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The Compass Steering P&G

Of course packaging is essential to the way P&G goes to market, but packaging is always designed and evaluated in terms of how it meshes with four other key business drivers.

This Lenor product and its ISBM PET container exemplify P&G’s tightly integrated development process, which enables the firm to move more quickly than in years past.
This Lenor product and its ISBM PET container exemplify P&G’s tightly integrated development process, which enables the firm to move more quickly than in years past.

Those who know the sport of rugby are familiar enough with the meaning of the word “scrum,” the bunched-up group of players into which the ball is thrown so that play can resume. But the term is also heard in IT and business circles these days to describe a set of practices used in agile project management where great emphasis is placed on multidisciplinary participation, daily communication, and the flexible reassessment of plans.

Spend a day split between Procter & Gamble’s Cincinnati headquarters and its nearby Beckett Ridge Technical Center and two things become abundantly clear. First, the scrum is a model that is enthusiastically embraced and used as a tool to bring innovation to life—a key focus for P&G. And second, packaging is smack dab in the middle of the scrum. Kathy Fish, Chief Research, Development, and Innovation Officer, says it’s all about lean.

From left: Ken McGuire, Research Fellow; Phil Duncan, Chief Design Officer; Victor Aguilar, Vice President Corporate Technology Development and Open Innovation; Kathy Fish, Chief Research, Development, and Innovation Officer.From left: Ken McGuire, Research Fellow; Phil Duncan, Chief Design Officer; Victor Aguilar, Vice President Corporate Technology Development and Open Innovation; Kathy Fish, Chief Research, Development, and Innovation Officer.“The idea is to bring in the entrepreneurial approach to learning that a startup might have and then marry that together with the strengths that we have as a well-established company. So when we approach a new opportunity we start lean, which means small, dedicated, multifunctional teams that learn together, teams that are able to make decisions quickly on what’s important and let go of what’s not. This allows us to move much more quickly than we’ve been able to historically.”

A 40-year veteran of P&G, Fish is a senior member of the Global Leadership Council (GLC) and leader of R&D, which discovers, develops, and implements technologies to accelerate and advance the work of P&G brands that make up the 10 category-based Global Business Units. At the same level of the corporate structure and also part of GLC is Phil Duncan, Chief Design Officer at P&G for the past 11 years. An equally big fan of the scrum approach, Duncan summarizes its biggest benefit more pithily. New developments coming out of the pipeline, he says, are “Months in the making.”

The other thing that becomes clear in visiting with the likes of Fish and Duncan is that packaging at P&G is always viewed in terms of how it meshes with four other key business drivers. P&G refers to these as the five vectors of superiority: product, packaging, brand communication, retail execution, and value that can be appreciated by both consumer and retailer. Collectively, they are the compass by which the P&G ship is steered.

“A few years back,” Fish explains, “at a point where we weren’t really meeting our growth goals, we carefully studied the success factors behind our billion-dollar brands. And what became clear is that those successful brands weren’t just better than the competition, they were irresistibly superior. They were so superior that they made an emotional connection with consumers, to the point that consumers really missed having that brand in their lives if they switched to another brand. We came to realize that what we had done so well with these billion-dollar brands was that we had taken a holistic approach that made the whole consumer experience with the brand seamless. Naturally, at the most fundamental level it was a matter of product and packaging working together. But aside from product and packaging we’ve come to see that it’s really more than that, so we’re now focused on also integrating the retail experience, the value equation, and the commercialization and marketing in such a way that the consumer experience is completely seamless from the time they first see the item to the moment they are shopping to their use of it in the home to when they tell their friends about it.”

Innovation reset
Duncan says it was partly a matter of rethinking the role of innovation. “We’ve always understood that innovation is the lifeblood of the company and a key differentiator in terms of how we win against the competition,” he points out. “But we needed to do a better job of understanding how product, package, design, and ideas should mesh. So we did a lot of thinking about how the skills within our organization—R&D, design, commercial functions—needed to come together to make that happen. Whereas in the past we might have been content to think about it as ‘If we can just get the product into her or his hands, they’ll love it.’”

Fish adds that with the new mindset came a significant financial investment. “We invested in design within the R&D organization to help make sure that we are really crafting holistic experiences from the very beginning. We’re now able to rapidly prototype, test things out very quickly with consumers, and make a decision.”

Victor Aguilar, with 30 years under his belt at P&G, reports to Fish and recently moved into the position of Vice President Corporate Technology Development and Open Innovation. He elaborates on how the five vectors of superiority shape packaging design. “We’re in the business of creating superior consumer experiences. We call them irresistibly superior experiences. The whole idea is that consumers fall in love with the products we create, and that includes, of course, the packaging execution. To us the package is never just a container, because it’s part of our brand-building story, part of the holistic consumer experience we seek to create.”

Fish is in complete agreement with Aguilar’s take on packaging. “It’s so much more than a container,” she says. “Is it easy to hold and use? Does it pour well? Is it responsible from a sustainable packaging perspective? Remember, too, that not everybody sees our advertising these days, so the burden on the package to tell the story to the consumer is more important than ever. It needs to have the consumer in the store saying ‘I know what you are. I know which version to select. And I want to buy you because you look really compelling.’”

The unique dispensing technology and the refill format that characterize this recently launched product were first commercialized under the banner of the Febreze brand. P&G describes this as an important packaging platform that we’re going to leverage.”The unique dispensing technology and the refill format that characterize this recently launched product were first commercialized under the banner of the Febreze brand. P&G describes this as an important packaging platform that we’re going to leverage.”Many of the course corrections P&G has had to make in recent years have been driven by dramatic shifts in the retail environment, including such things as SKU proliferation, new kinds of retailers, and the emergence of new distribution channels like e-commerce. Faced with this new environment, it was no longer enough to have product designers come up with new items and then hand them off to another group whose job it was to design suitable packaging.

“We had to raise the bar if we hoped to offer products that really stand out, and this is where the intersection between product formulation and packaging execution comes in,” says Aguilar. He adds that in his new role as corporate technology development leader, his job is to look into the future not just of packaging but of innovation in general. “At the corporate level we’re looking five to ten years ahead of our Global Business Units. In the case of packaging in particular, we’re putting a lot of effort into sustainability and e-commerce.”

The scrum in action
When asked to provide a good example of the scrum approach that characterizes P&G’s path to innovation, Aguilar points to the injection/stretch blow-molded PET bottle for Lenor brand fabric softener—the U.K. equivalent of the Downy brand so well known in the U.S. The package design team gave it a diamond-faceted look so that it would stand out on shelf, and industrial designers ensured that these shapes would lend top-load strength to the bottle and thus reduce the amount of plastic resin required to make the bottle. This reduction in plastic used means that the vector of superiority relating to value is represented; it also scores some sustainability points. Meanwhile, the product formulation team paid close attention to product viscosity and concentration so that the package’s shape and its cap were compatible with pouring and measuring. As for the final two vectors of superiority, messaging and retail execution, they’re in the mix through advertising and in-store aisle-end displays. And what’s most important is that it all gets baked in from the get-go.

“While functions such as design, marketing, and R&D are still independent entities, we now have integrated work processes that result in tightly integrated development,” says Aguilar.

He points to the AeroFlex concept, winner of the top award in the 2018 Dow Awards for Packaging Innovation, as another good example. A number of commercially available products in this breakthrough format are being tested, including P&G’s own Dawn brand 9-oz dish soap (for complete coverage, go to pwgo.to/5313).

Though it looks a lot like any other flat-bottom, gusseted, stand-up pouch, it utilizes nitrogen gas to inflate specific portions of the pouch, notably along the edges, to bring a degree of rigidity that is typically not possible in a flexible package. And because the package is made of flexible film, it requires 50% less plastic than a traditional blow-molded bottle. Not to mention that, because it can be delivered to a filling facility as rollstock, it has the potential to score additional sustainable packaging points because it greatly reduces the number of truckloads of empty bottles that have to be delivered.

“Only through a tightly integrated and multidisciplinary approach to development could such a product and package emerge,” says Aguilar.

The Dawn brand dish soap execution of this innovative technology is a good example of what P&G refers to as a “landing strip.” As a new technology is developed, P&G corporate picks the business unit most suitable to land that technology in the marketplace on a commercial basis. Once it’s established there, some well-organized internal networking kicks in so that other business units can consider it for commercialization. This is how, not long after the Dawn product debuted in the AeroFlexx format, Old Spice brand men’s body wash appeared in an AeroFlexx format.

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