A couple weeks ago RWC Business Professor Linda Bricker wanted to give her Marketing class a feel for what goes on in the real world of marketing, so she invited guest speaker Andrea Zahumensky, who works for Procter and Gamble (P&G), where she is a brand manager and works only on one product, Crest toothpaste. Brand Management is where P&G focuses on profit and loss, to figure out what the company needs to do to sell the product better. Zahumensky said it’s all about what’s hot right now, and P&G is focusing on holistic or integrated communication. A company needs to have a strategy, a big idea, Zahumensky said. It needs to find out what the consumer wants.
“Many companies are realizing they need to have the willingness to let go of some control and let the consumer tell them what they want,” Zahumensky said. She also provided some examples of other products to demonstrate that this is a rising trend in marketing strategies by many companies.
A year ago, Crest launched a case study to try out holistic communication. We know that toothpaste is in our daily routine, but, as Zahumensky explained, it is a low interest product. She asked members of Bricker’s class for a show of hands of those who knew the brand of toothpaste they use. About half knew. Then she asked them about the type of toothpaste they use, and only a handfull knew. Finally she asked them about flavor, but no hands were still raised at that point.
Crest is known for being more of a family heritage brand, so P&G wanted to target the 18-34 age range, because P&G’s number one competitor has been targeting this age range for the past few years.
Consequently, P&G came up with a new product, Crest Whitening Plus Scope Extreme. The key line was “Irresistible fresh breath.” The company then came up with an “Irresistible IQ test” with help from a celebrity matchmaker to develop the quiz. They hit this idea big by putting it out on the Internet and teaming up with MySpace, where people could go to take the quiz.
P&G also teamed up with Nick Cannon, musician/actor, who was the first to take the test; he talked about the product on several television shows and received a lot of magazine coverage. On CrestIQ.com the quiz was also available, and anyone could register to win Ipods. Crest went further and did an experiment in bars where P&G would have an advertisement on the bathroom stalls and people could text to be entered in the sweepstakes.
Finally Zahumensky said that the case study was a huge hit, and P&G saw significant sales growth from the launch.
The presentation was very professional as well as fun; there were many laughs. It would be nice to have her back and open to the public. There is so much to learn, to give us a better understanding of what marketing jobs require.
Zahumensky is a UC alum. She says that UC is near and dear to her heart.