The following are considered more important sustainability values

• Water/Use conservation
• Climate Change
• Packaging/Waste recycling
• Product/Ingredient Safety
• Fragrance ingredient disclosure
• Renewable energy

Though the above are sustainability values that are derived from the manufacturers, regulators and the councils that prescribes the best practices, but how the market responds to that. Now the players in the manufacturing ecosystem of the personal care products have two key questions to be addressed:

1. How most successful products that have sizable market share position them in terms of sustainability?
2. Does the formulated ingredient supplier (Fragrance, Base-Surfactants, Co-surfactants, Dispersant, Solubilizer, Wetting agent, Foam booster, Viscosity modifier, etc)., play a role in this?

These are the most intricate questions to answer from the consumer point of view for the product owner or the stake holders in the value chain. We have initiated a campaign to answer the questions indicated. The logical first steps should be to understand more about the target markets where the products are sold. The landscapes of the target markets are studied in three broad lines:

• Sustainability trait imparted due to Regulatory framework
• Sustainability traits imparted due to Industry best practices
• Sustainability traits imparted due to the consumer – centricity (User intent)

These are the critical backdrop on which the act of sustainability and its implementation is done in different parts of the world. We have carried out such studies in 15 countries. This study has drawn the necessity of building a sustainability perception indicator for different personal care products based on their cultural, regulatory and consumer intent. We have created DataTheta analogous scoring algorithm, inspired by the Game Theory approach, that ranks the products with higher sustainability perception score. If there are x players in the competition, the nth rank player’s score is computed by the expression : nth player’s score = 100 – (n-1)* 100/x

This essentially built on directly measurable variables and indirectly measurable context of the market – such as user intent, regulatory framework, etc., with appropriate weights, accorded based on the rules established from the secondary research. Though the approach is well exploited in the game theory problems, this works handy in ranking the products that exhibit sustainability traits.

Significance of using the analogous scoring algorithm

1. This is helpful when the variables are incomparable to each other, for example, user-intent and regulatory framework may not be compared in any sense.
2. This is quite useful to measure the state of a single product based on its own sustainability trait (or claim) with a cohort.
3. Though the scores could not exhibit an established meaning as if in the case of physical variables (mass, temperature, etc.,) or sales figures, but it is useful to compare the products based on the market landscape and claims of sustainability.
4. This methodology is mathematically consistent and can’t be tailored (!) to render the desired result but to play on established rules.

The brand positioning is well correlated with the sustainability score and their allied rankings for different products. A detergent product “Tide” from the US market has the highest rank in the eco-friendliness category and it univocally position the product for eco-friendliness. This methodical study has unraveled that most successful personal care products are slowly moving to position on sustainability tenets. The paradigm has pushed the ingredient suppliers in the valued chain to position their formulated chemicals or packaging materials has the sustainable trait or imparts such values to the finished product. This would render good results in terms of planet friendliness, and we will not leave a planet filled with pollutants and trash to the next generation.

Image: Charisse Kenion on Unsplash