Customer Centricity Defines Procter & Gamble’s Advertising, E-Commerce, and Digital Content Strategy

It is an understatement to suggest that Australians' shopping habits have fundamentally changed in the last year. Cartology, a subsidiary of Woolworths Group, collaborated with FMCG research firm Advantage Group to survey 40 of Australia's FMCG leaders about the changing environment of customer needs and engagement. Their resounding response was that digital is the new front door of a retail company, and the new world is one driven by the customer. Woolworths' insights support this as well.

Woolworths, Cartology, and brands will explore how the industry responds to a year of customer transformation in a three-part series.

Zulfiqar Mahar, vice president marketing for P&G Australia and New Zealand, says that the fast-moving consumer goods business has seen massive shifts in customer behavior over the last year, with many of those habits and routines here to stay. The shift to digital platforms in the way consumers search for, engage with, and purchase brands have been a recurring topic among Australian shoppers.

Mahar's main takeaway is that customer-centricity is even more important in times of uncertainty and change.

P&G has adapted to seismic changing consumer behavior by reinventing how it builds brands. For example, consumers today see ten times as many advertising messages as they did a decade ago. Thus P&G needed to rethink advertising, including making messages more impactful and with less clutter.

P&G's ability to bring content to life in digital environments and beyond has never been more essential in this context. P&G wants to expand the amount of pull-based content it wants customers to engage with, and that content must be personalized to the context and media platform for each consumer group. According to Mahar, P&G's successful examples of this approach include Gillette Direct, the Oral B AI app, and the Olay Skin Advisor, which offer the company more direct, one-on-one engagement with consumers.

In addition, the way messages are conveyed via media platforms has been reinvented to provide mass reach with targeted precision - no easy accomplishment for a company whose goods are used by 95% of the population; it is a case of effectively conveying a message with regularity while avoiding wastage.

Personalization is also important since customers want brands to interact with them directly, but there is a need to avoid being too familiar, according to Mahar.

Key trends have also influenced P&G's marketing approach in digital adoption and usage. As customers gain confidence in shopping online, they seek products to buy and depend on the views of other product users. P&G aims to integrate search across many platforms, including stores, to answer all of the questions customers have about brands, providing a seamless experience that is also more efficient.

P&G is also attempting to increase efficiency and effectiveness in digital media and advertising spending in e-commerce by matching content with context to maximize relevance and attention.

All of P&G's marketing, advertising, and digital strategy changes are viewed through the critical lens of customer-centricity.