P&G

P&G REVIEW

         Procter and Gamble (P&G), a publicly owned company, has an affluent heritage of not only building strong leading brands and consumer relationships, but also a leader in innovation.  P&G is a fortune 500 company with established brands in over 180 countries.  Before P&G became the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer goods, it was a company of humble beginnings. 

         William Procter, an immigrant from England, started a business making candles and delivering them to customers locally, in Cincinnati, Ohio.  However, in 1837, he met James Gamble, an immigrant soap maker from Ireland, and a brother-in-law of Procter’s wife.  The father of the two wives convinced Procter and Gamble to become business partners, thus, a candle and soap shop was born, with assets totaling $7,192. 

        P&G has come a long way from its humble start as a candle and soap shop.  Its products now include a wide range of beauty, grooming, and household products, as well as water filters and pet food.  P&G started as one man’s vision, and grew to a partnership and now world- renowned, with over 300 brands.  P&G has undoubtedly become an established household name, such as Pampers, Tide, Olay, Gillette, Crisco, Charmin, Bounty, Always, Febreeze, Pantene, and Oral B, to name a few, with annual sales of over $89 billion, and a community of over 130,000 employees globally. 

OVERVIEW OF SOCIETAL MARKETING PRACTICES

            From charities to environmental causes, P&G cares.  The top focuses of P&G for societal marketing is in the following categories, Products, Operations, and Social Responsibility.

Products

          P&G are sustainability conscience.  One way they are reducing the carbon footprint is changing the packaging of their products, examples include,  Gillette Pro Glide, from plastic to fiber based, made of sugar cane, bamboo, and bulrush; a package that is 100% free of Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC).  Pantene has also revamped its bottles to a plant-based approach, made from sugarcane.  Powered detergents, such as Tide, have been compacted into a smaller container size, which enables less waste, benefiting the environment.  Charmin toilet tissue introduced the mega roll, which in turn, fewer disposals of the cardboard cores.  Oil of Olay’s Total Effects changed the design of the pump, which will save approximately 800,000 pounds of plastic annually; these are just a few innovations P&G has introduced to help save the environment. 

Operations

         P&G facilities strive to reduce CO2 emissions by supplying a sustainability scorecard to suppliers, which determines their environmental footprint.  They also assess inefficiencies, and try to combat them, such as empty trucks, rush transport up-charges, loading and unloading delays, and P&G production line stops.

Social Responsibility

           P&G gives back in numerous ways in their philanthropic work, one way is through their Live, Learn, and Thrive program, a worthy cause that has reached 315 million children with 2.9 billion liters of clean, safe drinking water, since 2007, saving 14,000 lives, and days of disease prevented is 115 million.  P&G also lends their support in times of devastating natural disasters.

         When tornados ripped through towns in Alabama and Missouri in 2011, P&G set up trailers that provided free laundry services, a marketing campaign called, “Tide Loads of Hope,” which provided a place where tornado victims could come to wash clothes.  Not only did they provide laundry services, but also supplied free batteries and flashlights, as well as charging stations for phones and laptops, a program called, “Duracell Power Relief."

        Other ways that P&G gives back is the Hope Schools in rural and impoverished areas of China, which has allowed 150,000 children to become educated in the last 15 years.  Feeding America, an initiative that has helped 75 million children throughout the United States, in the past year, to receive proper nutrition by donating 5.7 million pounds of products.  Project Shiksha, which began seven years ago in India, a country that has the highest total of uneducated children in the world, has helped to educate over 280,000 children, build new schools, strengthen existing school education programs, and reestablish inert government schools.  The Protecting Futures program, which has helped to keep over 450,000 girls in developing countries in school, by supplying feminine protection, so they do not have to miss school, as well as provided puberty education and sanitary facilities.  Furthermore, since 2006, Pampers has joined UNICEF to aid women and children in vaccines for maternal and neo natal tetanus.  The marketing campaign is, for each pack of pampers a consumer purchases a dose of the vaccine is donated; this program has already helped Uganda and Myanmar mothers and children.  These are just a few ways that P&G are taking action in social responsibility. 

TYPES OF PROMOTIONS UNDERTAKEN

         P&G has used social networking to “get the word out” about their philanthropic work.  Facebook and Twitter has become a vehicle for social responsibility.  For example, Senior Executive Greg Allgood started a Facebook page for PUR brand, in order to gain company support for 13 million PUR water purifiers to be sent to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Maldives, after the tsunami devastated Southeast Asia in 2000.  In one day, 50,000 Facebook fans joined PUR brand Facebook page, and became Twitter’s second most popular tweeting topic, hence, achieving internal buy-in.  P&G also used social networking for their program, “Tide Loads of Hope,” and “Duracell Power Relief."

       P&G distributes over 50 million Brand Saver monthly coupon books to consumers for its cause marketing campaigns, where some of the proceeds from brands go to charity.  Some of the causes that these booklets have supported include, Feeding America, Always and Tampax Protecting Futures campaign,  Pampers Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus global campaign, (1 pack= 1 vaccine),  and PUR Children’s Safe Drinking Water program.

FIT WITH TARGET MARKET / MISSION OF COMPANY

         CEO Bob McDonald, “Touching and improving consumers’ lives,” quotes the purpose of P&G.  An extraordinary purpose, since most corporations bottom line is profits, however, P&G is more than just the bottom line, they genuinely care about the people, or the global society that it serves, as well as the environment in which it thrives.  This is seen, not only in their products, but also in sustainable packaging that holds these products, and the sustainable route that these products take to get to the consumers.  The care that they give, to not only the products, and the 4.4 billion people they serve globally, but also to the various programs that help children and mothers, natural disaster victims, and the global society.

         One of P&G’s target markets’ is geared toward emerging countries, such as China and India, with a growth strategy that states, “More Consumers in More Parts of the World, More Completely."  By the philanthropic work that P&G has undertaken in these emerging countries, not only are they touching and improving consumers’ lives, but also reaching more consumers, in more parts of the world, more completely, not only through their products, but as well as their care and donations to the people in these emerging countries. 

         P&G is a global force.  Their target markets could be summed up as, “The whole world is their target market,” reaching from Cincinnati, Ohio, and all the United States, to China and India, to New Zealand.  They are a corporation that truly cares, and this is evident in their philanthropic work, as well as, through their donations, from their home to consumers’ homes throughout the world; as CEO Bob McDonald once said about the PUR campaign in Southeast Asia, “This is good business and good philanthropy."