The team wanted to turn the promise into a plan. The plan was to remake Oil of Olay—its brand, its business model, its package and product, its value proposition, and even its name. Out went “Oil of,” and the brand was rechristened “Olay.

For Olay, the how-to-win choices were to formulate genuinely better skin-care products that could actually fight the signs of aging, to create a powerful marketing campaign that clearly articulated the brand promise (“Fight the Seven Signs of Aging”), and to establish a masstige channel, working with mass retailers to compete directly with prestige brands. The masstige choice, which was a decision to win in the channels P&G knew best, required significant changes in product formulation, package design, branding, and pricing to reframe the value proposition for retailers and consumers.

As discussed earlier, the five capabilities core to P&G’s where-to-play and how-to-win choices are consumer understanding, brand building, innovation, go-to-market ability, and global scale. The notion of bringing these capabilities to bear on the Gillette business was top of mind. From the first meeting post-acquisition, Bergh set out to incorporate P&G’s strategy framework into the Gillette DNA, working to articulate Gillette’s choice cascade.

Once the where-to-play and how-to-win choices were clear, the team could turn its attention to the capabilities required to deliver on those choices.

Communication to the Organization – A.G. Lafley

I prioritized the consumer ahead of all other stakeholders, including customers, shareholders, and employees. I started with consumers, because the purpose of a business is to create consumers and to serve them better than anyone else can. No consumers, no business. I said P&G had to win the consumer value equation and the first two consumer moments of truth. I talked about retail customers and suppliers as partners in serving consumers better...

I really tried to distill things down as a way to get the choices understood. There’s no doubt in my mind that clarity makes a difference. Clear and simple, easily translatable choices were crucial to get 135,000 P&G-ers in ninety countries operating with excellence every

day.

Reverse-engineering strategic options:

(Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.187) “1. Frame the Choice

As a general rule, an issue—for example, declining sales or technology change in the industry—can’t be resolved until it is framed as a choice. Until a real choice (e.g., should the company go in this direction or that one?) is articulated, team members can’t understand cognitively or feel emotionally the consequences of the different ways to resolve the issue. A team could talk endlessly about declining sales, making no progress toward solving the problem...

With Olay, framing the choice was crucial. It made the stakes clear immediately. Rather than agonizing endlessly about what to do with a fading brand, the team framed the choice and provided an impetus to action. The team laid out two possibilities: it could attempt to transform Oil of Olay into a worthy competitor to brands like Lancôme and La Prairie, or it could spend billions of dollars to buy a major existing skin-care brand to compete

instead.” (Lafley and Martin, “Playing to Win”, p.188-189) “2. Generate Strategic Possibilities

Framing the issue as a choice identifies a preliminary set of options for resolving the problem; the next task is to broaden the list of possibilities. The objective in this step is to be inclusive rather than restrictive of the number and diversity of possibilities on the table. Here is the opportunity to encourage creative and more-unexpected strategies. In this

context, a possibility should be expressed as a narrative or scenario, a happy story that describes a positive outcome. That is why we like to call them possibilities rather than options. Characterizing the possibilities as stories helps ensure that they are not seen negatively as unsubstantiated opinions. No one is yet arguing for a possibility; you and your colleagues are simply envisioning a world in which that story makes good sense...

Culling a possibility about which a particular individual feels strongly may well cause that individual to withdraw, perhaps for the rest of the process. So inclusion, rather than exclusion, is the rule at this stage...

In the end, the P&G beauty team focused on five where-to-play and how- to-win possibilities for skin care. One was to largely give up on Oil of Olay and to acquire a major global skin-care brand. A second was to keep Oil of Olay positioned as an entry-priced, mass-market brand, strengthening its appeal to current consumers by leveraging R&D capabilities to improve wrinkle-fighting performance. A third was to take Oil of Olay up- market into the prestige distribution channel as an upscale brand. A fourth was to reinvent Olay totally—as a prestige-like brand that appealed more broadly to younger women (age thirty-five to fifty), but sold in the traditional mass channels with retail partners that would be willing to create a masstige experience with a special display section in the store. A fifth was to extend the Cover Girl brand from cosmetics into skin care.