Scientific Innovation

Consumer Healthcare

Innovation, inspired by deep consumer insights, underpins the health and wellness solutions we bring to consumers around the world.

Whether developing a better way to treat pain, improve nutrition, or enhance vitality and appearance, we look to our consumers to guide the work we do to improve their lives with high-quality, trusted brands.

Using Open Innovation and Venture Design to Accelerate Innovation in Health and Wellness

In 2016, we forged a partnership with frog, a global design and strategy firm, to launch the Design Collaborative, an initiative to develop new health and wellness solutions for consumers in the areas of improved sleep, stress management, energy, aging, better breathing and nutrition. The Design Collaborative is an example of Venture Design, which is an approach to leveraging design methodologies for near- to mid-term scalable business impact through the creation of new product ecosystems, services and businesses. It allows us to build on our own efforts to develop new, innovative ways for consumers to achieve better health and wellness by tapping into the creativity and thinking taking place in the world around us. In addition, we partnered with tech learning company Galvanize, Inc. to launch a health and wellness innovation program, which provided support for 20 start-up companies developing potential solutions to help people sleep, eat and manage their stress better.

Innovating Our Portfolio

Consumer needs and preferences evolve continuously and we stay attuned to ensure our brands keep pace. This year, for example, we launched ChapStick^® DUO, an innovative product and package designed to delight teens, a new niche market for our lip care business. To land on the final product, we conducted extensive testing with nearly 2,700 consumers and developed almost 300 concept sketches and packaging prototypes. Leveraging what we learned, we developed a dual-sided detachable lip balm that can be purchased as a single unit or double-pack flavor combination – a true innovation for our 125-year-old brand.

Using Real-World Insights to Evolve Our Products

Our passion for understanding consumer behavior is not limited to the laboratory. We extend our quest to understand how consumers use or would like to use our products through our Consumer Home, built within our research facility in Richmond, Virginia.

An actual home within our research facility, the Consumer Home enables us to observe consumer behavior in real time and in a real-life environment. Our scientists and researchers study consumers as they go about household activities, looking at everything from where they store a medicine and their first instinct when they have a cold, to what happens when they wake up in the middle of the night and need a pain reliever. We assess how factors like package design affect their work in the kitchen. By using sensors and state-of-the-art recording devices, we capture authentic reactions to various health-related scenarios so that we can learn about both their routines and emotions, and leverage these learnings to evolve our products. In the end, our Consumer Home helps us design and market products that truly hit “home.”