sunsilk #2 How do you translate your brand story into innovation?
INNOVATION WITH MEANING? Since 2012, the hair care brand Sunsilk has refocused its brand positioning on the idea of enabling young women to build their own story, in a world that does not always make it easy for them, by at least putting their hair on their side. New advertising drives works, and the brand is growing steadily. But an opportunity remained: How can we translate the story into innovation that will not only reflect the state of Unilever’s hair care science – but the unique view that the brand has on life? After all, making innovation more consistent with the brand positioning should help bring that compelling story to life, and make new products more distinct from other Unilever brands, and from competition…
INNOVATING WITH THE GIRLS, NOT FOR THE GIRLS The challenge for the brand team was to change the innovation process, and make it start with the girls that the brand serves, as much as with technology. We set to design a co-creative innovation process – but how to engineer it for a brand that serves young women in 64 countries, with different hair types, climates and cultures? To make this work, we built a co-creative online community, bringing over 60 girls from 8 countries, carefully recruited so they would reflect Sunsilk’s middle class target, but also speak English. However, where online research is usually used to gather fast answers to simple questions, we needed to create richer conversations. We engineered to community to allow the girls to speak together, rather than just to us. For weeks we offered them themes – some of them related to their daily lives, some of them to beauty and hair. We gave them tasks to complete together, encouraged interactions between them, talked with them individually. The girls connected, learned to know each other, joked, told stories, across continents! It was a researcher’s dream, when respondents talk to each other, oblivious of the moderator.
A WEALTH OF INSIGHTS Over weeks of interactions, we gathered a detailed sense of their lives, of the role their hair played, and of where help was needed. Amazing insights appeared, like the idea that hair products are traditionally designed for use in the bathroom, when the girls actually take care of their hair through out the day; or the notion that hair benefits were always thought through for inside life, when Sunsilk’s target group largely lives outside, dealing with the heat, the humidity, the pollution or the sunshine through the day… For each similar idea, a wealth of compelling product possibilities appeared. We analysed thousands of posts, pulling out common themes and high potential directions, connecting ideas with the life’s insights that they also had shared. Equipped with this wealth of information, we met with the brand team to debrief of the learnings and produce innovations’ directions – with the help of a few of the community participants whom we invited for the session. And then went back to the community with early ideas, which they helped us evaluate and hone.
AN INNOVATION PATHWAY TO THE FUTURE Today, Sunsilk works with a broad, long term & short term innovation funnel. Some of the ideas that came out of the community require significant R&D work, and will appear only in a few years. Some others, like the idea of stronger fragrances in hair products – since scent is such an important way to evaluate whether a girl’s hair is clean or not – have already been successfully launched. The process itself has been invaluable. Finding ways to engage dozens of girls to actively work with the brand team has allowed to crack the original innovation task – but it also allowed to surface dozens of insights that are now used in advertising, and in the development of the brand’s social mission.
INNAT The E E TOOL: Co-cr Communit eation y CATEG product Perso ORY: nal COUN Care TRY Globa : l
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