P&G Vs Unilever: What Does Next-Gen Experience Management Mean For CPG?

A brand is like a country. It has a culture and language of its own. It creates products and services that are unique. And to be effective, people have to believe in the mission of what the brand is trying to accomplish from the first touchpoint.

First, a brief history lesson on how we got here. It is important to understand as it contrasts specifically how much things have and need to be changed.

If you consider the history of how modern Consumer Brands expanded, I think you can really trace it back to the days of TV and the AC Nielsen Company, which was the first company to offer market research, creating a retail index that tracked the flow of food and drug purchases. The combination of data gathered through surveys and set-top boxes on what consumers were watching on television gave the very first demographic breakdown of viewers, enabling brands to align their television advertising with the kind of viewer who would most likely buy their product. It also enabled consumers to identify and differentiate brand qualities of what they were buying, versus, say, a store brand. 

Kleenex is a great example of an original brand which created a product category by identifying a consumer need with its brand. In 1924, Kleenex tissues were sold as a cold cream and makeup remover, but when a head researcher started using the tissues in place of his handkerchief for allergies, the company embraced this use and sales doubled in the first year. Ever since, the brand Kleenex has been synonymous with tissues, and the brand is often used interchangeably with the product. The definition of a successful brand was very much driven by the consumer.

As advertising and branding matured, brands moved into the driver’s seat and were much more focused on convincing consumers on why their brand was relevant. This became the norm for all brand advertising and marketing, and dictated the brand experience for consumers at every turn. In-store testing and customer observation became standard, led by Les Wexner and The Limited Brands in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Enter the internet age, which completely changed how customers interact with brands seemingly overnight. Consumers were no longer reliant upon brands for information and were less open to their charge. The age of information empowered them to make their own decisions, surfacing new expectations for brand attributes and experiences. Once untouchable brands like Toys “R” Us, Kodak, Blockbuster, Borders Books, Pontiac and even Lehman Brothers were unable to keep up with the changing needs and expectations of consumers, who were once again in the driver’s seat.  

Many brands find marketing to consumers today so complex, when actually, it’s quite simple. Staying connected to current and potential customers in real-time, and asking them about their preferences, needs and expectations when it comes to products and experiences, is giving birth to next-gen experience management.

In my last article, I mentioned we’re hard pressed to find an industry that hasn’t been gathering troves of data on customer interactions and purchases. This has only expanded since the early days of Nielsen
NLSN
. However, even with new forecasting technology which largely relies on past behavior, the brand experience can never fully align with consumers who are in a constant state of change. 

Today, next generation experience management around brands is about immersing a consumer in an environment or experience in a holistic way. This means interacting at every touchpoint, whether it’s the product or service, the employees, other customers, or the brand itself. 

Next-Generation Experience Management

Understanding a consumer goes beyond forecasting, or following clicks on a website to serve up pages based on past behavior. Next-generation experience management must allow consumers to decide and gauge their reaction to see if you even have a market or category that makes sense right now. It’s about immersing the consumer in the experience.

Unlike static historical data sets that rely on past behavior, true and effective experience management must be about engaging consumers on an ongoing, regular basis to better serve them through every touchpoint. That means gathering voice of consumer (VoC) insights to determine how a customer can be involved in products or services, and the most relevant offers that will resonate. Next-Gen Experience Management inspires and shapes a dialogue between a customer and a company (brand) that resonates through holistic experiences.

A Top Down, Bottom Up Approach

In next-generation experience management, brands can no longer feel confident in developing only a top-down model where they decide and then simply communicate their brand to consumers. Consumers want a say in the products and brands they buy, requiring a bottoms-up approach. Consumers expect to lead, and you only need to look at crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to see it and understand it.

According to this piece, the original mission of these platforms was to give inventors and creators the ability to manufacture their innovation if enough of the crowd backed the campaign by pre-ordering the product. If the crowd really wanted the product, then the creator would get the funding necessary to manufacture and deliver it to the crowd. However, with several years under its belt, these platforms have built huge communities of Innovators and Consumers (Followers), and larger brands have begun to harness these platforms to launch new products. Segway, for example, has launched 3 new products on Indiegogo, including the SegwayⓇ Drift W1, testing a pipeline of products by engaging with early adopters during development.

Once brands identify a segment they’d like to penetrate, they need to identify if consumers want their product or offer, and whether it can support that business model.

That is “the new bottoms up approach to marketing,” and consumers will have the final say on whether a brand has the right to expand into a new market space.

Think about how Procter & Gamble’s
PG
brand Ivory and Unilever’s brand Dove have faced off in their approaches to the next generation in experience management. Dove has launched marketing campaigns that celebrate our differences, from skin tone to body shape to gender. The brand has become a symbol of inclusivity and diversity, which resonates very strongly with their target audience from imagery, to social media, to advertising and in-store displays.

Ivory soap, established in the late 1800s and once (and perhaps still) a household name synonymous with cleanliness, seems to have done little by comparison to engage with their customers — except the loose connection with their decades-old tagline.

Great brands have brand affinity from employees to customers which captures the essence of who they are and what they do. At the end of the day, if they don’t engage the customer in real-time, understand their needs and expectations and surround them with experiences and messaging that enable them to have a voice, the future of the brand will likely look pretty grim or even non-existent.