Market Research Reports: Personal Care

An accurate and comprehensive examination of competitor cost structures of leading personal care marketers, focusing on key trends, developments, and business opportunities designed to:

• Understand how key marketers' cost structures have changed recently
• Offer a benchmark for industry cost performance
• Understand how cost structures differ among various personal care product classes
• Reveal profit and loss line items for each player and their largest product classes
• Assess cost positions of market leaders including L'Oréal, Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, and Avon
• Give subscribers critical insights in order to make informed business decisions
• Provide an appraisal of expected future performance

Personal Care: U.S. Competitor Cost Structures has been successfully completed seven times before and was last published in 2009. Personal Care: U.S. Competitor Cost Structures presents information on the financial performance of 12 leading personal care suppliers in the United States. For each company, cost breakdowns are provided for its overall personal care business, as well as its three leading product classes. The product classes covered in this report are similar to those covered in our Cosmetics & Toiletries USA program.

Cost structures refers to U.S. operations only. Sales, expenses, and profits are presented for the 2009, 2010, and the first half of 2011 and do not include extraordinary or nonrecurring items reported in published financial statements. References to overall corporate results are for the latest fiscal year available.

This study provides subscribers with accurate and concise profitability information and cost structures of 12 major personal care marketers in the United States. It is designed to help cosmetic and toiletry firms benchmark their cost structures with those of their competitors.

Specifically, this report assists subscribers by providing:

• Line-item detail to allow companies to benchmark their business against that of competitors
• Details on how personal care marketers structure and run their operations
• Insights into decisions companies have made regarding outsourcing, resource allocation, and product portfolios
• Competitive intelligence that will help make decisions to take steps toward lowering costs
• Important comparisons of marketers' cost structures between 2009, 2010, and the first half of 2011, and understanding how personal care marketers’ costs have shifted and the resulting impacts on profits

Kline is unmatched in our ability to gather hard-to-get market and competitive intelligence with a high degree of confidence. Kline's approach relies heavily on primary research, employing the use of field and telephone interviews to capture insights and information from a wide range of industry experts and opinion leaders including:

• Executives from cosmetic and toiletry firms in functional areas such as finance, production, procurement, sales, marketing, distribution, and research and development
• Suppliers of raw materials, packaging, and processing equipment
• Service providers such as advertising agencies, logistics providers, contract manufacturers and packagers, and retailers/distributors
• Key professionals specializing in manufacturing economics, packaging, chemicals, and technology assessment

This report also draws upon nonconfidential data from Kline & Company's internal database, which contains 51 years of syndicated research on the personal care industry. The analysis is supplemented by secondary research, including a review of annual reports and other financial files and analyses, as well as primary research with raw material suppliers, packaging companies, advertising agencies, retailers, manufacturers, and other stakeholders. This approach has proven to be the most effective and reliable approach to obtaining accurate data and expert insights.