Serial innovators see dead people

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TLDR

The transformation of Olay from a declining “Oil of Old Lady” brand into a market-leading skincare innovator offers valuable lessons for product managers and innovation leaders. Through deep consumer research, strategic pricing, and holistic product development, P&G’s Nancy Dawes led a team that created an entirely new market category of “mass-prestige” skincare products. The success of this transformation hinged on understanding consumer psychology, developing innovative technology, and carefully positioning the product between mass market and luxury price points.

Key Topics

• Characteristics and strategies of successful serial innovators in product development
• Comprehensive approach to consumer research and insight gathering
• Strategic product positioning and pricing in the mass-prestige market
• Integration of technical innovation with consumer psychology
• Organizational navigation techniques for innovative product managers
• Holistic approach to product development and brand transformation
• Market validation and testing strategies for premium products
• Cross-functional expertise development for product innovation

Introduction

Remember when Pringles was just another potato chip, or when Olay was losing its shine in the cosmetics aisle? If you’ve ever wondered how struggling brands transform into market leaders, you’re about to get a masterclass in product innovation and consumer insight. Today, we’re joined by Nancy Dawes, a legendary force in product transformation who tripled Pringles sales and breathed life into the Olay brand by creating new product lines. She was Proctor & Gamble’s first female engineer to be honored as a Victor Mills Society Research Fellow. Nancy has also been recognized as a Serial Innovator—featured in the book Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms. She spent 38 years at P&G mastering the art of understanding what customers want before they know they want it. After retiring from P&G, Nancy continues to guide founders and entrepreneurs in creating products customers love and also volunteers with Ohio State College of Engineering and Girl Scouts of Western Ohio.

Whether you’re leading a product team at a Fortune 500 or founding a startup, Nancy’s proven approach for uncovering consumer insights and driving breakthrough innovation could be the difference between your product’s decline and its dramatic comeback.

Serial Innovation in Product Development

Nancy characterized serial innovators as those who:

• conceive new ideas for products that solve problems
• develop those ideas into breakthrough new products and services
• invent technologies as needed along the way
• guide those products into the market for commercial success

Serial innovators solve important consumer problems, and often figuring out the right problem is just as important as fixing it. They invent new technologies to support their solutions and follow their products into the marketplace rather than handing them to someone else.

The Olay Transformation: A Product Innovation Case Study

Nancy told the story of how Olay transformed from a struggling brand, called “Oil of Old Lady” by some customers, to a market leader through strategic product innovation. The story begins in 1985 when P&G acquired Olay, which was then known as Oil of Olay. By 1995, when Nancy joined the project, the brand had declined by approximately 50% in value.

Market Analysis and Opportunity Recognition

Nancy identified four factors that created the perfect environment for transformation:

• Demographic Opportunity: 75 million Baby Boomer women were entering their prime skincare years, ready to reinvent aging
• Technology Evolution: The emergence of alpha hydroxy acids moving from professional to consumer products
• Corporate Support: Strong leadership commitment to winning in the skincare category
• Expertise Alignment: Right combination of technical knowledge and consumer understanding

Initial Assignment vs. Strategic Vision

Nancy’s original assignment was simply to create a superior facial moisturizer, but Nancy recognized that just having a better product wasn’t enough for success and it wasn’t really what the women who were buying skincare and starting to age really wanted. She came to this conclusion by using what she calls “kitchen logic”—understanding both what women wanted and how women believed anti-aging skin care products worked. Customers believed products need to penetrate the skin to work. They wanted to develop a product that is efficacious and that women intuitively feel is working.

Connecting the Dots

To create a product that delights customers, Nancy and her team had to “collect and connect” many dots—considering many areas that were important to customers. Their innovations included:

Consumer Research and Insight Development: Understanding the Skincare Market

Nancy’s approach to consumer research demonstrated how product managers can gain deeper insights by going beyond traditional market research methods. Her commitment to understanding consumer behavior firsthand led to breakthrough insights that shaped Olay’s transformation.

Research Methodology

Nancy’s comprehensive research approach included:

• Personal conversations with over 1,000 women about their skincare routines and preferences
• In-home visits to observe real product usage patterns
• Shopping with customers to learn their packaging preferences
• Blind product testing without branding to understand true value perception
• Analysis of the consumer decision-making timeline in skincare

Understanding the Consumer Journey

By observing customers do their skincare routines, Nancy learned that after a customer first uses the product, she thinks about how it makes her feels. Over the next few days, she checks whether her fine lines and wrinkles are disappearing. After 2-3 weeks, she decides whether to keep using the product, but the bioactive ingredients take a few months to work. This knowledge led to Olay adding light-reflecting particles to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, encouraging customers to keep using the product long enough for the bioactive ingredients to start working.

Market Positioning and Pricing Strategy: Creating the Mass-Prestige Category

Nancy learned from customer focus groups that customers perceived Olay’s product as a department store product that would cost $30-40. Olay created the “mass-prestige” skincare category, launching their Total Effects skincare as a $20 prestige product but in the mass channel. To validate the premium positioning, the team conducted extensive testing, including blind tests in which Olay outperformed leading department store brands in improving seven signs of aging.

Developing a Different Product

Nancy realized early-on that it wouldn’t be enough to develop a better product. Olay needed a different product. Rather than just staying comfortable as a product developer, Nancy acted as a serial innovator and took the risk of launching an entirely new brand.

Nancy identified a significant market gap between cheap mass market skincare and expensive department store skincare. Their customers shopped at both places. They tested different price points and found that $20 was inexpensive enough for mass market shoppers and expensive enough to be a high-quality department store product.

Navigating Organizational Challenges

One of the most valuable insights Nancy shared was about managing the challenges serial innovators face within large organizations. She acknowledged that innovators often feel like “square pegs in round holes” and offered practical strategies for success:

• Make the “implicit explicit” by creating visual models and clear documentation of your thinking process
• Build a network of mentors and allies who understand and support your approach to innovation
• Identify and execute critical experiments that can validate your ideas to stakeholders
• Learn to communicate complex, interconnected ideas to linear thinkers in your organization

Nancy’s experience showed that while holistic innovation might look simple once completed, the process of getting there can appear chaotic to others in the organization. The key is helping others understand your thought process and building support for your approach through clear evidence and results.

The Spider Web

Nancy compared the work of a serial innovator to a spider in its web:

• Intimacy with the Problem: Just as a spider is intimately connected to its web, successful innovators maintain close contact with the problems they’re solving. This means getting personally involved in consumer research and product testing.
• Multi-Domain Mastery: Like a spider’s expertise in web building, vibration analysis, and food capture, innovators need deep knowledge across multiple domains. Nancy called this becoming an “M-shaped innovator” rather than just having depth in a single area.
• Integration of Knowledge: Serial innovators must connect insights across different areas, similar to how a spider interprets various web vibrations to make decisions.
• Environmental Awareness: Understanding when and where to build the web is as crucial as knowing how to build it – timing and organizational context matter significantly.

Conclusion

The transformation of Olay from a declining brand into a market leader offers valuable lessons for today’s product managers and innovation leaders. Through Nancy’s systematic approach to consumer research, strategic product development, and market positioning, we see how breakthrough innovation happens when technical expertise meets deep consumer understanding. Her story demonstrates that successful product transformation requires more than just creating better products – it demands a holistic approach that considers every aspect of the consumer experience.

For product managers looking to drive innovation in their organizations, the key takeaway is the importance of becoming what Nancy calls an “M-shaped innovator” – someone who can master multiple domains while connecting insights across disciplines. Whether you’re working to transform an existing product or create an entirely new category, success depends on your ability to combine consumer insights, technical innovation, and strategic thinking while building the organizational support needed to bring transformative ideas to market. The Olay case study shows that with the right approach and persistence, even the most challenging product transformations are possible.

Useful Links

• Watch Nancy Dawes and Bruce Vojak’s webinar, “Serial Innovators”
• Check out Nancy and Bruce’s PDMA session, “Are You Firing the Wrong People?”
• Connect with Nancy on LinkedIn

Innovation Quote

“I see dead people.” – Nancy Dawes, based on The Sixth Sense

Application Questions

1. What research methods could you use to better understand your users’ unstated beliefs and assumptions about your product category?
2. What evidence would you need to gather to validate a new price positioning for your product?
3. Looking at your current product development process, how could you better integrate immediate user satisfaction with long-term benefits? What early indicators could you provide to users that would encourage them to stick with your product long enough to see its full benefits?
4. How could you become more of an “M-shaped innovator” in your organization? What additional domains of expertise would help you better connect insights across different areas of your product development process?
5. Think about a current challenge in your product line: How could you use small-scale experiments to validate your hypotheses before requesting major organizational investments? What would be your equivalent of Nancy’s early package testing?

Bio

Nancy is a recognized Serial Innovator from Procter & Gamble for her transformative work on Pringles, Olay, & Head & Shoulders.  She was instrumental in creating the anti-wrinkle, masstige skin care movement inside the $135 billion global skin care category via her pioneering work which turned a declining Olay brand into a $2.5 billion powerhouse.  She led global teams that demonstrated improvement in skin health and appearance, strategized proprietary materials, innovated packaging and product characteristics with uniquely strong consumer appeal and enabled pricing that led to holistic business wins for P&G.  Bookending this program, she employed similar methods and achieved similar results in P&G’s global Head & Shoulders and Pringles’ brands.  Nancy’s string of achievements caused P&G to elevate her to the level of its most elite scientists and engineers (Vic Mills society) and the Ohio State College of Engineering to award her the 2021 Benjamin Lamme Medal for Meritorious Achievement in Engineering.  

After 38 years at P&G, Nancy leverages her innovation experience providing training to help companies/people improve their innovation capability.  She is an active volunteer for Girl Scouts and the College of Engineering at Ohio State.

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.