Tysonn Betts is The Procter and Gamble Company’s self-proclaimed “right brain,” a title the vice president of design adopted to characterize his role in making graphic arts a greater focus at the Cincinnati-based corporation. During the 26 years that Betts has worked for the company, he’s had a hand in the branding and vision of nearly all of P&G’s business units, starting with health care products like Crest and Vicks before moving on to family care and home care.
“If you’re familiar with Procter and Gamble at all,” he says, “you know that it is a long-standing leader in the consumer product goods space. It’s a very disciplined organization, and we recruit from some of some of the best business schools. Design, though, I would argue for a long time was not the most well-respected discipline within the company. However, I believe that design has a unique value to the organization and helps us be even better at the things that we're good at.”
“One of the tenets that I live by is ‘To whom much is given, much is required.’ For me, that means I must use the position and access that I have to create better and more opportunities for those around me."
Early on in Betts’ career, he began to realize that although his education at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) had been a great help in developing his eye for design, it hadn’t fully equipped him to work with his more business-minded colleagues, many of whom studied at prestigious business schools.
“I was not sure that those that I was working with truly understood or appreciated what the value of design could be,” Betts says. “Some of my colleagues and I would joke half-heartedly that many of our business colleagues saw design as the last decoration station on the way to market.”
Motivated to complete the Executive MBA program at Xavier University in 2003, Betts made it his mission to better communicate the importance of design at P&G, a goal that, in turn, helped him realize his own value within the company.
“I look at myself as responsible for helping to educate and inform the business leaders that I work with to also understand the right-brained side of the business,” he says. “I want to show them what it is that design brings to the table that helps make it an invaluable part of how we deliver what we deliver for our customers.”
This Thursday, March 23, 6:30 p.m. at the Eva G. Farris Auditorium, Tysonn Betts will give a free presentation open to all NKU students, sharing key lessons learned throughout his own design journey in hopes of inspiring the next generation of creatives. One of those lessons, he says, is that education is not limited to the classroom.
“The rise of the internet was happening when I was in school,” Betts says. “There was a real need to explore and expand beyond what we were being taught in the classroom to really understand and discover how to be a better designer.”
Betts knew that he wanted to pursue art from a young age. When he was an elementary school student in Birmingham, Alabama, Betts was constantly drawing, occasionally drawing on the walls of his family home.
Rather than discourage her son’s unbridled expression, Betts’ mother enrolled him in weekend communiversity art classes largely attended by adults. In second grade, he negotiated a deal with his teacher that allowed him to spend his afternoons in the art classroom if he finished all of his schoolwork before lunch. Before he reached middle school, Betts’ art teacher recommended that he attend the Alabama School of Fine Arts, where he went from seventh to 12th grade, spending three hours per day refining his visual arts skills. After graduating, he moved on to MICA, where his journey to P&G began.
“In a way, I got my job because of Phish,” Betts laughs.
During his senior year, competition mounting between his group of highly qualified peers, he recalls a classmate who completed an internship at P&G’s Hunt Valley location, ultimately receiving—but declining—a job offer at the end of her semester.
“Her grandmother told her that she could do whatever she wanted after her graduation, and she decided to go on tour with Phish rather than take the job,” he says. “I took her offer letter, called up P&G’s hiring manager, and offered to show them my book. 26 years later, I’m still here.”
In recent years, Betts has made a point of giving back to the city of Cincinnati. In 2016, he was part of the Contemporary Arts Center’s inaugural “The 50” class: a group of 50 individuals who donated $3,000 to subsidize free admission to the building for three years. He has also served on many boards for local organizations like Covington’s Frank Duveneck Center, Elementz, a hip-hop cultural arts center in Over-the-Rhine, ArtsWave and Cincinnati Public Radio.
He is also one of the four co-founders of Cincinnati’s Huenited collective, an organization dedicated to fostering a more diverse creative industry.
“One of the tenets that I live by is ‘To whom much is given, much is required,’” Betts says. “For me, that means I must use the position and access that I have to create better and more opportunities for those around me.”
