Jim Stengal, Proctor and Gamble's Global Marketing Chief Stepping Down
Via AdAge today, news that Jim Stengal, who's headed up the worldwide marketing efforts for P&G and held the purse strings to the consumer giants $5.2 billion dollar marketing budget, is stepping down on October 1st. However, Stengal won't be leaving the company, but instead moving over to head up a special project, starting August 1st. What project? AdAge speculates:
"One personal goal that he's yet to achieve, that he now wants to focus all his personal efforts against, is he has a very personal passion to influence all marketers to embrace the power of marketing as a positive force in the world. He now wants to focus 100% on that, and feels the time is right to do that," [said a Procter and Gamble spokesman.]Which is interesting in light of a major article that ran in the New York Times this Sunday, focusing on how to use consumer habits for social good. The article focused on a effort, by P&G, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to build a campaign to encourage hand-washing in Africa via effective marketing:Mr. Stengel has not shared yet how exactly he wishes to take that message to a broader forum beyond P&G, the spokesman said. Mr. Stengel could not be reached for comment.
P&G has embarked on a wide variety of cause- and ethical-marketing efforts on Mr. Stengel's watch in recent years, including a Pampers program with Unicef and an effort led by Pur to provide safe drinking water in much of the world.
To teach hand washing, about seven years ago Dr. Curtis persuaded Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to join an initiative called the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap. The group's goal was to double the hand-washing rate in Ghana, a West African nation where almost every home contains a soap bar but only 4 percent of adults regularly lather up after using the toilet.Of course, P&G still knows how to build habits that aren't quite so life-saving, as the example of Febreze air freshner shows:
The researchers at P.& G. realized that these types of findings had enormous implications for selling Febreze. Because bad smells occurred too infrequently for a Febreze habit to form, marketers started looking for more regular cues on which they could capitalize.The article goes on to note that North Americans spend about $650 million dollars a year on Frebreze now.The perfect cue, they eventually realized, was the act of cleaning a room, something studies showed their target audience did almost daily. P.& G. produced commercials showing women spraying Febreze on a perfectly made bed and spritzing freshly laundered clothing. The product's imagery was revamped to incorporate open windows and gusts of fresh wind -- an airing that is part of the physical and emotional cleaning ritual.