Jim Stengal, Proctor and Gamble's Global Marketing Chief Stepping Down

(MoneyWatch)  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.]

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.

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:

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 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.

The article goes on to note that North Americans spend about $650 million dollars a year on Frebreze now.