Alex Keith on Driving Growth in P&G’s Beauty Business

When it comes to Alex Keith, talk of women’s intuition transcends the cliché. A chemical engineer by training, Keith has harnessed her instinct for human chemistry to crack a code no one else has been able to solve for the last decade: how to create a winning formula for Procter & Gamble’s beauty business. After a dismal period, which saw the company sell 41 brands to Coty for $11.6 billion, a deal which many said would be transformational for Coty rather than P&G, the consumer packaged goods giant is once again talking about beauty driving significant growth—both for the group itself and the market overall. Beauty has regained its mojo. The numbers tell the story: For fiscal 2018, P&G’s beauty business—which consists of personal care, hair care and skin care—posted sales of $12.4 billion, the third-largest category for the $67 billion group. Moreover, it led the company in terms of growth, with a 9 percent increase versus a 3 percent companywide gain. Much of the growth in beauty can be attributed to the return to health of P&G’s skin-care category, driven at first by the success of the prestige brand SK-II in Asia, but more recently by the mass market Olay, as well, whose turnaround

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