Talking Olympics: Q&A With P&G's Marc Pritchard

Marc Pritchard, global brand building officer at Procter & Gamble, says his company's activity leveraging its sponsorship of the 2012 London Olympics was "the largest and most ambitious marketing campaign in our company's history." During the 100-day countdown to the Games, which began July 27, P&G launched a series of new marketing initiatives around its "Thank You, Mom" campaign, sparking an ongoing conversation with consumers in social media circles. It also blanketed retail stores across the globe with Olympics-themed shopper marketing programs. "We set a new standard of performance with our in-store merchandising and activation," says Pritchard.Shopper Marketing spent some time with Pritchard in early September discussing P&G's Olympics marketing strategy. In the interview, he shared highlights of the activations and explained how the company was able to deliver strong results.SM: P&G's involvement in the Olympics dates back 70 years, but it wasn't until the 2010 Winter Games that you developed a broad marketing platform celebrating the mothers of Olympic athletes. How did this idea originate?Pritchard: We took a look at our programs and thought we could come up with something better – a bigger idea that united the brands under a more cohesive theme. One of our agencies, Wieden+Kennedy, came to us with the idea that at first glance, P&G's brands have little to do with the Olympics, except that every Olympic athlete has a mom. Moms are with their kids every step of the way, and P&G is in the business of helping moms. It was a great idea. We generated $100 million in extra sales in the Vancouver Games even though we only had about 40% of our [retail] customers activating.From there we really expanded the campaign and got much more deeply involved. What made a big difference this time is that we had enough lead time for our retailers to get behind it. They thought this was a great idea because it involved so many of our brands and it unified those brands. Retailers put together spectacular in-store and merchandising activation.SM: What were some of the key insights that you leveraged?Pritchard: Our research showed that the "Thank You, Mom" campaign created a natural connection between the Olympics and P&G and its brands. We had increases in favorability that led to purchase intent, and this was a higher ROI program than our average brand activity. We created ideas that we researched – whether some brands would be more effective than others.For example, Pampers products were used to talk about the "Spirit of Play" and that there's an Olympian in every baby, and advertising around this concept was found to be a very strong idea. We used focus groups, one-to-one research and quantitative testing of our communications. We went around the world and asked people about the "Thank You, Mom" idea and found it to be universally appealing.SM: P&G expanded the campaign in 2012 to include the "Best Job" short film, Web videos, a dedicated Facebook page, Visa card donations to Team USA, and a Duracell virtual stadium. Talk about how you created deeper engagements with consumers.Pritchard: Take the short films as an example. They established a stronger relationship with P&G – a feeling that P&G really knows me. One out of three people who viewed the "Best Job" video shared it [through social media]. It's one of the highest sharing videos ever. That creates free awareness and an endorsement of P&G products, of sorts. Awareness leads to trial and gets people into the stores. That's what drives sales.SM: What was the overall approach to shopper marketing for your Olympic programs?Pritchard: We started with the idea of thanking moms for everything they do, then gave shoppers the opportunity to buy P&G products and either get something – free tickets, Olympic pins, additional product – or give something like a donation to youth sports, which was actually one of our best concepts. We perfected that by making sure to always show a mom or an athlete [in merchandising], or even a mom with her kid playing sports. We then optimized the product mix and put them together with strong visuals to create the most engaging shopping experience.SM: Give an example of how athletes were paired with brands to create effective merchandising programs.Pritchard: Pantene's idea was that your hair can withstand an Olympic torch test and keep shining, so we put [swimmer] Natalie Coughlin together with Pantene and created displays and merchandising around that concept. Same thing with Bounty: [Gymnast] Shawn Johnson can turn your home into an Olympic training facility. Let the spills begin because mom doesn't have to worry about it, thanks to Bounty's new "trap & lock" technology.SM: There was an enormous effort to activate around the Olympics at Walmart. What were some of the highlights?Pritchard: We worked with Walmart early on. We created this great "Tour of London" program, brought it to life with displays that evoked the London Olympics and filled it with 17 different brands. They had some special packs that they qualified for and provided additional merchandising for those. Walmart did a fantastic job.I was really pleased with all retailers. We threw it open to their creativity. Retailers around the world did some spectacular things like a Tower of London display, or recreating an Olympic pool with five rings stacked up with Pampers. Another did one the size of a 400-meter track stacked up with multiple products including Tide and Ariel.SM: How successful was the Olympics effort for P&G?Pritchard: We set a completely new standard for what's possible on our in-store and merchandising activation. We consistently exceeded our display feature and shopper marketing goals. When each retailer did some activation, we tried to isolate how much lift they got. Virtually all teams reported lift in the range of 5% and a high of 20%. We measured during the merchandising period, which varied considerably. Some did four or eight weeks; some did five months. We needed to see about a 7% to 10% lift in order to deliver on our sales goal of $500 million. We've seen a few that were three to four times their normal lift.SM: And have you met that sales goal?Pritchard: As far as we can tell, yes. We won't know for sure until we do our final ROI later in the year. Everything we've seen so far indicates it was consistent with what we're shooting for.SM: How successful was the "Thank You, Mom" campaign from an engagement standpoint?Pritchard: Every single one of our ads was above normal in terms of recall. A couple ads were 100% to 200% over normal. Our Facebook "Fans" went up 30%. We also won the Twitter battle with 370 million tweets during the Games.SM: It's worth pointing out that you accomplished these goals during a massive company restructuring. How did you pull that off?Pritchard: We try to scale up our activities to use all our brands together. It creates efficiency in media buys with our retailers, and we get a higher ROI on average – close to 50% higher than we normally get. That's the beauty of something like the Olympics. It's a really well executed, scaled program that not only generates sales but does so more efficiently. That's exactly the kind of productivity we're looking for.

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