At Procter & Gamble, 'Beauty' truly Is a State of Mind

By Patrick Henry

Elizabeth Olson, a 25-year veteran of Procter & Gamble, remembers the days when bar soaps and household cleaners were in the same product family and conceptual thinking wasn't the hallmark of P&G brand design that it is today.

Once upon a time, perhaps, it didn't matter. But Olson notes that when it comes to her area of responsibility, beauty products, "the bandwidth has just blown apart" in terms of what shoppers want and how they expect it to be presented to them. "There are girls who are using cosmetics at 12, and women who don't stop using them at 80," she says, calling today's wide-open attitudes a far cry from the old days when a tad too much powder or lipstick could be a dicey thing for a lady's reputation.

As director of global design for P&G Beauty at the company's Cincinnati headquarters, Olson specializes in sifting the bandwidth of consumer demand for the cues and clues that enable P&G Beauty to make the all-important emotional connections with shoppers around the world. This mandate means that Olson and her design teams are less concerned with the specifics of package design than they are with the broader strategy of brand identity creation. Once they have articulated what Olson calls the "metaphors" of a product's value proposition to its audience, a creative partnership with an external design agency puts ideas on paper, a design proposal on the table, and, in the end, the package on the shelf.

It's a conceptual workflow from start to finish, and with partners like the Cincinnati divisions of brand consultancies Landor Associates and Libby Perszyk Kathman (LPK), it's a package development methodology that works well for P&G Beauty. Not surprisingly, the chief executives of these firms share Olson's view that in the design of any package, clarity and harmony of vision are the wellsprings of whatever ultimately triggers the shopper's purchasing decision.

Meet, think, and co-create

With the guidance of P&G global design managers, multifunctional teams of varying sizes spend the bulk of their time meeting and thinking about strategies for individual beauty brands. Their objective is to identify sensory cues, brand heritage features, and other attributes that shoppers will find compelling. It's not package design per se: "Generally, we're not the ones picking typefaces and deciding point sizes," Olson says. Because the teams — consisting of product developers, package technicians, researchers, industrial designers, and graphic artists — work in a "design management model" that prioritizes business goals, they typically don't design packages in-house. That phase of the work is outsourced via "co-creation arrangements" with brand design consultancies.

Design is seldom the clock stopper

So many projects, and, relatively speaking, so little time. The cycle for P&G Beauty turnarounds is shrinking. "And I know," says Duncan, "that P&G would like it to get even smaller." Kathman says that speed-to-market is crucial because the issue always is: "For every moment you delay, how much revenue are you denying yourself?" He points out that package design usually isn't a make-or-break activity in the timing of a launch. Other tasks can be much more time-consuming; for instance, a change to the package's structure or qualification testing of the product.

All agree that the appeal of a successful package can be dramatic, subtle, or something in between. There's no master key to unlocking a purchasing decision.

In the sea of choices presented by most retailing environments, says Olson, "'Made you look' isn't the same as 'made you buy'." For some people, it may only be a matter of finding their familiar "green brand versus the red brand." Therefore, it's necessary to optimize the package for its "implied viewing distance" — the space within which it must be able to communicate its essential, sale-triggering visual cues to the shopper. The package must also be engaging at two feet, and ultimately, compelling in hand. The trigger could be any feature of design or construction that changes the package or makes it seem unexpected — but not so unexpected that the change appears inappropriate.

Duncan says that in the case of the Secret Sparkle Collection, the glittery finish is what makes the emotional connection. The distinctive model photography on Nice 'n Easy packages shows not only richly shaded coiffures but facial expressions that convey "emotional experiences" on the part of the models. "It's not just a head and hair shot," Duncan says.

Kathman maintains that in order to make an emotional connection, the package has to answer three questions: "Who am I?" (clearly identifying the product); "What do I do?" (communicating the product's function); and, most important, "Why am I right for you?" The answer to third question lets the brand attach itself emotionally to the shopper by evoking associations like panache, grace, or femininity, according to Kathman. "It's what makes her say: 'This brand understands me,'" he emphasizes.

The price of "preciousness"

It's the design managers' job to reconcile the quest for connection with the constraints of budget. In beauty, notes Olson, many products carry "a preciousness and an expectation" that the details of the packaging will be exquisitely rendered. That's all well and good, but the reality is that "those details come with a cost." Thus, whenever her team weighs investments in closures, labels, and other packaging components, it's never forgotten that although "we have to create specialness, you can't price yourself out of the market," says Olson.

Talented external partners implement P&G's visions of well-executed brand strategies for beauty products. According to Duncan, Landor faced a special challenge in revamping the look of the packaging for Textures & Tones, a line of hair care products for African-American women. It was a question of gaining insight into the needs of African-American shoppers so that the packages could speak to the segment's cultural preferences. Fortunately, says Duncan, P&G excels in the kind of consumer research that makes achieving this delicate balance of style and substance possible.

LPK, likewise, is proud of its association with Olay, a brand that Kathman sees as having evolved from "grandma's pink beauty fluid" into an international success story with world sales in excess of $1 billion. He says the brand owes its success to continuous innovation, a consistent look, and the "discipline and rigor" of its design process.

Clarity of purpose and uniformity of method are crucial to making sound creative calls within a category that embraces many more definitions of beauty than it used to, says Olson. This is why, she explains, the essence of package design is discerning the "core desires" of consumers at all points of the blown-apart bandwidth that the demand for beauty products has become.

It goes without saying that consumers, in the meantime, will be making judgment calls of their own. According to Kathman, any shopper can test the strength of a brand proposition by asking himself or herself, "What's of interest to me?" and deciding how well the product on offer plays to those interests. For consumers, he says, "this is a game in which the investment is pretty low," since it typically will cost only a few dollars to find out whether the product pleases or disappoints. For the brand owner, however, the stakes are much higher. "If you're disingenuous in your claims, you won't be repurchased," Kathman stresses.

Olson says that hard-nosed thinking often is needed to "clarify that fuzzy front end where creativity and ideation take place." What's more, hitting the "sweet spot" between cost justification and attention to detail can be "an iterative and confrontation-laden process." But, it's not all cold logic. Sometimes the best course is to sleep on design ideas and let them percolate into formulas for success. "There's still some art to the science," Olson says.