In a survey presented last week at the WWD CEO Summit in New York, the CEO of retailers questioned said that "seamless, easy cross-channel integration was the key game changer today and would continue for the next few years" .
P&G is clearly asking itself the same question: how do we access our customers / consumers and dialogue with them when we sell in supermarkets?
In a previous post on 16 January 2010, I presented two initiatives taken by P&G, which already followed this reasoning:
- The opening of an e-commerce website that regrouped a number of their brands (Olay / Pampers / Tide, among others ..).
- The use of pop-up stores in Canada, the "Look Fab Studios".
This effort has been pursued over a year with a new initiative: "Have You Tried This Yet?".
P&G based itself on the premise that many product launches could go unnoticed and that 42% of new products were tested (by consumers) within the 6 months of their launch. It therefore had to abandon traditional approaches and break out of distribution by finding new ways of dialoguing with consumers. The campaign "Have You Tried This Yet?" was launched in two stages:
- Late 2010 early 2011 - with the opening of pop-up stores, in New York and Miami among others, giving consumers a chance to discover 15 to 20 new products-of-the-year from P&G, spaces for counselling, makeup and care as well as samples and reduction coupons. The results followed: P&G announced that some retailers saw sales of the products in question increase by 10%.
- Late 2011 - the focus is now on social media and the Internet: the website pgtryit.com welcomes comments from clients (written or video) and features bloggers or celebrities.
Of course this is far from the sophistication of Lancôme's integrated strategies (which I described in my post of 12 February 2011), or Estée Lauder in China - but the goal is the same: to establish a dialogue with consumers, put them in touch with new products, offer services and advice (previously provided exclusively by specialist retailers like Sephora in beauty) and reductions - all of this outside the walls of hypermarkets and supermarkets.
