Pampers: Supporting Your Baby's Healthy Growth
The Challenge
Pampers revolutionized the baby care industry with its invention of the disposal diaper – a product that promised to "Keep Baby Drier”. Mothers hated diaper duty and loved the convenience of disposables. The competition, however, quickly adapted. Huggies, Luvs, and other baby-care brands quickly adapted and introduced their own lines of disposable diapers. "Keeps Baby Drier” no longer represented cutting edge innovation; it had become the price of entry. Pampers’ performance plateaued, and then declined for more than a decade.
In the absence of new and meaningful innovations, Pampers’ “dryness” strategy was unable to sustain, let alone grow the franchise.
LLI’s Goal
Minor feature improvements such as new diaper patterns and girl vs. boy designs were not sufficiently compelling to sustainably build market share, Pampers needed new insights and breakthrough innovation capable of raising the bar vs. the competition.
LLI applied our proprietary Experience Driven Design © Research approach to uncover mom’s emotional goals and desires. LLI needed to uncover the experiences she wished for and what product features she’d trust to help her achieve her most desired parenting experiences. From a product standpoint, three factors mattered: uniqueness, feasibility, and visibly distinct product features that would be very difficult for competitors to copy.
Emotional Core: Skinship
Our research revealed that the most compelling Fundamental Human Value mothers aspire to is skinship - the emotional, physical, and mental bonds between mother and child that last a lifetime.
As a newborn, a mother’s arms are the safest place for her baby, however, as their worlds expand, mothers strive to ensure that their babies remain safe, comfortable and are able to mature normally - at every stage of development.
Based on those insights, we developed a new Unique Advantage for Pampers: Supporting Baby’s Health Growth. Inspired by this sentiment, Pampers adopted a new brand essence: “Pampers are Better for Baby”.
Product Innovation: Pampers Stages
Being “Better for Baby” meant Pampers’ design needed to adapt to best meet infants’ unique needs at each stage of development. From this insight, the Stages product line was conceived. LLI focused on developing marketable product differences for each of the baby's distinct developmental stages: newborn, curious baby, mischievous explorer, and independent child. Stages effectively allowed babies to grow up with Pampers. Consumer loyalty to the brand deepened, the innovation justified premium pricing and mothers proudly self-identified themselves as “Pampers moms”.
The Results
The launch of Stages marked the beginning of a dramatic turnaround for Pampers and P&G. The brand successfully evolved from being a functionality-based brand to become an aspirational lifestyle brand that drove P&G’s year on year growth. Stages also informed on-going product innovation in related-baby care categories such as wipes and bibs. For the first time in decades, Pampers built unit volume, share and profitability simultaneously. Revenues more than tripled, from $3B to $11B, in 9 years.