Speech Summaries

Vivienne Lee Bechtold Marketing Director, Global Marketing Center of Excellence Procter & Gamble

How Consumers Are Inventing The Future Of Great Brands And Great Marketing

Vivienne Lee Bechtold, Marketing Director, Global Marketing Center of Excellence, Procter & Gamble, emphasized that the Internet's role in brand building is to build relationships with consumers -- not buying online, advertising, or product-driven content. She outlined three key insights about today's consumers and shared some of P&G's recent successful online marketing and branding initiatives.

First, consumers do not seek functional product benefits anymore; instead they look for total solutions. P&G's online Web site and newsletter, Home Made Simple, provides a total solution for consumers by utilizing cohort marketing.

Second, consumers are no longer looking for shopping and product use; they want total shopping experiences. P&G's solution Pampers.com offers information about parenting -- not just diapers. When Pampers.com teamed up with Wal-Mart to create Baby's First -- A Helping Hand for Parents, both parties benefited: Wal-Mart grew in terms of sales and equity while P&G grew its sales and share of the diapers market.

The third insight is that consumers want real consumer relationships not transactional relationships. P&G's solution? S-magazine, which focuses on how to make life simple for targeted families. It includes sample offers and how-tos and is comarketed with other retailers.

Questions And Answers

Q: How do you measure the success of these activities?
A: I think you need to understand what your objectives are. For example, with Crest's pre-launch online campaign, we were trying to build awareness without wasting money. With Home Made Simple, we examined the cost of the site versus what we can measure on pre-post to justify the building of it. In addition, Pampers research showed that people are likely to be loyal to the brand at a level which pays out.

Q: Given the independence of most brand managers, how does P&G share product information globally and across brands?
A: We have a global Internet site where we post relevant learnings and a marketing university where we bring brand managers together for intensive training and to share best practices.

Q: What percentage of P&G's advertising budget is spent online?
A: Very little is spent on advertising because we do not think that online advertising is most important. More is spent on marketing, and different P&G brands spend varying amounts. For example, Pampers has invested a significant amount in pampers.com and parentstages.com.