P&G Advertising Strategy Essay

For marketplaceing students at IIM Ahmedabad, 9th of January, 2011, is anything but a usual Sunday. They rent resisted the temptation to join their batchmates in a lazy basketball game game and appear oblivious to the cheerful riotous frenzy of the kite festival on the banks of the Sabarmati. Instead they shoot been pitted against each other(a) all morning in a brand exercise organized and masterminded by P&G. The prize? A dinner date for the teams with a globe responsible for running the marketing function of wiz of the just about powerful FMCG companies on the planet, Marc Pritchard , global marketing and brand building officer, P&G.However, even students who do not execute the cut get a stake to experience Pritchard firsthand when he addresses a respectably jammed hall that evening. Soon after hes d integrity, the questions fly mystifying and fast. These include some potentially embarrassing posers. How does P&G feel, one student wants to know, about its campaigns ex istence ambushed by its archrival HUL? Few people call for forgotten the teaser campaign about a mystery lave last year (that was revealed to be P&Gs Pantene) being hijacked by Dove from the HUL stable.Pritchard opts to take the high road on this one We cant prevent any competitor from ambush (surprise attack). only when if you focus on the consumer, what your brand is doing to serve the consumer and if you have a colossal idea, you will win most of the time. And thats a running subject field through somewhat much everything that Pritchard has to say. Whether hes addressing students at IIM-A, the media or an audience at the Cannes Lions Festival, hes a tireless flair of brands serving consumers or purpose driven branding. P&G fagged most of the 1990s establishing a global footprint. Now, according to Pritchard, it finally has the chance to live up to its purpose. The first step was getting senior concern to define a purpose for each of the brands in the P&G stable a bluepr int on how the company could touch and alter lives. Pritchard explains, We still have a core benefit but be thinking more broadly on how we can deliver it. We atomic number 18 very focussed on sharpening what the brands stand for, positioning human insights that can render into rangy ideas. Bold Gamble However those prep ard for a r ar chronicle of CSR and corporate do-gooding are likely to step back, a gnomish disappointed. Pritchards showreel of purpose driven work from P&G includes pretty much every big campaign the FMCG has come up with recently. This includes the highly awarded work on Old Spice with its cocky The man your man could smell like tagline. Pritchard says, Purpose is much more than a attain or a corporate responsibility. We deliberately focused on reservation people define purpose as how brands improve everyday lives.A cause is just a piece of it as opposed to the totally thing. This dish ups take purpose out of an ivory tower. Its no longitudinal some thing that resonates only with consumers in coached markets, fed up with hard sell, look for corporates to do something more. Instead it could even be used as an good go to market strategy. Which is pretty much the case with Pampers. Pritchard defines the brands purpose as to improve a babys healthy, riant development. Its benefit is dryness and comfort that allows babies to sleep, play and explore more. When they do that, they develop better.By the way, its also making their moms lives a lot better if they sleep through the night. To bring this purpose to life, P&G sends pediatricians to villages with tips on how to help the baby sleep and advice on immunization, at any rate using this interface as a sampling opportunity. The one acquire = one vaccine program run in association with the UNICEF is tie into this salient purpose too. It helps bring the community of moms together since they like to help other moms, says Pritchard.Even Women Against Lazy Stubble for Gillette, a homegrown campaign, has something larger driving it. Purpose takes on a more meaningful grapheme in developing markets, he explains. The vans that propagate the program take place preadolescent men tips on shaving, how to dress, handle an interview and talk to women. Purpose coincides intimately with P&G making a concerted push into non-city markets not just in India but in other countries like brazil nut and China that have a yawning urban-rural divide. P&G is instruction on stores because its the first moment of truth for the rural consumer. Pritchard says, We market back from there to create cognizance to get them to that point. There are approximately 7 meg high frequency shops in India and P&G has covered 4 million of these so far. A evenhandedly amount of product and package development is being done to issue to this segment. Using the store as the starting point also helps make the entire process less sporadic. Pritchard states, It means you are always on. We have consolidated the number of distributors into a core highly capable, powerful group. We give them the material, knowledge and know how on display. India is in some ways at the vanguard of P&Gs rural drive. One of the things pioneered in India was generating more household trial.Pritchard admits, It was Sumeet Vohra (chief marketing officer Asia, P&G) who created this machine to identify what it was going to take to get these products in the households, as well as the tools to measure performance. Much of what we learnt in India has been exported to other markets like Africa for event. The recent encyclopedism of Paras by Reckitt Benckiser proves that multinational giants look to India for a lot more than its large consumer base. Pritchard gives a diplomatic answer when asked if there are any local heroes that hes got an eye on. But P&G constantly unearths little jewels with every acquisition, he says.Like Koleston which was not very big globally but strong in Latin America, par ticularly in Brazil, around the time Wella was acquired. P&G took the brand to Mexico, Europe and are now launching in India. Pritchard goes further back for his next example Richardson Vicks in 1985 had a very tiny brand called Pantene that accounted for $70 million in sales. He says, We put the new technology in, and launched it in chinaware and came up with Pantene Pro V. Now it is over a $3 cardinal brand. To be chosen for the big push, the brand needs equity and it helps to have some sort of a story.Like Max Factors SK2 which was made with Pitera, a yeast extract used by monks in Japan which kept their skin in a better condition. We reinforced from that story, tested it in different markets and now its more than fractional a billion dollars and growing like crazy, says Pritchard. In a guiltless FMCG battle, market observers may be tempted to brand P&G as a pacifist, with hardly any aggressive countermoves towards competition. But, combining brand awareness with social prog rammes, driving its brands further into the hinterland and acquiring a readiness of creating billion dollar brands, Pritchard knows that the company is pushing the right levers.