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February 2006 - Strategy Magazine
Who to Watch: Sex

International inspiration: Elexa's Veronique Hamel
With a portfolio of 30 brands that just keeps on growing, it's a good thing Church & Dwight's Veronique Hamel loves launching new products

by Annette Bourdeau
page 16

She's an international woman of marketing.

Veronique Hamel's experience overseeing brands in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the U.S. and Canada certainly explains her motto, "think globally, act locally." Now Mississauga, Ont.-based Church & Dwight Canada's director of marketing and development, Hamel, 45, is constantly looking at other markets, gauging possibly transposable trends and hunting for best practice models to apply to her roster of 30 products, including such prominent brands as Trojan, Nair, Arm & Hammer and the recently acquired Crest Spin Brush Pro.

Perhaps this is most obvious through her pivotal role in the high-profile North American launch of Elexa, a new line of "sexual well-being" products like condoms and freshening cloths aimed at women.

"She's impacting the entire organization, not just Canada," notes her American counterpart, Jim Daniels, Church & Dwight's U.S. director of marketing. "In terms of marketing in the sexual health realm, she has provided great insights - from packaging to communications to advertising." Daniels says Hamel's French background - she's from Paris - helped her grasp and articulate the certain je ne sais quoi the company was looking for. "We were trying to project a certain level of sophistication - a female confidence that wasn't brazen. There was a lot of French influence." Even when it came to naming the product, Hamel was instrumental: She was adamant that it be easy to pronounce in English and French. While American marketers are well aware of their own sizeable Latino population, appealing to French Canadians isn't high on their radar, she says.

After the product line itself was conceived, Hamel focused on adapting the launch campaign to the Canadian market. She leveraged Health Canada statistics about the rise in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among young people, and worked with her PR agency, Toronto-based Veritas, to build the Canadian event of Elexa around the stats to make it newsworthy. The lavish Toronto media launch featured prominent Canadian sex columnist Josey Vogels talking about the importance of sexual health products like the Elexa line, and resulted in plenty of news coverage, including mentions in Elle Canada and the Toronto Sun.

What really made the Canadian launch unique was Hamel's ability to get retailers like Shoppers Drug Mart and Pharma Plus to agree to carry the Elexa line in feminine care aisles, rather than traditional condom sections. This move was based on the insight that many women feel uncomfortable being seen browsing in the condom aisle. She was able to win over retailers by presenting Health Canada stats, including one indicating that less than half of women 20-24 used condoms regularly - a number that demonstrated a potentially untapped market. While unable to share numbers, Hamel says the Elexa launch has been an undeniable success.

It was as deputy GM at Scholl PLC, based out of the Paris office and reporting directly to the Italy-based CEO, that Hamel learned how to really maximize her relationships with retailers. She made sure to fully understand each retailer's equity to best leverage it, and adapted programs to meet and anticipate shoppers' needs. It was also during this

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