Marketer-to-marketer: what other marketers have to say to Camillo Pane

Click here to read the cover feature: a profile of Camillo Pane, Reckitt Benckiser’s UK chief
Click here to read a Q+A with Camillo Pane
Click here to read about Reckitt Benckiser’s game-changing products

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Ross Farquhar, brand manager for Cadbury Wispa, Crunchie & Bitesize, asks: Achieving “brand fame” through creativity must be difficult in categories that are either low-emotion staples, such as cleaning products, or only useful at a time of pain such as over-the-counter pharmaceuticals.

Camillo Pane (CP): I don’t think it is too difficult. I wouldn’t describe Cillit Bang’s advertising as emotional but it works because it has a point of difference.

We’re not shy of talking about our brands’ points of difference against the rest of the market. We build our creativity around a culture of concentrating on innovation, insight and premium performance. That can be more than enough to create brand loyalty among consumers.

We’ve just launched a new Strepsils product called Strepsils Warm, for example. We launched Strepsils Cool last year, which did extremely well.

Just like with Marmite – where you either love it or you hate it – we discovered that there is a clear split between people who like a cool sensation when they take a sore throat remedy and those that prefer a warm sensation, so we set about developing these new products.

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Donna Clegg, brand manager at Birds Eye, asks: Consumer engagement is moving higher onto the agenda within FMCG. Is this something that Reckitt Benckiser sees as a high agenda point?

CP: Our new Lemsip and Nurofen Facebook pages are growing every day. I don’t know of any other OTC brands with Facebook pages. We’re trying to lead. We also have a Nurofen app where you enter the application and you can get advice and tips about pain management.

Many of our household and healthcare brands are in a great position to forge a role as a place to come to for expertise and authoritative advice. That sort of engagement is priceless.

We’ve recently appointed someone from a digital agency to help us gain a more consistent approach towards digital. We’ve made a global commitment to embrace new tools and do better from a digital point of view. So we are moving a lot of spend from traditional media towards digital. The percentage of spend in digital was substantially increased from 2009 to 2010 and we plan to double the 2010 digital spend in 2011.