The difficulties of developing a personal care product: Part 1 of 3

The personal care market is continually growing, with new brands emerging onto the high street on a weekly basis. During the past decade the industry has seen strong growth in the male grooming sector and similarly with organic toiletries as consumers become more conscious of the products that they apply to their skin. Developing a revolutionary new product that will take the industry by storm is a dream all entrepreneurs have. However, the reality is that this will be just a dream for most as the core of raw materials used in the personal industry haven’t changed a great deal. Therefore, most brands are using marketing as their way to gain an advantage over their competition.

As a contract manufacturer who does not own any brands, Expac has been able to take a neutral stance to developing a brand. Over the past 34 years thousands of products have passed through the Expac doors, many of these being new start up brands. Some have gone on to become a great success and have grown at an incredible speed, on the other hand, some have struggled to make an impact and unfortunately they have failed to break into the market. In this series of articles I am going to discuss what factors need to be considered when developing a new product and where it can all go wrong.

Getting the right balance is key

Creating a new product is not an easy task, with a mountain of decisions needing to be made: 'What product is best to break into a new market?', 'Who is my target market?', 'Where will I position my product?' and so on. Once you have decided on the fundamentals of your new product, as with all things in life, it will come down to your budget as this is what will determine many of the options that are available to you. Of course we would all love to work with a blank cheque book and create a formulation that is packed with organic goodness and packaging that would make Tom Ford stop and take a second look, but for many this is just a dream. So how do you create a successful product on a budget? From the experience gained in this market place it is through getting the right balance between sharing the expense of developing a good quality formulation and having product packaging and marketing that attracts the target market.

The cost of a formulation can vary greatly, but one key factor that needs to be remembered, the more natural the formulation is the more expensive it becomes. Synthetic materials generally tend to be cheaper than their organic equivalent and there is a lot of negative press surrounding the use of Parabens in products that are used on the body. So this leaves the brand owner in a Catch-22 situation, in today’s market products that contain Parabens are at risk of being perceived as a ‘bad’ product due to the negative press surrounding the use of Parabens. So in order to avoid this risk many new products are becoming more natural and basing their marketing strategy around the fact that their formulations don’t contain any Parabens.

From the consumers perspective, this is great. The variety of products on the shelf is growing, the products are becoming more natural and the competition between brands increases, bringing better value for money. With all this competition it becomes vital in getting your marketing strategy right. People will pay premium prices for premium products, so making sure that you get this message across to the consumer is imperative to the success of a product.

The product's packaging is the first thing the consumer will see and will be the difference between them stopping and taking a second look at the product or continuing to browse and find something else. Therefore the brand owner must find a style of packaging that attracts their target market. The options for product packaging are endless; do you use a tube, glass or plastic bottle, airless bottle or jar? Then there is the closure; pump, flip cap, screw on closure and so on. I won’t start on the labeling options. With all these packaging mediums available, getting the right one for your chosen target market can be tricky. If you are targeting the premium end of the market then a basic style of packaging won’t attract the right customer base, if the product doesn’t look expensive then the consumer won’t pay a premium price. A products initial sale is based on the packaging, the packaging needs to engage with the customer and attract the target market. Once that initial sale has been made then the quality of the formulation is what will determine a repeat sale.

Taking the above into consideration it becomes apparent that it is vital in getting the right balance between a high quality formulation and product packaging that will stand out from the rest on the shelf. It is often the products packaging that will win you that initial sale. Once you get that sale then it will be the quality of the formulation that will get the repeat sale. So getting the right balance between the two is a key factor in creating a successful product.

The above is the first of three articles that looks at the difficulties of developing a product in the personal care market. The next installment which is to be published on the 19th of February will take a look at a case study of a start up brand that faced the above dilemma of getting the right balance, and how it has overcome these decisions to create a successful brand that is growing from strength to strength. The final installment will discuss the key factors that need to be considered in order to break into the market place.

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