P&G lead by example in engaging constructively: Ariel's facts and figures

Recently I posted some thoughts based on a case study that questioned the practices of P&G which stood accused of trying to fool customers by falsely stating that the new bottle type of Ariel contained "10% more product" (tan the previous type of bottle presumably). 

Much to my surprise, I got an answer from somebody working for P&G who reacted within just a couple of hours and that's quite impressive since this blog has never been about building audience or making noise and is therefore not particularly influential. I'm absolutely WOWed by P&G ability to monitor online resources and take reasonable action on any alerts and that's the kind of defensive marketing tactics modern brand management should always feature. More often than not that's not the case.

In this post there's a quick analysis of the facts provided by P&G, which infirm the assertions of the presentation although they do not necessarily prove the accuracy of the "+10%" claim, which I'd rate as "almost true" or "true enough" if I were to run the "truth-o-meter". Naturally that means there is no reason to state that P&G is fooling their customers and the very fact that they engaged in a discussion with this blog shows that they're treating online sources and people out there in a very respectful manner.

First let me give you a copy of P&G's reply, which I found very well formulated, very factual and showing great respect for a very humble blogger without any influence whatsoever. To respect privacy I'm witholding the name and details of the author of the reply:

 Dear Alex,

I’m working for Ariel (P&G France) and I’m regularly looking, thanks to a Google alert, what is said on the web about the brand. That”s how I’ve found a post you made on your blog and on slideshare.net about the “Ariel and the mathematics” French power point presentation. I also read your post titled “No you cannot fool your customers P&G... or whoever else”.

http://blog.businessquests.com/

http://www.slideshare.net/businessquests/ariel-et-les-mathmatiques-capitalistes

I’m kindly writing to you to draw your attention on the fact that the data in the presentation are wrong. The author of the presentation, who lives in Germany, has already acknowledged his mistake, distances himself from the content of the presentation and regrets having circulated it.

What has happened?

The author of the presentation did not compare the Ariel bottle from 2009 (+10% more content; 1.4L content equalling 20 wash loads) with the real predecessor from 2008(1.26L content equalling 18 wash loads), but with an older bottle from 2005 (1.5L content equalling 20 wash loads), that he found in his house.  

The compared Ariel bottles origin from different years and during those years we have launched several new product generations. According to the production code the featured old bottle was produced in the year 2005, the new product is from 2009. Our products are constantly improved to fulfil the increased consumer needs. In comparison to the product of the year 2005, new Ariel liquid 2009 offers a formula that has been constantly improved over five years, plus it offers an improved washing result by an even lower dosage per wash load (now 70mL per wash load versus for example 75mL still in 2005). This can be seen on the dosage instructions on the back of the bottle.

We hope we could clarify the misunderstanding with this statement and we would really appreciate if you could post this statement online or if you could delete the initial post itself.

Of course, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me for more information.

Best regards,

Now to translate the content's of P&G response into dry facts and figures I created the table below to try to assess the actual impact of changes to Ariel's bottling in terms of effective quantity of product provided to consumers. Since we do not have any idea of the evolution of the product's price in inflation adjusted terms we cannot say whether the 2009 bottling is a better deal or not, but depending on whether they could actually do 18 or 20 (18+2) wash loads with one bottle the effective quantity purchased could either be a real increase of 11.1% or an unchanged situation, but it is in no case a decrease of 5% to 7% in quantity provided as shown in the presentation:

Needless to say I'm very impressed that P&G was able to spot the post within only a few hours from its publication, that their response was so swift and effective and I can see why they've been so good at building world class super valuable brands: Ariel is #84 and worth close to 7.8 billion USD in the 2009 top 100 and Pampers is ranked #31 and valued at 18.8 billion USD. For your convenience I'm embedding the ranking of top 100 brands below:

Global top 100 Brands 2009 -

No you cannot fool your customers P&G... or whoever else

Customer empowerment is nothing new these days. (Nearly) every marketer knows that they cannot afford the luxury of communicating brand value or product proposition without taking the customer into account. Those who don't are a species in danger of extinction. However before they go extinct they run the risk of killing a couple of fine brands painstakingly built by their owners to connect to specific customer groups. Here's an example which was sent to me by a friend; it tells the story of a new packaging of Ariel laundry wash liquid that's supposed to offer "10% more product" to the customer, but in fact contains 0.1 liter of liquid less than the old packaging while promising "18+2 washes", something the customer is expected to swallow as a vast improvement of 10% over the "20 washes" of the old packaging... Somebody who used to work for P&G in the seventies told me marketers and sales people in the house used to say "you can think the consumer is stupid, but cannot tell the consumer they are stupid". Well, we've got news for you P&G: these times are over. Enjoy the slideshow and if you're a marketer who doesn't know better, please read Paul Isakson's vision of the future of marketing.

Ariel Et Les MathéMatiques Capitalistes

View more presentations from alex Papanastassiou.

Coherence essential to leveraging "social media"

Today I spent some time going through the "WTF is social media - one year later" presentation, which I find excellent. It's embedded below for your convenience and below are some of my thoughts on the matter.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Jacquelyn Corbett cyr.

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The WTF material is really good stuff full of common sense, good thinking and it provides a sobering view of what this thing called social media could be used for. Focusing on fundamentals of business and on phenomena we've been able to observe over the past few months and years, the authors actually help business people who are a bit lost with all the chatter about social media and collaborative workspace. Observations and statements of what "social media" (for lack of a better word) could be used for are excellent and it's a pitty there is only little content about concrete ways in which to leverage the different aspects of social media... but of course who wouldn't understand that the authors would gladly provide that as part of their services at Brand Infiltration ;)

Now the presentation is also excellent food for thought and here are a couple of those that emerged going through the slides:

1. I am not entirely sure the method you use is what drives business value: I mean that whether you go for high tech "social online super dooper media"  or low tech "true caring for customers" the method will not built rapport let alone create a "mystique" for your brand. Look at Cirque du Soleil and how they went from a "spectacle de rue" in Québec to an amazing global business running over 15 shows on all continents and generating over 700 million USD in turnover by creating unique, magical, immersive and truly memorable experiences for their customers. Did they need social media to do that?


2. this whole issue of genuine engagement of prospects and customers
   starts within and that modern tools and practices simply make an
   organization more transparent and more porous therefore exposing both
   what is coherent and beautiful about its way of dealing with customers
   and what is slightly less desirable which could be hidden from view in
   the old world. From that perspective tackling brand building, community
   management, customer acquisition and engagement or even intelligence
   gathering simply from the angle of tools and practices is futile. You
   need to achieve deeper transformation of cultures and that's quite
   another challenge that requires capabilities and authority no CMO has
   on her own today. It takes the whole corporate leadership team to
   commit to a radically different way of running the business... And I don't think it's about unleashing complete chaos but rather about combining opposites, transcending old discipline and including it in new forms of managerial practices, pretty much like the Obama
   presidential campaign did: central control of all mission critical
   aspects and complete delegation of authority for everything else,
   taking care to project an image of collaboration & participation.


3. the mere fact that spending time on social media is one of the favorite online activities of Internet users today is not enough to demonstrate that from a business perspective you can actually do something useful in that space at an economically acceptable cost. It might only be a biased observation but, it does seem to me that:

• people gladly engage when there's a worthy cause for which there could not possibly be the slightest suspicion of commercial manipulation or commercial


• the rejection of initiatives that seem to be "remote-controlled" by major brands is almost immediate in many cases


• when a space is new like for example the blogosphere a few years ago or Twitter a couple of months ago, the signal / noise ratio is good enough to derive value out of that space with spectacular returns on investment whereas things become much more difficult when more people bring more content and more potential interactions


• the possibility of interactions does not means that there will be interactions, let alone true conversations where people actually listen to other people and truly seek to understand what they mean by what they say, an effort that requires focus of attention and that can be tedious enough to require far more time than is allowed by the culture of the immediate, fast and short of social media


• interactions don't mean transactions let alone economically useful or even profitable transactions

So social media is probably an excellent phenomenon for specific businesses and for a whole range of purposes and not only marcoms as rightly pointed out by the authors of the presentation... But it's only a tool and as such it's only as good and relevant as the skill with which it's applied to the pursuit of coherent objectives by congruent organizations who will make more than half-hearted committments to the new world of open participation. And that may not be a world for everyone, so expect to see more established organizations die as their environment changes to the point of transforming some long established practices into deadly sins.

Isakson's future of marketing updated

Paul Isakson recently presented an updated version of his excellent "What's next in marketing and advertising" presentation. His content is embedded below for your convenience and my thoughts follow.

What's Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

The presentation contains many excellent observations and assertions, broadly making the case fora radical shift in the way professionals of this industry see their work and the world. Points I particularly liked in Isakson's presentation:

1. quote by Clay Shirky saying that "a revolution does not happen when a society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors." - how true...


2. marketing must speak to people, do things (what things would be interesting to discuss) with and for people


3. marketing will be collaborative, generous, experimental, helpful, playful, personal, honest and participatory


4. to get there commit yourself to something bigger than yourself, listen carefully and replace the thought that the world is an audience by the opposite (I would say each audience is a world and each person a universe)


5. "the best way to get people to do stuff with you is to first join them in what they are already doing"

Isakson accurately identifies some pretty important trends that do represent a change that may explain why this recession is particularly hard for advertising, with recent figures from the US market showing sustained fall in spending. In short the world is changing and as people, who now have a voice in the public space thanks to the web,  become better educated about advertising and marketing tactics they are less likely to fall prey to mechanisms that used to work so well... Or in fact seemed to work so well because there was no real way to tell and everybody accepted a situation of waste of as much as 50% of money spent to convince consumers to trust specific brands and products. That bit about measuring the effects of initiatives and having more relevant petrics is missing from the presentation and I think it should be there because metrics is not just a minor operational aspect but rather a highly strategic one: if you derive knowledge from unstructured information and act on that knowledge you do have an edge that is likely to be worth multiples of what it cost you to create it.

Overall excellent food for thought again. Thank you Mr Isakson!

Just words...

Business has a jargon like every field of human activity. But business has something else: a unique ability to distort and pervert words. In fact there are a few words that simply drive me nuts when I speak to customers and partners simply because they are often either meaningless or covering up realities we don't like to admit:

• strategic - often used to speak about initiatives that are risky and not supported by plans and actions to manage risk and help achieve intended business benefits... which also go unstated when (top) managers or entrepreneurs say something is "strategic"


• partnership - used to describe unspecified relationships between business entities all of which seek specific resources or benefits that none of the "partners" is able or immediately willing to provide, so we patch together a statement about a "partnership" just to stay positive


• synergies - perhaps one of the most beautiful words especially in a context of scarce environmental resources, but perhaps also the most perverted of words in business. Used to speak about (unspecified) justifications for putting together activities or combining assets. In fact it is a "cover up" word that sounds better than "lay-offs" or "discontinued operations" or "cost cutting". So more often than not the trigger to use "synergies" is fear to state intended business benefits especially if said benefits are achieved at the expense of people or local communities


• historic - a "historic" situation is a messy situation for which nobody has a better explanation but "it's always been done like that" and which nobody wants to incur the cost of reforming. So "historic" describes a mess we'd rather keep as is until somebody else gets the job and charge of it


• alliance - a slightly clearer situation than a partnership, but usually a reflection of the creation of a temporary situation until the relative situations of the allied parties evolve to the point of allowing one or more of them to clarify the alliance thing by acquiring the other parties. Here the use of the word is a reflection of the fear to alienate one or more parties whose competition we're better off avoiding


• integration - usually used in more technical contexts to speak about work to bring together the platforms" or tools of two organizations especially when the dominant organization is fearful of admitting publicly that their platform will end up replacing the one of the "weaker" party even irrespective of functional merit of said platform

So to sum it up:

• before doing something (often dumb) and not well thought through in terms of expected business benefits we call it "strategic"


• if we cannot access the assets we're looking for the move takes the form of the "partnership"


• and if the other party is a bit too strong to be swallowed we set up an "alliance"


• but once the dust has settled and we can simply acquire the other party, we start an "integration" program


• and, years down the line, when things go sour on a poorly designed move we call the situation "historic"

Of course since the average tenure of a CEO of a public company in the US is 18 months and people change jobs more and more often, parts of the economy become a big game of throwing the hot potato around... measured in GDP/capita of course.

Creative approaches to fighting climate change

US Innovation Status

I just read this excellent report on the status of innovation in the US (link kindly provided by the excellent Leeander) and I find it just amazing that the authors show a great deal of analytical rigor both in assessing the past and suggesting ways for the future in the form of a public private partnership. The article is long but very well worth your time.
With this kind of approach I see the US going back to the very top of innovation performance. It's time we did a similar assessment in Europe instead of just celebrating innovation and creativity in a very institutional manner.