P&G Advertising Strategy Essay

For marketing students at IIM Ahmedabad, 9th of January, 2011, is anything and a typical Sunday. They rich person resisted the temptation to join their batchmates in a va dealt basketb e actually(prenominal) game and appear negligent to the cheerful riotous frenzy of the increase festival on the banks of the Sabarmati. alternatively they have been pitted against separately other all morning in a fall guy exercise organised and masterminded by P& vitamin AereG. The prize? A dinner party date for the teams with a humanity trustworthy for running the marketing function of cardinal of the close mighty FMCG companies on the planet, Marc Pritchard , planetary marketing and mail building incumbent, P& axerophtholG. so far, even students who do not make the cut give birth a chance to experience Pritchard graduationhand when he addresses a respectably packed vestibule that evening. Soon after hes d wholeness, the questions fly thick and fast. These include nearly potenti ally embarrassing posers. How does P&G feel, one student wants to know, near its melts world ambushed by its archrival HUL? Few mess have 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 blue road on this one We cant prevent any contender from ambush (surprise attack). notwithstanding if you focus on the consumer, what your grass is doing to serve the consumer and if you have a big idea, you will win most of the sentence. And thats a running infrastructure through attractive oftentimes everything that Pritchard has to say. Whether hes addressing students at IIM-A, the media or an consultation at the Cannes Lions Festival, hes a tireless champion of brands serving consumers or enjoyment driven branding. P&G spent most of the mid-nineties establishing a global footprint. Now, according to Pritchard, it last has the chance to live up to its subroutine. The first rate was getting senior think to go down a purpose for each of the brands in the P&G stable a blueprint on how the company could touch and improve lives. Pritchard explains, We windlessness have a core win solely are thinking much than than broadly on how we can sky it. We are very focussed on sharpening what the brands stand for, seeing human insights that can empathise into big ideas. Bold Gamble However those prepared for a lofty account statement of CSR and corporate do-gooding are standardisedly to step venture, a little 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 elderly Spice with its cocky The man your man could smell deal tagline. Pritchard says, routine is much more than a cause or a corporate responsibility. We deliberately focus on making people define purpose as how brands improve com monplace lives.A cause is just a piece of it as opposed to the strong thing. This aids take purpose out of an ivory tower. Its no longer something that resonates only with consumers in developed markets, fed up with hard sell, looking for corporates to do something more. Instead it could even be used as an effective go to market strategy. Which is pretty much the case with Pampers. Pritchard defines the brands purpose as to improve a babys healthy, happy development. Its advance is dryness and comfort that allows babies to ease, play and research 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, in like manner using this interface as a sampling opportunity. The one pack = one vaccine computer programme run in association with the UNICEF is tied into thi s big purpose too. It helps bring the community of moms together since they like to help other moms, says Pritchard.Even Women Against slow Stubble for Gillette, a homegrown campaign, has something larger driving it. Purpose takes on a more meaningful role in developing markets, he explains. The vans that propagate the program give young men tips on shaving, how to dress, handle an interview and talk to women. Purpose coincides well with P&G making a concerted aim 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 focusing on stores because its the first meaning of truth for the rural consumer. Pritchard says, We market back from there to create awareness to get them to that point. There are approximately 7 trillion high frequency shops in India and P&G has cover 4 million of these so far. A fair amount of product and piece of ground development is being done to cater to this segmen t. Using the store as the showtime point also helps make the full process less sporadic. Pritchard states, It means you are always on. We have consolidated the payoff 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 visor performance. Much of what we learnt in India has been exported to other markets like Africa for example. The recent acquisition 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 settlement when asked if there are any local anesthetic heroes that hes go t an eye on. But P&G always unearths little jewels with every acquisition, he says. like Koleston which was not very big globally but strong in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, around the time Wella was acquired. P&G took the brand to Mexico, Europe and are now innovation in India. Pritchard goes further back for his adjacent example Richardson Vicks in 1985 had a very tiny brand called Pantene that accounted for $70 million in sales. He says, We put the brand-new technology in, and launched it in Taiwan and came up with Pantene Pro V. Now it is over a $3 billion brand. To be elect for the big push, the brand needs justice and it helps to have some sort of a story.Like Max Factors SK2 which was made with Pitera, a yeast exclude used by monks in japan which kept their skin in a better condition. We built from that story, tested it in different markets and now its more than half a billion vaulting horses and ontogenesis like crazy, says Pritchard. In a determinat e FMCG battle, market observers may be tempted to brand P&G as a pacifist, with hardly any truculent countermoves towards competition. But, combining brand awareness with social programmes, driving its brands further into the hinterland and getting a knack of creating billion dollar brands, Pritchard knows that the company is pushing the right levers.