Nelson Urdaneta
Chief Financial Officer at Kimberly-Clark
Sure, Dara. So let me start by echoing what Mike said. I mean, we're very proud of how our teams have executed in the first half of the year. I mean, we've gained momentum on a number of fronts relative to our Powering Care strategy. As a reminder, I mean, as we think about margins, our main focus is on driving profit dollars growth. Margins for us, as we've stated, are milestones and we're moving on that progression.
Growth in the first -- in the second quarter and the first half reflected solid volume mix-driven gains. And on the third quarter -- it's a third quarter in a row that we drive positive volume mix. Importantly, in some of our largest, most profitable geographies like the U.S., China and the UK, we saw solid volume mix growth, which is something we've been focusing on. And as Mike said, I mean, it is the key for our long term algorithm.
We delivered more than half of our profit dollar objectives for the year in the first half and this actually gives us flexibility for the second half to further invest in strengthening our brands and our innovation pipeline, especially as we manage through some of the challenges in the macro environment and some of the increase -- the consumer pressure that we're all seeing. As we think of cadence of first half, second half on the top line, we would expect the second half to grow at a similar pace of what we saw in the second quarter with again volume and mix, key drivers of growth, while pricing will continue to play a lesser role sequentially.
As to profits, four things to keep in mind. First one, productivity delivery. It's been solid in the first half and ahead of our original plans, given timing of some of the projects. So we do expect a lower absolute dollar productivity delivery in the second half, but still very strong on the year.
Secondly, pricing, net of costs. It's been strong and favorable in the first half due to timing of pricing actions relative to costs. And you got to take into account Argentina, which again, a lot of the hits that we took on the currency were in the second half of last year. So we're going to be lapping that as we head into the second half of this year. For the balance of the year, we expect pricing at a cost benefits to taper off. However, it's important to reiterate that on a full year basis, we expect to be at least pricing that are cost-neutral.
The third aspect is timing of investments. In the back half of the year, we expect to step up investments behind our brands, given timing of some of the innovation programs that we have. As a reminder, on the first half of the year, our spend on our brands was approximately 6% of sales. Heading into the second half, this number is going to be closer to 7% as we take advantage of our strong first half and we strengthen the overall investment profile, setting up the time for us to continue growing sustainably in years to come.
And then last but not least is the divestiture of our personal protective equipment. We expect it to be a headwind in terms of profits of around 180 basis points in the second half of the year. We didn't have that in the first half of the year.
Two more things as you think of EPS. Equity method investment income, while it grew in the first half of the year, some of it had to do not just with the underlying performance of our equity method investments, it also had to do with the strength of the Mexican peso in the first half year-on-year. That's going to revert in the second half of the year, and we expect the net equity investment to be largely flat in the second half of the year. And the other item on EPS is the effective -- the adjusted effective tax rate. For the full year, we're now projecting 23% to 24% adjusted effective tax rate. And for the first half, our adjusted effective tax rate was 22.3%.
So when you combine all those factors, that gives you the cadence of how we're looking at the first half and second half.
