Marketer 2 marketer

What other marketers had to ask P&G’s Marc Pritchard…

Ben Jones, founder of Graze.com, asks: The upcoming generation believes business is not just about the bottom line but also about humankind and the chance to make a difference. How are you evaluating P&G’s CSR programmes in reaction to this quiet revolution?

Marc Pritchard (MP): In 2010, we announced our new sustainability vision for P&G. This embedded sustainability in every part of our business and this is absolutely the case in our brand building and communications. We recognise the opportunity we have as a company to improve lives, and both environmental and social responsibility are fundamental to this. We can drive sustainable consumption through our brands like our cold water washing campaigns on [US laundry brand] Tide and Ariel or through innovative packaging like on Pantene Nature Fusions or Gillette Fusion ProGlide.

We can form far-reaching partnerships between our brands and NGOs like Pampers and Unicef, which has already provided 100 million vaccines to protect 300 million
women and their babies in the developing world against maternal and neonatal tetanus. And we can take our purpose of improving lives all over the world with our Children’s Safe Drinking Water campaign. More than 1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean drinking water and we’re tackling this with our P&G PUR water purification technology.

We’ve already provided more than 4 billion litres of clean drinking water to the developing world and in disaster relief efforts and we’ve pledged to ‘Save a life every hour by 2020’ by providing up to 2 billion litres every year. It is both a responsibility and an opportunity for companies like P&G to broaden how we touch and improve people’s lives and to continue to do so now, and for generations to come.

Helen Normoyle, departing BBC director of marketing and audiences, asks: Over the last few years we’ve seen Unilever increase the use of its masterbrand on packaging and now P&G is following suit. What are your thoughts on how to effectively communicate the P&G brand alongside its respective sub-brands to consumers?

MP: The best way to do that is to ensure people know the company behind the brands. What we did for the Olympics activity is to introduce the company behind the brands with the Thank You Mum programme, which shows that P&G is the proud sponsor of mums. You come up with an idea that people can associate with and then you activate it across multiple touchpoints.

The best way to do that is to come up with a big idea that you can unite your brands behind, then communicate the values of the company alongside the benefits of the brands. You can see this with the Olympics, P&G is in the business of helping mums, and then all the athletes can communicate a particular benefit of each product.

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