Procter & Gamble Takes Marketing into a New Era
P&G discovered that online power in 1999 when it created Pampers.com. The site is loaded with information from the company's research on new and expecting mothers. Pampers sites are now in 49 countries. "Moms would rather be part of the Pampers community than get their diapers for 50 cents less," contends Liodice.
Now the company is taking online experiments further. P&G found that Americans looking for information about heartburn go online first. That prompted the company to aggressively market its over-the-counter Prilosec online.
Last year, when it gave the Herbal Essences hair-care brand a makeover, P&G sold new bottles on eBay before they were available in stores. The bottles went for up to $25 apiece, and the proceeds were donated to charity. For its Crest Whitening Plus Scope Extreme product, P&G put up a quiz on MySpace last April rating what makes a person irresistible. More than 50,000 customers added the quiz as their "friend" on the site. Just in time for Valentine's Day this year, P&G let customers send a text-message or E-greeting "kiss" through its Scope mouthwash site.
Marketers are realizing that online socializing is not just for "techno geeks" anymore, says Forrester Research senior analyst Lisa Bradner. Research site Emarketer predicts that advertising on social-networking sites will rise from 2 percent of total ad spending today to 9 percent by 2010. This year, P&G decided to launch two of its own social-networking sites to help gather information about customers: Capessa for women on Yahoo! Health and the People's Choice Community around the People's Choice awards.
Such open strategies have their risks. Customers can just as easily talk back using blogs and other instant technology. "The balance of power has shifted," says Bradner. Now if customers dislike a product, "they can get on the Internet and tell 2 million people about their experience."
On the blog Commercials I Hate, posters have panned many P&G ads, from the ones for Gillette's five-blade Fusion razor to the Pepto-Bismol jingle. The advertising blog Third Way called watching P&G's online serial "Sunset Heat" to promote Escada perfume "more painful than reading Ulysses at the beach."
The idea of listening to customers rather than lecturing to them is a big cultural shift for most companies, says Bradner. It means that they "have to be comfortable with the idea of failure," she says. P&G admits that its foray into video games has been less than successful because the company hasn't figured out how to weave the marketing into the game in a less-than-obvious way.
Bradner says the fear that something won't work shouldn't keep companies from experimenting. Because it's cheaper and faster to play around with new technologies, companies should "fail quickly and move on," she says.
In the past, a marketing executive might have already moved on to a new job by the time a company concluded a campaign wasn't working. Now it's possible to tell right away. As one Commercials I Hate poster said about an Old Spice ad revealing a man's chest hair, "You guys really have to catch this one before they realize how bad it is and stop showing it."
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