The Interpreter

Claudia Kotchka is holding the secret to understanding design at Procter & Gamble in her palm. It's not a P&G product but a tin of Altoids, the "curiously strong" mints produced by Wrigley. As the scent of peppermint oil wafts out of the box, she points out the nostalgic typeface, the satisfyingly crinkly liner paper. "Even the little mints look handmade," she says. "It's not completely full. The whole thing is very authentic."

Then comes the twist. "Let's say P&G buys this brand. What are we going to do?" asks Kotchka, P&G's vice president for design innovation and strategy. "[Employees] always gave me the same answers. 'We're gonna cost-save on this tin. We're gonna get rid of this stupid paper -- it's serving no functional purpose.'" She plops the tin on the table and picks up another product, unable to suppress a mischievous smile. "And I go, 'Okay! Exactly! And this is what you get.' "

Kotchka reveals "Proctoids," a box made of cheap white plastic from P&G's baby-wipe containers. With uniform beige ovals jammed into the container, fewer colors on the lid, and no paper, Proctoids taste like Altoids, but they look as appealing as a pile of horse pills. Gone is the pleasure people get when they buy Altoids. Gone, too, is the up to 400% premium they pay. "That's what design is," she says of the look and feel. "That's what designers do."

Kotchka, 53, is not and never has been a designer. She was trained as an accountant. But she is now one of the highest-ranking design executives in the country, vital to CEO A.G. Lafley's effort to weave design into every strand of P&G's DNA. (See Lafley interview, page 56.) The goal is to transform the company from a place that's good at selling "more goop, better" into one whose products infuse delight into customers' lives. What Lafley and Kotchka are trying to do is revolutionary for a major corporation: They aim to make design part of every step of the product-development process, from the research to the store shelves. "We have an innovation process," says Lafley, "and we want to make sure that design is plugged in at the front end."

To be the design maven for a $51 billion company that until recently considered her realm to be the "last decoration station on the way to market," in one designer's words, is a hell of a job. But marrying beautiful design and beautiful business is a natural fit for Kotchka, a whip-smart 27-year P&G veteran who punctuates her speech with a lot of "fantastic's" and "awesome's." She coexists seamlessly in two worlds that usually interact about as well as oil and water. "P&G is in the forefront [of design] because of what Claudia is doing working with Lafley," says Peter Lawrence, chairman of the Corporate Design Foundation. "This is a leading example."

Like a simultaneous translator, Kotchka must express the language of design in a way that people steeped in sales, finance, or research can understand. At the same time, she needs to keep her designers motivated and clear on the fact that an idea that doesn't increase sales is meaningless in a place like P&G. "That's all we care about -- what's going to win with the consumer," she says.

Kotchka started her career at Arthur Andersen. Bored silly, she wrangled a job in marketing and climbed up the P&G ranks. In 1991, she was the first nondesigner asked to run the art and package-design department. After a few more moves, in 1999 Kotchka started her own successful business within the company, Tremor, which used influential teenagers to test new products. In June 2000, a shakeup at P&G brought Lafley in as CEO. He immediately started talking about design as a way to differentiate P&G. The experience of using a product, he said, was worth more to the customer than the price or technology alone. The guy might as well have been speaking Chinese. "To say he was going on this design kick when there were some immediate challenges was not an easy sell," says Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a consultant to P&G.

Kotchka knew and liked Lafley, but when he asked her to give up Tremor and "build design into P&G," she turned him down flat -- twice. The third time, she accepted, becoming a direct report to Lafley, a clear signal of design's importance. Kotchka quickly hired dozens of designers, planting them in every business unit to seed new ways of thinking. Bringing experienced outsiders into a company famous for growing its own was a departure. But P&G needed to shock the system to change minds quickly.

Slowly, the products began to change. There were innovations brought from outside, such as the Crest SpinBrush, and fresh looks such as Prilosec's purple package. Then came offerings whose design changed the function, such as Kandoo, a toilet-training wipe with a kid-friendly button on the box; Tampax Pearl, a tampon with a more comfortable applicator; and Olay Regenerist, a new formulation of Oil of Olay that creates an aura of luxury.

Listening With Their Eyes