Designing Brand Personality Using the Power of Archetypes ...

5. The Case Study – Pantene Pro V
5.1 Company background
When P&G bought the brand Pantene, there was no brand in hair care that was bigger
than a 5% share, and the category leader basically changed every three years. After a
complete re-launch of the brand identity, 20% share has been achieved with the
category leadership for 15 years. Now let us take a look into their concept of the
archetypal brand personality strategy.
5.2 Designing the brand personality step by step
The challenge was to go beyond the left brain, the product attributes, to create an
emotional connection with their consumers, based on an breakthrough idea. The
emotional contribution that the brand brings is completely anchored into what the
product does. When Pantene transforms women‟s‟ hair, she feels inspired to turn an
everyday moment into a shining moment.
1. Defining company‟s values
The Pantene‟s values can be characterized as innovation, nature and transformation.
This all should be applied not only to their marketing strategy, but to the principal
corporate motivation that drives employees on each organizational level. Everyone in
the company knows their main objectives: the commitment to help women in their
search for beauty, bring them the true beauty, allow them to be transformed to be
strong and confident as they want to be. (Pantene updated 2010)
2. Setting the positioning
The Pantene shampoos were repositioned from regular hair care products into a set of
professional hair styling treatment. When choosing the archetype, Pantene instead of
following competition in the category by being either Caregiver, Innocent or Lover,
they positioned themselves as Magician. An dynamic transformer of the unimaginable
to the real. They can promise women‟ dreams come true using their products. The use
of this brand personality serves as an effective differentiator. This archetype was
aligned with a strategic target group of young women. They represent the symbol of a
change and are themselves less reluctant to change.
The brand department tried to reconnect the hair to the woman, because a woman
wants beautiful hair as an expression of her own beauty, she doesn‟t want it to have a
life of its own that exists separate from her. She wants it to express who she is.
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