Innovative Product vs. Innovative Marketing?

An AdAge article titled "Is P&G's Biggest Innovation Old-Fashioned Functionality?" has me saying - I've been saying that for years. But I almost missed the light typeface subhead "Its Viral Hits Are Cool, but Focus on Fundamentals Is What Moves the Needle" - and I would agree with that thought as well.


P&G ads and marketing communication used to be very boring - but people bought the products/brands because the company did a good job of continually improving the products - or giving us the perception they were being improved.

P&G marketers - perhaps without even realizing the nature of functional-to-emotional brand life-cycles, consistently chose to lean into functional messaging - which often led to somewhat informative, but not very exciting advertising. I'm not sure if sales of Tide have plateaued, but at some point, many consumers probably said - enough with price increases that come with the so-called-"NEW"-special-ingredients as they switched to less expensive brands.

At some point Tide, probably at the incessant pleading of their ad agencies, experimented with more emotional messaging (remember the ad with the baby covered in spaghetti?). But I'm guessing the ad testing they normally do did not show strong scores or the types of responses they were used to seeing. Which I chuck at, since it feels like they assumed their target actually consumed ads in the manner in which they were tested.

These days I don't see many Tide ads. I suspect the media planners and buyers are doing a much better job of targeting women. But the residual effect of continual product improvement messaging still has its effect on me. But this is an emotional versus a rational effect. I believe that Tide probably has the best product in the market. Right now, I'm not willing to pay the extra cost - but I suspect the emotional belief is what continues to make this brand a leader - despite the lack of emotional advertising.

In the meantime, P&G has experimented more and more with interesting emotional based advertising - ranging from talking stains to Old Spice spokesmen - often turning to creative hot-shops like C&P for this work. A new way of thinking at P&G versus the last few decades. A very welcome one from my perspective.