PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

We’re having an interesting summer (clearly, we’ve been a bit busy based on the evidence of this blog). One of our projects has been to help a B2B company transform itself into a consumer brand. A fool’s errand, you say? A marketing whitewash? In this case, perhaps not. Check out a terrific article from Biotech 360, whose title says it all: “What can the biotech industry learn from a consumer products giant? More than you might suspect.”

The article outlines how P&G, under the leadership of CEO A.G. Lafley, has brought the company from strength to strength in observing, recording, co-developing, testing, and following its customers everywhere, including into their minds. In short, consumer-driven innovation. In one of the best anecdotes, P&G Pharmaceuticals staff wore pagers to interrupt their daily lives 6 to 12 times a day to simulate the effects of having acute ulcerative colitis. If they were driving and got the page, for example, they had to find the nearest public bathroom. What a great way to create empathy with a target audience. The insights gained led P&G to improve its support programs and guided clinical research.

What’s so interesting about this approach is that one of our B2B clients is similarly cultish about their customers. They observe them in their work spaces. They have 165 technical specialists whose job is to do nothing but solve problems and report back insights in real time. They hire industrial design firms to add useful innovation to commodity product spaces. And yet surveys show they are often thought of on the same level as industrial distributors, coopetition in short. Clearly, the message about how they approach their customers looking for innovation opportunities is not getting through.

Which is where their agency comes in. How do you convey a customer-driven company without hanging out internal laundry? Why should the customer care? Are a customer focus and unending determination the stuff of great marketing? At the moment, we’re moving from insights to creative treatments. Should be an interesting next couple of months…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 5:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.