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Johnson’s Baby Brand Gets Global Restaging

Known all over the world as the brand parents trust when it comes to baby health and wellness, Johnson’s Baby just went through a reset that included a 70% reduction in the number of bottle and closure styles.

Johnson's Baby shampoo samples
Johnson's Baby shampoo samples

For the first time in its long and notable history, Johnson & Johnson recently re-staged an entire line of products on a global basis. But it wasn’t just any line of products. It was a brand called JOHNSON’S® Baby. And even though J&J owns such well-known brands as Tylenol, Aveeno, Neutrogena, and Listerine, it doesn’t get any more iconic than Johnson’s Baby.

“The magnitude of this whole thing can hardly be overstated,” says David Smith, PhD, Vice President of Global Packaging Development at New Brunswick, NJ-based J&J. “I say that for two reasons. First, this brand is absolutely foundational where this company is concerned. It’s almost as if Johnson’s Baby is Johnson & Johnson. And second, from day one this was a global project. We’ve done plenty of things regionally, but this was about how Johnson’s Baby was going to look across the globe.”

The back story to this transformation runs along these lines. For nearly 125 years, Johnson’s Baby—shampoos, washes, lotions—grew to become the most popular baby brand in the world, with sales in more than 140 countries. To reach this size and scope, the brand developed regionally, leading to 470 products, 293 formulas, and 102 different types of bottles and closures. This resulted in complex business structures, cumbersome supply chains, and a multitude of formulations around the world—all of which prevented the brand from adapting to the shifting preferences of today’s millennial moms and dads. As niche baby brands began expanding their market share, something significant within J&J had to happen.

The restructuring of the brand included streamlining operations, simplifying the supply chain, paring back ingredient lists, and creating updated and globalized formulations based on cutting-edge science as well as parental preferences.

“We started by building deep consumer insights into the brand,” says France Depaix, J&J Senior Director of Packaging Development R&D Global Baby & EMEA region, who led the packaging transformation from her office in France. Much of this insight came by way of J&J’s Consumer Experience Centers, or CXCs as they’re called. There’s one in Skillman, NJ; one in Val de Reuil, France; and one in Shanghai, China.

“These are settings where the consumer can really show us and talk with us about what it’s like to interact with our products and their baby,” says Smith. “And we learned a ton—including the fact that moms and dads don’t like taking their hands off the baby any more than is necessary when they’re changing or bathing them. Of course they don’t, not when the baby is naturally squirming and wet. So, in many cases we’ve added pumps, which permit one-handed use of the container while the other hand stays attached to the baby. Overall, it’s just a much more ergonomic design, because we looked carefully at how the package is used across the entire portfolio to then determine the best package design.”

Global solutions
Armed with consumer insight, says Depaix, “We then implemented global solutions with global suppliers. The model was not to reinvent the wheel in multiple markets but rather to develop once and deploy globally.”

The results are impressive, including a 23% reduction in SKUs, a 70% reduction in bottle and closure styles, an 89% reduction in the number of packaging suppliers, a reduction of ingredients by 60%, and a reduction of formulas by 49%. The simplified portfolio has decreased cost while increasing speed to market and overall customer responsiveness. Consumer testing was also performed all along the process to guarantee delivery on consumer preferred packaging solutions.

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