Q&A: Communicating Innovation to Reach Consumers

This week, we reported that Newell Rubbermaid had selected Carmichael Lynch Spong as its domestic agency for four of the company's many brands. PRNewser then spoke with David Doolittle, VP of corp comms for Newell Rubbermaid about some of the broader challenges that the company is faced with, including how to reach their target consumer - "the female head of household" - in this still struggling economy. Our Q&A is after the jump. You’ve identified the female head of household as the key target. What is she looking for? Right now, if you think across our whole company which is a portfolio of a lot of different products [including] office products like Sharpie and Paper Mate pens and even Irwin Tools, really since the recession began, the consumer is looking for value. And value doesn’t always mean price. We’re seeing that the consumer wants superior performance. What we are doing to respond to that is to put new innovative products on the market to provide superior performance to the consumer. Graco’s one of our brands. With car seats, you start out with an infant car seat, then you move to a car seat for a toddler, and then to a seat for the older child up to 80 pounds. We’ve come out with a new seat that has all three of those in one. What we’ve found is even though the price point is slightly higher, consumers will pay more because they see the value that they’re getting. We see that across the board. With the economy being what it is, even a company as big as yours is faced with some issues. (According to the announcement, sales for the company in 2009 were $5.6 billion.) What are those issues and some of the ways communications can overcome them? We expect 2011 to be very similar to 2010 because the challenge is the unemployment rate remains high. Even for consumers with jobs, there’s a lot of uncertainty and nervousness and so they’re more reluctant to dig into their pocket. Our response again has to be to deliver new innovations that will make them open up their pocketbook because they see the value that these products can add to their lives. You sell everyday products. How do you make them stand out? We make humble products like pens and saw blades and baby strollers, but we are in 90 percent of U.S. homes and we have a strong growing business internationally. In terms of communications, we’re focused on understanding the consumer and communicating the benefits of these new innovations. Our strategy in the current economy is to deliver superior value to the consumer. We have to communicate to the consumer that we have that product available. That’s everything from better on-shelf packaging [to] more compelling communications that get right to the challenge that we’re solving. So we’re trying to do a lot of research to get consumer insights into the challenges of their daily lives and coming up with solutions that meet those challenges, then communicating those through advertising and PR. Like a lot of companies we’re using social media. For our Sharpie brand we have SharpieUncapped.com which has a whole community site for Sharpie enthusiasts. Creating that engagement then creates more consumer loyalty and it’s also a great avenue for communicating these new innovations we come out with. For Graco, first-time mothers are sponges of information and they get a lot of information online. We have a blog that communicates the kinds of issues they might be facing as they navigate all the things they need for a new baby. It’s not just commercial-speak. It’s moms talking about the daily issues of being a parent. That authentic speech and really connecting with parents is working for us.

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Q&A: Communicating Innovation to Reach Consumers

Tonya Garcia

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Tonya Garcia