‘You need a unique value proposition to transform as a brand’ says Avon CMO

When he became Avon Prod­ucts’ glob­al mar­ket­ing chief in March, the first thing that Kristof Neirynck did was scour the archives of the busi­ness, which start­ed life as the Cal­i­for­nia Per­fume Com­pa­ny back in 1886. The main object of that exer­cise was to find out which fac­tors had made the firm unique in its mar­ket.

He has con­clud­ed that there are about 5 mil­lion key dif­fer­en­tia­tors, in the shape of the self-employed beau­ty advis­ers who work as Avon’s sales rep­re­sen­ta­tives. 

“We have amaz­ing prod­ucts and a great R&D func­tion, but there are oth­er com­pa­nies that have those too,” Neirynck says. “It’s our reps – and the per­son­al rela­tion­ships they build when sell­ing – that give us our unique offer­ing in this mar­ket. We need to stay true to that.”

In the 1950s, the firm’s 250,000 so-called Avon ladies rep­re­sent­ed the largest female direct sales force in the world. Their door-to-door meth­ods were cel­e­brat­ed by the famous “Ding-dong – Avon call­ing!” adver­tis­ing cam­paign. This brigade of micro-entre­pre­neurs is 20 times larg­er today, but it has become increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult for the com­pa­ny to stay true to its proud her­itage.

Cus­tomers in many of its ter­ri­to­ries have been turn­ing away from this tra­di­tion­al chan­nel as buy­ing goods online becomes ever more con­ve­nient. The Covid cri­sis has also been a key dis­rup­tive force – the idea of going door to door with paper brochures sud­den­ly los­es its appeal as a sales method when a pan­dem­ic strikes.

Avon’s ecom­merce sales have soared as a result. In the first half of 2020, the val­ue of its dig­i­tal turnover was triple that of H1 2019.

Neirynck expects that this trend “will con­tin­ue to evolve, so that’s why we need to rein­vent our­selves. At a time when you can order every­thing from Ama­zon, try­ing to do every­thing door to door is prob­a­bly not the right mod­el.”

For many busi­ness­es, the answer would be obvi­ous: go straight for where the mar­ket is grow­ing and con­vert the busi­ness into a whol­ly etail con­cern. But, while he recog­nis­es that Avon’s approach to sales needs to be “mod­ernised and digi­tised”, Neirynck is keen not to not throw the baby out with the bath water.

He explains: “The unique thing about Avon is the rela­tion­ships. Our rep­re­sen­ta­tives build per­son­al ties with their cus­tomers, mean­ing that they can advise them in a much more indi­vid­u­alised way. That per­son­al ele­ment is hard to repli­cate at scale by any oth­er busi­ness sell­ing con­sumer pack­aged goods. The moment you start for­get­ting that while pur­su­ing some quick sales, you start los­ing the essence of the brand.”

Neirynck argues that a sim­ple deci­sion to sell more goods via the shelves of Boots or the web pages of Ama­zon, say, would end up destroy­ing the brand’s image, which has been painstak­ing­ly built on the per­son­al touch over the past 136 years. 

Instead, the com­pa­ny must work out the best method of mov­ing to mul­ti­chan­nel sales while pre­serv­ing the “Avon way”, he says, adding that “you need a unique val­ue propo­si­tion to trans­form your­self as a brand”. 

Avon is focus­ing its trans­for­ma­tion efforts on three key areas. The first con­cerns mak­ing it more prof­itable for peo­ple to become Avon rep­re­sen­ta­tives. As part of the new strat­e­gy, reps will be able to earn more com­mis­sion (which is typ­i­cal­ly about 25%), the more they sell. Avon is also plan­ning to improve the sign­ing-up process as part of a dri­ve to enhance the whole rep expe­ri­ence. 

The sec­ond area is the company’s brand­ing, which requires a “revamp”, accord­ing to Neirynck. This exer­cise will involve updat­ing Avon’s visu­al iden­ti­ty, pack­ag­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

The third area con­cerns improv­ing the company’s dig­i­tal capa­bil­i­ties. As Neirynck reports: “We’re trans­form­ing from a pre­dom­i­nant­ly paper-based cat­a­logue busi­ness into a much more digi­tised, omnichan­nel con­cern.” 

All of these activ­i­ties are being sup­port­ed by work to reduce the com­plex­i­ty that has crept into the firm’s process­es and sys­tems over the years. 

“When you’re try­ing to digi­tise your com­pa­ny and trans­form your brand, work­ing to a sim­pler mod­el is real­ly help­ful,” he explains. “It’s very dif­fi­cult to do suc­cess­ful­ly if your prod­ucts are not com­ple­men­tary and if your IT infra­struc­ture is not con­sis­tent.”

The firm has recent­ly intro­duced a mobile app for reps called Avon On. Neirynck claims that it “pro­vides rep­re­sen­ta­tives with new ways to sell while still keep­ing the per­son­al touch that Avon is known for”.

Through Avon On, reps can con­nect their own social media accounts to the firm’s dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment tool. This gives them access to tem­plate posts for prod­ucts, beau­ty tips and offers or images that they can per­son­alise and share with their cus­tomers. 

The app also offers sim­ple ecom­merce fea­tures, mak­ing it eas­i­er for users to keep track of their stock lev­els, order new prod­ucts and share dig­i­tal brochures. 

“Cus­tomers don’t always want the rep to come to their house with new prod­ucts,” Neirynck says. “This is about pro­vid­ing more oppor­tu­ni­ties for con­sumers to shop the way they want.”

As part of its dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, the com­pa­ny is explor­ing new chan­nels through which to offer cus­tomers the per­son­alised beau­ty advice they’ve come to expect. This has includ­ed a for­ay onto Tik­Tok last year.

One recent social cam­paign tar­get­ing con­sumers in Brazil attract­ed 2.5 bil­lion views, accord­ing to Neirynck. He adds that hav­ing so many reps on social net­works has helped to ampli­fy Avon’s mes­sag­ing on these plat­forms great­ly, help­ing the brand to achieve “a mas­sive boom in views”.

Gain­ing the capac­i­ty to col­lect large amounts of data and crunch it into use­ful infor­ma­tion is key to any suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Neirynck has sev­er­al ideas for cre­at­ing val­ue for the busi­ness using such tech­nol­o­gy, many of which he devel­oped dur­ing lengthy spells with Wal­greens Boots Alliance and, before that, Proc­ter & Gam­ble. These include per­son­al­is­ing web pages and track­ing cus­tomers’ pref­er­ences and pur­chase jour­neys through the site.

He sug­gests that such enhanced data-han­dling pow­er could enable Avon to, say, send a reminder to a rep when one of their cus­tomers is like­ly to have run out of lip­stick. But one tricky ques­tion in this respect is: who holds the data on that cus­tomer: the rep­re­sen­ta­tive or the brand?

“There’s always a wor­ry among rep­re­sen­ta­tives that you’re going to use the data to start sell­ing direct­ly and cut them out,” Neirynck says. “But that’s not the pur­pose of this com­pa­ny. We want to pro­vide earn­ings oppor­tu­ni­ties to women.”

To pro­vide reas­sur­ance, he plans to use data on the pur­chas­ing habits of its reps – many of whom act in a sim­i­lar man­ner to its cus­tomers – to demon­strate the ben­e­fits of shar­ing such infor­ma­tion. He hopes that this will show them why giv­ing Avon this data “will help them run their busi­ness­es”. 

“Once we get that right, the amount of data we will have access to is pret­ty much unlim­it­ed,” Neirynck says. “That will put us in a very strong posi­tion.”