The Analysis: The Brand Needed a Complete Rethinking

P&G made Herbal Essences more relaxed and more quirky, all in the language of young women

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Procter & Gamble is one of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world, and it really wrote the book on how to market, develop, and innovate in the whole area of fast-moving consumer goods. It's a company watched by marketers and retailers far and wide. But every day, it's faced with change—markets changing, consumer habits changing, and indeed the whole way people buy changing. What's important in retail today could be redundant tomorrow. What's important in the shampoo market today could be irrelevant by the end of next week.

Herbal Essences is a classic example of a brand established around the notion of being a little more natural, amid a range of products seen to be highly chemical. Its consumers had grown older and more affluent, and had started to migrate to more expensive products.

So what should P&G do? It comes down to: innovate or die. The questions for P&G become "What is innovation?" and "How far should I go?" Is it about breathing new life into a shampoo or conditioner brand, or is it about finding a whole new way of creating a franchise around a brand like Herbal Essences?

What do I mean by that? I think if you put every single innovation in every single market sector around the world onto a spectrum from evolution to revolution, you can fit everything on it, from the personal computer to the motor car to the wheel. So P&G first of all had to consider what its opportunity was and what its brand is, what its relationship with customers is, and how to think about developing it.

Evolutionary Step Forward

The route chosen is to give Herbal Essences an evolutionary step forward. One of the things P&G does absolutely brilliantly—it's a company hallmark—is to start with the customer, to understand the customer's relationship with that category, its products, and the way they're purchased. It understands how products are used, how they appear in the store, and what those products mean to customers' lives and their psyche.

The first thing the Herbal Essences team discovered was that they needed to reset the "who," as P&G would call the target consumer, to be Generation Y. That then sends you off in a clear direction. As a result, Herbal Essences is going to change the way it speaks to its customers. It's going to change the way it appears to customers, and it's going to change the way that it might position itself on the shelf compared to its competitors. It has to stand out and be clearly for that group of people—those women, those customers who want to feel they're part of that generation.

When you start from that point, it's clear how they ended up where they have. They looked very carefully at the form of the bottle, they understood that women like to buy shampoo and conditioner within the same [brand], and they've made that even more evident by making the bottles fit together on the shelf. They've thought carefully about the kind of person they're speaking to. They've used tone of voice, as we would call it, brilliantly. The way the products are named, the little things that are written on the back of the bottle—it's very quirky, very relaxed.

What they could have done was turned the whole thing on its head. They could have actually said Herbal Essences the brand might be our equivalent of The Body Shop. So then, this is no longer just about shampoo or conditioner. It's actually about a franchise. It's about a way of buying, a way of living your life. It could be as much to do with a retail experience as it is about the next time you wash your hair.

One of my observations would be that with every single evolutionary or revolutionary innovation process, it never stops. You're always looking at the next step forward. I suspect the team working on this would learn certain things are working harder, and perhaps the shelf standout could be slightly higher. Perhaps that notion of putting the bottles together could have worked a little harder. Perhaps their branding needs to stand out a little more powerfully. But overall, Herbal Essences is a great example of breathing new life into a brand.

Jez Frampton is the group chief executive officer for Interbrand, a leading brand consultancy with offices in more than 20 countries.