Lil-lets has announced a £2m marketing campaign to promote  its latest refresh, which sees new packaging for its existing products and the launch of three new products – including ’teen towels’ for nine to 14-year olds.

It’s good to see a mainstream sanitary brand taking the initiative by moving its products and designs forward – something that in recent years has been largely restricted to more niche, premium brands such as Moxie.

Lil-lets has a strong heritage as the brand that aims to help teens become more comfortable with the changes taking place in their bodies, and it’s great to see it reclaiming that ground.

When it comes to innovation on the brand, the new offer for 9-14 year olds combines a discreet, smaller product with packaging that aims to introduce some ‘girl glamour’ to the younger end of the market, and potentially allows the brand to justify a higher price point – always helpful in a mature category.

Having said that, the brand may come under fire from some quarters if the teen range is openly positioned for 9 years upwards, despite the fact that the launch is presumably a response to biological fact rather than another attempt to sexualise tweens.

On the renovation side, introduction of no-rustle packaging will hopefully support the brand’s somewhat faded positioning as the discreet feminine choice, but Lil-lets will need to build on a good start if it’s to achieve the category rejuvenation it hopes for.

All in all, some fair first steps, but still a long way to go.

At the risk of bandwaggoning it was a great shame to hear of the passing of Steve Jobs today. A man described by Barrack Obama as a visionary who achieved so much in a relatively short lifetime will have thousands of anecdotes, stories and myths about his life recounted over the coming weeks.

Whilst it is impossible to summarise the effect Jobs has had on his surroundings in a blog post one key lesson I will take from his remarkable life is the power of a single voice in leadership. Be it positive or negative, where Apple was concerned the buck started and stopped with Steve.

A great example of this approach is documented by adman Jon Steel in his book Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business. To summarise the account of a meeting between Steel and Apple in the late 1990′s shortly after Jobs was reinstated as Apple CEO goes something like this:

• Meeting starts between Steel and two Apple marketing execs
• Marketing execs present chart after chart of market, industry, consumer and economic data.
• Jobs arrives
• Jobs tells Steel to discount everything he has been told thus far
• Jobs draws 17 boxes on a whiteboard and proceeds to draw crosses in fifteen of them, telling Steel: “These are the projects I’m going to shut down, these two are our current focus”

This clarity of vision and single-mindedness focus is a refreshing lesson for any business but especially those engaged in marketing to a mass audience, where the relationship between vision and expression risks differing interpretation both internally and externally at all times.

So whilst there are so many things we can take from Steve’s successes one is surely that when iAmincharge things often run a great deal smoother.

It was early on Saturday morning when my boyfriend and I were watching the England vs. Scotland world cup game. It wasn’t a great game so during the half time break we were a little frustrated about the performance until the ‘Get up for England with O2’ advert came on. A normal England supporter’s alarm goes off in the early hours of the morning and feeling a little drowsy the England Rugby team physically help him get out of bed, put on his England shirt and cook his breakfast in time for the game, leaving the wife in bed.

It was the best England had performed all morning! My other half’s eyes lit up: the most brilliant advert he had ever seen, really capturing the reality many men are facing, waking up early to catch the game. He even declared that when his phone contract expires he is going to change to O2.

Amazing! This is exactly the emotion O2 wanted to provoke… however what they failed to realise was the flip side to having such a strongly emotive advert. What were the Scotland supporters going to think? One Scottish supporter responded that the advert has managed to alienate every Scottish O2 user from O2 by showing it during the England vs. Scotland match: ‘Totally insane marketing by O2. I am due to renew my O2 mobile contracts so rest assured it won’t be with O2. Stupid stupid stupid O2.’

While it is such a great advert in that it elicits strong positive emotions among England fans, the timing of its broadcast has also run the risk of alienating those that aren’t. Shame.

It’s easy to talk about the associations of a well-known brand – be they positive or negative, really well known brands with a long heritage behind them elicit strong opinions and emotions. So, what happens when the product(s) which the brand is selling changes? We’re often asked to talk about our opinions on product reformulations and it’s a tricky area: should well known brands stick to playing up to a certain predictable expectation of a product experience and never change it for fear of rejection or should it always seek to improve, making  tweaks and sometimes leaps along the way to ensure a continued relevance?

There are so many examples of hailed and hated product reformulations that there is no hard and fast rule to stick to – take Guinness, which has successfully made tiny tweaks over the years to great success and continued relevance vs. Coke, which reformulated its product to great success in blind taste tests but caused huge disappointment once on shelf for loyalists who had a specific (if statistically inferior) expectation in mind.

This is the problem: a well known and leading brand gives a guarantee of a specific product experience in its category, particularly in consumables - if it’s not that brand, it’s ‘just not right’. But products, like the brands which sell them, have to move on – ingredients, manufacturing methods, global taste palates and nutritional guidelines mean that no can of Coke today would or could taste the same as its ancestors but we’re still buying it anyway, believing it has ‘that Coke taste.’

So, we were delighted to recently speak on the radio with BBC about the re-formulation of HP Sauce and urge audiences to consider not just their own product expectations but the brand’s reasons for reformulating its products in the first place.  It just can’t stay the same. HP Sauce has been reformulated, from a health perspective, for the better – it has less salt than before and is simply catching up with its already reduced-sodium family members in the Heinz portfolio.

Currently the consumer verdict is still out – but is this a reaction to change rather than the product itself? Only time will tell…

In Matthew Parris’ Diary column in The Times is an article entitled: ‘The horrors of trying to use shower gel. Can anyone actually name the advantage of shower gel over soap?’

While we don’t entirely agree with how dreadful he suggests shower gel is, it has generated a lot of discussion here at The Value Engineers, what actually are the advantages of shower gel over soap? Quite a few it seems, after a quick office tally, the clear advantages appear to be as follows:

• It is more moisturising
• It is less messy (it leaves less residue etc.)
• It is better for travelling (although there are some against this opinion due to leaks)
• It is more hygienic (no one likes hair on the soap)
• It looks better in the bathroom (a sleek bottle vs. a soggy bar of soap)
• It is easier to put it in the shower (with the ability to hang not requiring a soap dish)
• It is easy to distinguish between different variants with distinctive benefits; exfoliating gel, polishing gel, moisturising, refreshing, partly because it is always packaged
• It has more of an emotional connection, consumers are familiar with the brands and having Molten Brown clearly on display does ‘make them feel good’… soap is just soap, very few brands stand out here

However, not all would agree with this, it feels that everyone has an opinion and does have a strong preference for one format over the other; soap does provide a feeling of nostalgia / pampering for many and therefore taps into the emotional connection. It is also seen as versatile, used for both hand and body occasions throughout the home (kitchen, bathroom, toilet…). For many it is also perceived to give a deeper clean, is more natural/ organic/ kinder to skin, better at killing germ and its cheaper.

What is apparent is that whether people prefer soap or shower gel is hugely influenced by the environment and culture they live in…

In much of South America, people prefer soap over shower gel simply because it’s a really hot environment, people have to shower 2 or 3 times a day and soap is more cost effective, provides the functional deep clean, is perceived to last longer and is cheaper…

In the former Eastern Bloc soap is much more prevalent because shower gel has only recently been introduced (and up until the 90s even kitchen soap was a commodity that was difficult to get hold of); soap is a familiar format with easily communicable benefits…

India and many of the Middle East countries use soap because the less affluent will use a single bar of soap for several different occasions/ purposes and in India in particular, deodorant is a rarity, so soap is used instead to provide that perceived lasting prevention against odour…

In contrast in Western Europe and the US shower gel is the norm, soap is felt to be out-dated and shower gel is relative cheap anyway. Westerners do believe that shower gel provides a deep clean, has a lasting fragrance and helps prevent odour just as much as soap does, if not better…

The big difference in global markets reiterates the notion of ‘not one size fits all,’ there is no one innovation, however successful or game-changing in a category, which everyone adopts.  Different formats will suit different people and will have perceived benefits unique to that person. I use shower gel because it’s less messy, Matthew Parris uses soap because it’s less messy…