P & G beleves in Online as a medium

At last a FMCG in india which knows and understands online medium. Came across following story --
THE debate about ‘old’ and ‘new’ economies cannot be an either/or debate – success will come from combining both old and new. P&G’s feels its assets –global scale, strong brands, indepth consumer understanding and superior technology – combined with the unique proprieties of the Web can put it among leading consumer-driven, Webenabled enterprise: What it calls a dotcombined’ company.

A brief look at the company’s Net initiatives. P&G is using an integrated strategy to commercialise the Net that focuses on four key pillars:

– Creating new consumer relationships
– Developing new ways to create,market and sell its brands
– Reinventing the supply chain
– Developing new partnerships

P&G estimates e-commerce to represent as much as 10 per cent of the retail Internet/home delivery channel by 2005, and sees an opportunity for as much as 5 percent of total cost savings through B2B activity, and much productivity savings through business-toemployee projects.

P&G has 72 branded Web sites,and it expects its brands to drive connections through the Internet,helping to answer questions and provide solutions.

One example of this is its new Mr. Clean Web site (http://www.mrclean.com/). The Net,says the company, gives it unparalleled reach to consumers and incredible speed for iteration of ideas. Conducting several thousand separate consumer research tests each year, P&G believes the Net can save that much time, as well as about 40 per cent of the expense.

The company says: “The Internet will help us identify consumer problems and provide effective solutions in ways that are difficult to do in a paperbased or telephone world. Good examples of this include: http://www.mrclean.com/, the Pampers Parenting Institute at http://www.pampers.com/, and the Tide ‘Neighbour-to-Neighbour’ programme at http://www.tide.com/.”

P&G is exploiting the Internet to explore low-cost/no-cost/highly effective brand introductions. The Net allows companies to take advantage of the ‘diffusion theory’,to attract early adopters by targeting through the Net. This allows a brand to be ‘seeded’prior to its broad launch. One example of this is http://www.thermacare.com/, which will be used to allow purchase of the brand among early adopters prior to a substantial geographic roll-out.

Also, digital brands have been created to leverage the company’s R&D technology and consumer understanding.