Erika Xim Paola Santos BSBA (Marketing) – III BA 170 – 4

P & G: Deep Customer Insights Yield Meaningful Customer Relationships

Introduction
As the chapter in the reference book, suggests, information about companies are readily
available in the vast world of the Internet. And browsing through their website presents an
opportunity to get to know P&G as a brand more than what was presented in the few pages of
the book.
There were some minor issues encountered especially how their page was heavily
developed that it caused the browser to crash at least twice. After a few more trials, it stabilized
enough that it can finally be navigated to get the information needed. First, P&G clearly
dedicates themselves as a brand in “finding small but meaningful ways to improve lives – now
and the generations to come”. [ CITATION Pro20 \l 13321 ].
P&G, as a company that promotes brands that sell mundane products such as
household cleaning supplies, dedicate themselves in making sure that they help people and
businesses create lasting impressions. As a brand, they can contribute to the experience by
understanding how their products make their consumers feel. From a child hugging her freshly-
laundered security blanket, to corporate people confidently walking the lobbies of their offices
with a sweet aroma from scented disinfectants, they contribute that to the experience that their
products provide. As P&G promises its consumers, “every experience counts.” [ CITATION
PGP20 \l 13321 ].
Also, the P&G Professional website designed its site to be informational and connecting
to their consumers. It features “Find-A-Solution” tabs where Guest Satisfaction is present so
consumers can send their contact information to request a consultation to have the best
cleaning experience using P&G brand products in their households or offices. They provide
online quizzes that assess your laundry concerns including stain removal, water consumption,
etc., then proceed to show you which P&G laundry products are suited for you based on your
result [ CITATION PGP20 \l 13321 ].

1. How was P & G able to get excellent insights into the needs, wants, emotions of its
laundry detergent customers?
P&G’s decided to delve deeper into customer relations and insights as its laundry
detergent brand, Tide, has its market share stagnant over the years and was seen as “arrogant,
self-absorbed, and very male.” The marketing team for Tide decided to send a new message for
the brand. In turn, they sought to capture the attention of its female customers in the hopes of
understanding their emotional connections with laundry. The team utilized a two-week
immersion with the women in different states, as well as discussing with the women about the
things that are important to them to understand how essential the role of laundry is to their lives.
This isn’t the typical market research conducted because they didn’t ask directly in terms of
laundry. The marketing team instead asked the women about their lives – what their needs are
and how they felt as women. They collected their stories to make valuable consumer insights to
improve the brand’s relations with their female customers [ CITATION Kot12 \l 13321 ].
As technological advancements progress in the digital age, Tide seized the opportunity
for digital technology means to get insights for their laundry detergent customers. In a marketing
event The Market Research Event (TMRE) 2019 held by KNect 365, Kriti Singh, the chief
analytics and insights (A&I) officer at P&G discusses the Analytics Studio powered by P&G. It
allows them to look at thousands of natural experiments simultaneously in real time every day,
week, or year all over the globe. This allows them to leverage their data in a “deep, granular
fashion” [ CITATION WAR19 \l 13321 ].

During the same event, P&G’s director/consumer fundamentals and insights, Michael
Lancor also talks about how they will approach the next tide in market research and explained
how washing machines may be their starting point. Their ideas include the plan to develop a
new method of market research of a “laundry diary study”. This can be done by putting a device
on a washing machine and it projects data such as when they’re doing laundry, how many, what
type of fabrics, etc. Add in some high-end programming language and they can interpret the
data. This is because they in P&G believe that behavioral data drives a better understanding of
the consumers’ needs, the actual jobs to be done, and how they can connect their new ideas for
the people [ CITATION Whi19 \l 13321 ].

2. How did P & G use the valuable customer insights in its promotional campaigns?
Since P&G was looking for a re-branded image of Tide laundry detergent from the
previous description of being self-absorbed and very male, they targeted its female consumers
and used more emotions, upon learning that women are very emotional about their clothing, in
their promotional campaigns, in contrast with their past advertisements that were deemed
heartless. As they understood that Tide and laundry may not be the top-most priority of women
in their everyday lives, their insights included how women like to take care of their clothing
because they hold a lot of stories, emotions, and memories that they also use to express
themselves as women, and their attitudes. They then decided that they can do more with Tide
as they can make a difference in what these women care about – their fabrics and how it
touches their lives. As a result, P&G and Saatchi developed their campaign around the theme
“Tide knows fabric best” that reaped awards as a promotional campaign in turn [ CITATION
Kot12 \l 13321 ].
Their advertisements in the said promotional campaign include how Tide touch lives of
different women at different points of their lives – from a pregnant lady with cravings who
dribbled ice cream on her last shirt that still fit her, but she need not to worry because she can
remove the stains using Tide with Bleach. Another is a woman holding her baby and cuddling
her husband while still smelling good for both roles as a mother and a woman with Tide with
Febreeze [ CITATION Kot12 \l 13321 ].
Lastly, they also found a way to connect with their consumers’ value for clothing as self-
expression by making sure that their clothes are clean with the promotional campaign campaign
— “Style Is an Option. Clean Is Not.” This campaign shows how people may have different
choices in clothes as their form of self-expression, but the lines are blurred when it comes to
cleanliness. This then highlights the effectivity of Tide’s cleaning prowess, as well as making the
consumers feel confident as they wear their outfits and go about their day [ CITATION Kot12 \l
13321 ].
3. How does P & G’s story relate to the topics in the Chapter?

P&G’s story provides us a good look as to how you do market research and gaining
deep customer insights that can make your brand connect well with your consumers. In relation
to the topics in the chapter, P&G wielded the steps in the market research process to seek out
how to address their current problem in the best possible way that will impact its customers’
lives in the most meaningful way.

By using the steps in market research, they first identified their problem and set their
objectives. They acknowledged the fact that Tide’s market share became stagnant and they
received negative feedback regarding their brand – somewhat creating a marketing myopia for
them. As their brand was seen as masculine, they then set their objectives by trying to reach out
to the opposite target audience, who are the women, and sought to gain insight and have a
deep connection with them. While they refused to set out traditional survey methods about
laundry for market research, they opted to have a two-week immersion with the women, and
having deep conversations as to their personal lives, to gather data for insights. From their
analysis of data, they formed their insights and used the marketing information by integrating
them into their promotional campaigns. This later on proved to be successful as they turned
their brand’s negative image into the opposite as they include advertisements full of emotions
and visual imagery that connect their consumers with emotions and relate them to the things
they value in their lives.

Most importantly, their success story doesn’t just border on technicalities in the
theoretical aspect of marketing. It also shows us how marketing should be done in a way that is
humanizing for our consumers. At the end of the day, it is not about how to make their brand
superior, but making a way to make their brand relevant to the consumers’ emotions, their
values in life, and their lives themselves. This is simply because their brand may not be their
consumers’ top priorities in life, but finding a way to make it a part of those priorities will build
relationships with them. This also presents that the most important thing is to value what the
customers value, and to listen to their feedbacks as to how they project the brand’s image.
References
Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2012). Principles of Marketing. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.
P&G Professional. (2020). About us. Retrieved from P&G Professional:
https://www.pgpro.com/page/about-us/
Procter & Gamble. (2020). Who we are. Retrieved from P&G Philippines:
https://ph.pg.com/who-we-are/
WARC. (2019). P&G takes disruptive approach to consumer insight. Retrieved from WARC:
https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/pg-takes-disruptive-approach-to-
consumer-insight/42879
Whiteside, S. (2019). How P&G is approaching the next tide of market research. Retrieved from
Informa Connect: https://informaconnect.com/how-pg-is-approaching-the-next-tide-of-
market-research/