Launched a $6M subbrand on Herbal Essences to enter a new target market
Key results
Exceeded sales targets by 1.6X and distribution goals by 2X, contributing a sustainable path for growth on this historically declining megabrand.
Designed new brand portfolio vision and market entry strategy for Herbal Essences to trade up consumers into accessible clean beauty and spearhead growth with multinational consumers.
Created and shipped the go to market pricing, marketing and sales plan despite pushback by aligning Country Leaders and leading cross-functional team and agencies.
Brand Product Strategy.
Business & Financial Analysis.
User Research.
Stakeholder Management
Marketing Strategy.
The Challenge
Herbal Essences’ sales had declined steadily for 10 years, and the US and global strategies weren’t working for Canada: Trade-up into our premium subbrand wasn’t occuring, and the attempted packaging change on one of our subbrands worsened sales to 60% that of previous years.
After creating a marketing strategy delivering 40% growth on one of our subbrands and an intervention plan to stabilize another one of our subbrands, I wanted to put together a holistic and sustainable growth plan for the Herbal Essences portfolio and evaluate a new third subbrand (subbrand C) that was doing super well in the US.
01- Who buys Herbal Essences?
Both the US and global brand teams didn’t have a shared understanding of 1) who the current consumers of each subbrand were and 2) what each subbrand had to offer to them respectively.
I therefore piloted this work to build robust consumer profiles with our Canadian User Researcher based off a framework I created:
I wanted to understand if the new subbrand C buyers would in fact be the same as our premium subbrand buyers as the US believed. If different, I wanted to know who they are, their needs, and how to speak to them. I started with understanding who our current buyers are demographically, their jobs to be done, competitive set, top purchase motivators, and purchase barriers through consumer interviews, quantitative pricing research and sales data, and then identifying who the MOST loyal buyers were.
We uncovered that our premium subbrand and value subbrand consumers were very different (in many different ways) but subbrand C currently attracted a mix of both demographics. We also uncovered that these consumers were very different from those in the US.
We also found out that $X.XX was the price cliff for majority of our value subbrand buyers through sales promotions data- even if the product offered was much more premium.
Next, I conducted a competitive analysis to see if we could pair user insights with a whitespace opportunity.
A opportunity did exist for an entry-level priced naturals shampoo & conditioner that met the demands of Canadian naturals consumers- and subbrand C was exactly that.
02- Doing the math
Then I calculated the business impact, assessed risks and tradeoffs, and gathered the data for our leadership team.
My hypothesis was that subbrand C could be a bridge between our value brand and our premium brand to 1) bring in new XXX consumers and 2) trade current value purchasers up. To assess business viability I created financial models with different scenarios to see how subbrand C could affect our portfolio’s performance, and executed consumer interviews & quantitative pricing tests to understand net impact to revenue under different pricing structures.
The data supported my hypothesis and showed that revenue was highest if we priced subbrand C between our value and premium tiers.
The problem was, we’d diverge from the US on two parts: 1) pricing- the US had subbrand C priced the same as their premium subbrand and 2) target market- our subbrand C buyer was very different
That’s when I really internalized that a great idea is nothing without people who believe in it.
A great idea is nothing without people who believe in it.
03- The struggle
My recommendation faced immense pushback. The US didn’t want us to diverge from their target market and pricing strategy, my cross-functional team didn’t think the subbrand was good enough, and sales reps didn’t want to sell a brand that’s performing at 60% last year’s levels.
In execution, I focus on mutual ground and try to place myself into peoples' shoes, so prior to meeting with stakeholders, I tried to foresee questions and pre-emptively address them in pre-reading material.
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For the US team, I put together a comprehensive strategy document that synthesized key consumer findings and summarized the business opportunity, and presented rationale to why this recommendation won over X other alternatives, potential risks, and mitigations.
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With my internal team, I knew the key concern would be sellability and performance, so I included US sales data, consumer verbatims, and revenue projections, and highlighted the best and worst case impact it would have on our team revenue metrics.
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Once my internal team was on board, I organized 1:1 meetings with people in the sales organization, to excite them with the mission and underscore why this product launch was going to be so impactful, and why they were pivotal in its success. I also made it very easy to say yes by building custom plans for key retailers to plot out what their shelf would look like and the overall increase to revenues they’d see. Overall, this resulted in us exceeding our distribution goals by 2X!
04- Designing the marketing plan
Now it was time for me to create the national marketing plan. This included deciding which channels to be on, how to find my audience digitally, creating marketing claims and visual assets, and engaging key broadcast, media and influencer partners. My objectives were to communicate the relevant Reasons to Believe we identified in part 1 and to minimize trade-down from our premium subbrand. This meant keeping away from national media outlets or broad targeting strategies.
I briefed our media and creative agencies to help with media channel choices and PR strategy with the existing insights we had, then proceeded to create marketing material with my team.
Based off of our consumer qualitative research and a couple guiding principles, I hosted a brainstorming session with brand, legal and R&D to come up with meaningful claims for my two target segments.
I then shared these with our User Researcher and we conducted a survey testing X options which helped us finalize the claim and also gave us data to support why it was so important to have X different marketing strategies for our X different target segments.
05- Testing and launch!
I also lead P&G Beauty Canada’s Test and Learn plan and expansion of digital capabilities, so I designed the launch plan to give us valuable information on creative messaging, marketing channels, and audience targeting methods for future executions. This meant our launch plan included a multi-channel A/B test that evaluated which data sources allowed us to best target our consumer and which channels would be most effective (measured in conversion rate and acquisition rate) and efficient (measured in conversion and acquisition per dollar).
