricing presumably continues to decelerate a bit. And also maybe you can just touch on given the heavy marketing this year, presumably with the SG&A increases, the level of payback and ROI you think you're getting on that higher marketing in terms of volume? Andre Schulten: On the volume side, look, I think the effects that we described that are holding us back in the current quarter, the inventory effect in the U.S. of 2 points, which is a point on a global basis, I don't expect that to hold. So I expect the U.S. to continue to grow in terms of volume beyond the 3% that we're seeing in the current quarter. I expect some of the negative headwinds in China, the Middle East and SK-II hopefully will improve sequentially. But in aggregate, I fully expect the markets to continue to recover, shift more towards volume growth as we've seen consistently over the recent periods. And since we're growing or holding volume share in most geographies that will also flow into our results. So sequential progress on volumes, many open questions still, but I expect the line to point upwards. On marketing spend, you're right. We continue to invest in reach frequency with strong quality of communication across the markets. We are very diligent in pre ROI analysis and very diligent in post event analysis to ensure that we understand whether the spending is effective. And if you look at the results, I would argue”