Now is not the time for marketers to avoid conversations about periods or explosive infant pooping: Now is the time for growth.
Following several years of pandemic-driven uncertainty and faced with a market continually troubled by geopolitical upheaval and rapid technological advances, Procter & Gamble chief brand officer Marc Pritchard took the stage for his keynote at ANA Masters of Marketing and made his case for market growth above all else. For his brand, that means publicly confronting topics that are now simply too costly to avoid.
Focusing on inclusion and “deep, empathic understanding of people,” Pritchard noted that growth didn’t require stealing market share from competitors, but simply growing P&G’s own market to its fullest potential. Given the basic consumer products it sells and the breadth of its offerings, Pritchard sees P&G’s audience as 100% of all consumers—but noted that the company only hits about 50-70% with media and advertising.
The answer, he said, is listening and speaking to more of that audience. He pointed to Pampers products and campaigns that heard parents’ concerns about overflowing diapers and addressed them candidly. He noted that a Cascade campaign that addressed the 70% of homes with automatic dishwashers increased their use 25% when it argued for their efficiency. He observed that Swiffer simply asking different corners of the population for their thoughts on mopping led to the creation of the brand’s Power Mop—and a strong influencer push by P&G.
“You can’t just talk about your product: You’ve got to gain insight into consumers’ job to be done, problem to solve or what their habits are,” Pritchard said. “[Marketers] can actually transform that into a creative idea demonstrates how the product actually works, why the brand is better for people, and do it in a very creative way.”
Pritchard considered that attention to data and detail innovation, but it’s also inclusion that yields almost immediate results. In India, for example, P&G’s The Missing Chapter period education campaign with Leo Burnett won the top prize at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for Sustainable Development Goals. Addressing the fact that 1 out of 5 young women and India drop out of school due to inaccurate information about periods and lack of access to period products for the families, P&G estimated that the campaign helped expand access to 100 million young women.
