Profile... Sze puts focus on beauty as Lux looks to expand

Sze Tian Poh reads up to 25 women’s magazines a month. He doesn’t seem to regard this as a chore. The global brand vice-president of Unilever’s beauty range Lux considers himself “very lucky” to be in the role. Given that his recent projects have involved a Hollywood superstar and a former Miss World, he might well be right.

Life could have been very different for the Malaysian. Before joining Unilever in the late 1980s, Sze was a computer programmer with an insurance company. But he soon decided this was not the path to glamour he was looking for. “It was fun, but not my kind of job. I can’t flick through all the fine details, the programme logic loop - it wasn’t something I really wanted to do.”

His job now is undoubtedly more exciting - Lux’s most recent project was a seven-minute commercial featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones, developed alongside JWT in China and Japan. “I was asked to do another job [within Unilever], but I wasn’t too keen,” he recalls. “It didn’t sound very exciting. If there’s one brand in the whole portfolio I want to work on, it’s this.”

The Malaysian first made a connection with Lux “many, many years ago”, when he travelled to Hamburg to work as a brand manager - “my first ‘real’ job”. The decision was spurred not so much by career prospects as by the romantic image - presented by the boss - of drinking mulled wine on the frozen Alster Lake. Aesthetics, it seems, are very important to Sze.

His mission for the 103-year-old brand is “to encourage women to celebrate their beauty”. This he is doing by building on Lux’s Hollywood heritage and “contemporising” it in his role as a self-styled design guru. As one agency source puts it: “He doesn’t consider himself a global brand manager, but a fashion stylist.”

The seven-minute ad was intended to focus on a woman’s inner beauty in addition to the exterior, depicting a level of female “ingenuity”. In an extension for Southeast Asia, Bollywood star and former Miss World, Priyanka Chopra, is shown “using her beauty as a connector” - for more noble means than simply persuading a man to part with his money.

“It’s not a major shift,” he notes. “You still need to use stars, but you can use them quite differently. We don’t always have to use a Hollywood star.”

He says it is too soon to judge the success of the recent marketing initiatives, but sees the approach as “a good break for the brand”. His emphasis is on experimentation rather than specific sales targets - he has a surprisingly relaxed attitude to measuring a return on the investment. “We’ll measure [the campaign’s] success through an increase in brand equity or more sales,” he says.

Unsurprisingly, aesthetic appreciation is a key requirement in his relationships with agencies. “Not all agencies have that understanding, but they are beginning to engage to make sure the Lux girls look the way we want them to look,” he says, adding that he enlists an entourage of artists, music and perfume experts to help the agency understand the brand.

Based in Bangkok, a location he clearly loves, Sze’s preferred pastime is shopping, though he says he draws most inspiration simply by walking the streets. His working style, according to the agency source, is “open and honest, quite involved in the creative process.”

Like many of his peers, Sze is keen to embrace social networking, but admits it is hard both for clients and agencies to keep up with the space. Branded content is another area that he feels agencies are gradually coming to grips with, although it “does not fit into the usual breadth of an agency, so we’re struggling a bit”.

The next stage for Lux in Asia is to build a presence in China’s lower tiers. The shampoo is now only available in Japan and China’s major cities. “In the third tiers, it’s not that we’re not there, but to make sure we work, we have to understand consumers more. There’s a big taste for beauty and self-expression in urban centres, but it will take time to reach other areas.”

Sze will oversee this strategy from Singapore, to which he will relocate later this year as part of a Unilever reorganisation. Will the city-state live up to his aesthetic expectations? At the moment, he’s not so sure. “There’s an amazingly unorganised beauty in Thailand,” he says. “Thailand’s beauty is more truthful. Singapore does have culture, but it has a charm different from Thailand.”

Sze Tian Poh’s CV
2007 Global brand vice-president, Lux
2004 Chairman and managing director, Unilever Malaysia and Singapore
2000 General manager, Unilever Singapore