New Look for a Venerable Brand

Unilever taps into new packaging to freshen its Suave brand image.

Joanna Cosgrove, Online Editor

When the time comes to update a brand’s time-tested packaging, is it possible to both cut costs and create a pleasing aesthetic? For Unilever, the answer was a resounding “yes.”

The company’s Suave family of hair care and skincare products had been a top selling value brand for more than 70 years, yet the packaging had remained largely the same, except for periodic graphic updates. That’s when the company called for the help of New York-based 4sight Inc., a company based on Structural Branding through structural package innovation.

“The marketing team realized that they weren’t using the full (packaging) palette available to them to communicate the most important attributes of the brand to the consumer,” commented Stuart Leslie, president of 4sight.

Although the need for a redesign seemed clear-cut, it was many years in the making because the collaborative team behind it couldn’t get a clear sense of the primary objective beyond simply updating the brand image. The R&D and the operations team won out, laying down the law on cost savings. “The program had to be justified with cost savings,” said Leslie. “It was a value proposition— they couldn’t just increase the price of their packaging while keeping the retail product prices the same. They needed to enhance the brand, but needed to be cognoscente of the costs and find true savings in the cost of the components.”

With the project objective duly framed out, Unilever’s market research team partnered with 4sight to conduct extensive research and learned that the woman who buys Suave is willing to pay more for value.

“When they started asking consumers about the brand attributes they were dialing up very low. In hindsight the reason was pretty simple: packaging,” recalled Mr. Leslie. “(The original Suave package) was a cylindrical bottle and cap that every store brand comes in, except the bottle had a Suave logo and claimed to be just as good as they expensive stuff. It didn’t sell well.”

Based on the information gleaned from the research, 4sight modeled various design concepts showing different contours of the bottle so members of the focus groups could evaluate them. In the end, Unilever selected Evolution bottles for its Naturals line, which were sourced from Matrix Packaging, Inc. (HDPE and PET) and Alpla, Inc. (HDPE) and Evolution caps from Seaquist Closures Inc. The Suave Professionals line employs Makeover Bottles from Matrix Packaging, Inc. (HDPE), Alpla, Inc. (HDPE) and Makeover closures from Seaquist Closures Inc.

Customized Stock Savings

The bottles selected by Unilever turned out to be where the company flexibly found its cost savings. “Because we were able to go to a narrow neck plastic bottle, we could take plastic out of the cap so it looks bigger and broader from a consumer standpoint but it’s actually less plastic then the narrow caps they used to have,” said Mr. Leslie. “Same with the bottle: we were able to narrow the finish and improve the top load. The consumer just sees it as elegant and yet from an engineering standpoint we were able to take a significant amount of cost out of that package.”

The new packaging also solved a number of ergonomic issues. The contoured bottle offers a good grip for wet hands, the cap can flip open with one hand, and it can stand on the cap upside down without falling over.

Sold at food, drug, mass and value retailers throughout the U.S., the new packaging for the higher-end Suave Professionals line of 24 products is already resulting in 51 percent dollar increase over the previous product sold a year earlier, according to Eric Yoch, senior brand development manager, Unilever. The more recently launched Suave Naturals is already seeing a three percent increase in dollar sales vs. the previous design.

“The growth in sales volume has exceeded our expectations and solidified our leadership of the value segment,” says Yoch. “The growth in the higher-priced Professionals range has grown the value segment and the category. This really isn’t a surprise, as our testing prior to launch showed the new bottle as having significant wins on overall opinion, quality, modernity, and many other important measures.”