\u201cFor the prestige shopper, it was great value, but not too cheap to be credible,\u201d Lafley and Martin wrote in “Playing to Win,” \u201cand for the mass shopper, it signified that the product must be considerably better than anything else on the shelf to justify such a premium.\u201d The result: double-digit sales and profit growth every year for a decade, beginning in 2000. So it went for lots of other P&G beauty brands as the company moved upscale but not too upscale (“masstige” was the buzzword), playing on its research and marketing strengths as it poached customers from more idiosyncratic, fashion-oriented competitors.<\/p>\n
That decade ended five years ago, though, and P&G\u2019s beauty business — which accounts for 23 percent of sales — hasn\u2019t gone much of anywhere since. Lafley returned to the sputtering company in 2013.<\/p>\n
One problem was that P&G had put the beauty division in the hands of people who didn\u2019t understand the beauty business, assuming that general management is fungible, and functional management gets developed by moving it around every two or three years.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, Lafley\u00a0said P&G\u2019s beauty division risked becoming too much like other companies in the industry:<\/p>\n
What are the risks for us in Beauty? We start thinking we’re a beauty company and we spend all our time at the Oscars or the Grammys or Fashion Week, which now runs for months, and we don’t stay focused on the consumer.<\/p>\n
So what was the right approach for P&G?<\/p>\n
We’ve just got to get back to the strategy that worked for us, which was fundamentally beauty capable where we needed to be beauty capable and playing to P&G strengths where P&G strengths make a difference for consumers and customers.<\/p>\n
It needed to be a balancing act, then, and balancing acts are hard. Lafley isn\u2019t giving up on it, but he is apparently looking to dramatically cut down on the number of beauty brands his company has to manage. One of the key questions in strategy, Lafley and Martin wrote in their book, is \u201cWhere will you play?\u201d More often than not the right answer is, Not there.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0 A.G.Lafley who has returned to P&G for his second act, remarked:\u00a0 “Beauty is the industry of gret promises made and never kept.: P&G had taken a slumbering company which sold “Oil of Olay” for $3.95 and successfully modernized\u00a0 it by … Continue reading ![\"Beauty](\"http:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Beauty-Business.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"