Claudia Kotchka is a 29-year veteran at Procter & Gamble. As Vice President of Design Innovation and Strategy, her job is to “build design into P&G’s DNA.”

Kotchka said she is gradually succeeding across the company by transforming the culture inside P&G to understand and embrace the value of design. “Organizations resist change because they’re made up of individuals who are working at what has always worked,” she said. True innovation, she emphasized in her keynote speech at the Fuse: Brand Identity and Package Design conference in April in New York, goes deeper than an appealing product and package design. It is a mind-set for conducting business. “At P&G, we want to build design into the front end of innovation,” she noted.

Most recently, this approach led to the restaging of the Herbal Essences line of shampoo and conditioner. The bottles’ unusual shape and the fusion of product and bottle color fit the wants and aspirations of the brand’s target consumers and have injected renewed consumer interest in the product line.

Kotchka started her quest for change inside P&G by debunking the myth that the product inside the package is all that matters. “Aesthetics are important, too. You need to fuse meaning and pleasure with function,” she said. “Unfortunately for businesses that operate on functionality, they see that as fluff.”

In discussing this fusion with P&G’s internal teams, Kotchka uses Wrigley's Altoid
mints tins as an example of a successful package. “I asked them, ‘Suppose P&G purchased Altoids. How would you package it?’ They said they would get us out of the expensive tin and use plastic, and also make all the mints the same shape.

“I asked them, ‘Would you pay a 4X premium for your new package?’ They said no, and then light bulbs went off. They began to see the value of aesthetics.”

The move toward a design culture within P&G has taken on the following additional steps:

• Creating work spaces that invite collaboration and inspiration.
• Engaging other P&G departments in the value of design. P&G’s mentor-up program is a move in that direction, in which a designer accompanies a senior manager on research trips to the store or consumers’ homes. Senior executives learn to think in terms of design.
• Launching an external design board. Three times a year, consumers talk with P&G’s internal teams about products in the marketplace.
• Expanding designers’ education in basic business. Conversely, the new age of collaboration at P&G has designers learning the language of business so they can speak more credibly with senior managers.
• Teaching the principles of design to cross-functional department team leaders. Department heads are beginning to understand design’s strategic value.

“We are not where we want to be in every area at P&G,” Kotchka said. “But we are much more inclusive in how we incorporate design into business strategy, and we are bringing our multidisciplinary functions together.”

- By Jim George, Editor in Chief