P&G’s Marc Pritchard Is Using 'Constructive Disruption' to Reinvent Brand Building

The demand for consumer-packaged goods in the wake of Covid-19 continues to upend the regular patterns that connect commerce and performance. From March 2020 through February 2021, both in-store and online CPG sales rose 14% compared to the previous 12-month period, according to data from NCSolutions. But with new opportunities come new challenges, and Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, led the company’s push to add more performance marketing into the advertising mix while navigating the tumult that was 2020. By dint of that stewardship, Pritchard is Adweek's Performance Marketer of the Year. While Pritchard has spent his entire four-decade career with the 183-year-old company, he has consistently pursued reinvention through a concept he calls “lead constructive disruption." The idea, which is premised on the practical use of data and tech as opposed to innovation only meant to dazzle the industry, has animated Pritchard's approach to Big Data and economic modeling. And it's been particularly key as predictable consumer purchase patterns were rendered unreliable in 2020. It has also dictated the way P&G has embraced purpose-driven marketing efforts to better engage and connect with its customers and match their values. Adweek sat down with Pritchard (virtually) to discuss his views on performance marketing during the pandemic, as well as P&G's recent loyalty efforts. Adweek: As Adweek’s Performance Marketer of the Year, what strategies were most important to P&G in 2020?Marc Pritchard: It's a recognition of something that we've been on a journey toward. It’s part of one of our strategies we call “lead constructive disruption.” It’s premised on disrupting in a way that is constructive and in ways that create value for the consumers that we serve, the retailers we work with and the shareholders that own our company. Performance marketing is how we reinvent brand building. We’re moving from mass marketing to brand building with greater precision. Procter & Gamble still operates on a mass scale. But the tools have changed. We’re focused on obtaining data in a privacy-compliant way. Those analytics enable us to be able to best reach the consumers we serve. What performance marketing tools were most important to you this year?Search is absolutely critical. It was probably more important in this last year than it's ever been. So many people were at home and searching online for the products that they needed and wanted. Search was key to connecting our consumers with retailers. We’ve been more focused to a higher degree on engaging with consumers through one-to-one means. For example, our Pampers mobile app engages with parents on a very one-to-one basis. Olay Skin Advisor is our direct-to-consumer effort. There’s also Oral-B apps for oral care, Gillette for shave care, and Braun, which is very much driven by performance marketing and digital technology. Our consumer relations marketing platforms like P&G Good Everyday in the U.S., which is called P&G Growing Families in Europe and P&G Living Artist in China, are loyalty platforms where we engage consumers. They sign on to those platforms so they can find out a lot about our brand and our products. It tells them what's available and where they can get more useful information. We also engage consumers there with games. Performance marketing is how we reinvent brand building. We’re moving from mass marketing to brand building with greater precision. When the pandemic hit, all the typical analytics models didn’t apply anymore because demand across the board changed so dramatically. How did you adjust your analytics?Propensity modeling became a bigger part of our analytics. It’s become so important for how we engage with retailers. We'll work with a retailer on combining their data and our data. The goal is to understand how we might be able to generate more sales with a retailer on their platform. How well positioned is P&G post-pandemic?Our business was actually growing pretty nicely before the pandemic. We already had a good sense of what was working and what was not working. Then, when the pandemic hit, the importance of cleaning, health and hygiene was elevated. Because of what we've been able to do with our performance marketing capability, where we looked at demand very easily, we were able to manage our messaging and targeting very well. Performance is really what drives brand choice. The "Lead With Love" campaign demonstrated an authentic way a brand can communicate its values. How did performance marketing support that effort?We created a compelling film that declared our intention to do 2,021 “acts of good” in 2021. We drove people to P&G Good Everyday. Once on that site, they discover a) what we were doing, and then b) what they could do to help and how they could do their own acts of good. It was a perfect example of the entire end-to-end approach to still use targeting to those who we thought would be most open to it. The goal now is to make sure that we can continue to engage those consumers. We found that people are very interested in a number of things. They're interested in basic cleaning health and hygiene. They want to know how to use our products. That's why some of those DTC and one-to-one approaches help people understand how to use them, and we do those on broadcast, too. Lastly, people want to know what kinds of good things the brand is doing. They want to know what we’re doing for equality and inclusion. [Consumers] want to know: What are you doing for the community, and what are you doing for the environment? The P&G Good Everyday platform gives people the ability to connect on all of those fronts. And each individual brand does the same thing. They're also finding ways to say, "Here's my product. Here's how to use it. And here's the good that we're doing." And that's the beauty of moving to brand building with greater precision on a mass scale. Check out all of our Performance Marketing Awards honorees here.