This week, we spotlight Marc Pritchard. He’s the Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble.
We’d like to congratulate Marc Pritchard for getting inducted into the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Hall of Fame.
The AMA will formally recognize his accomplishments on May 3, 2022.
According to the AMA, Pritchard is “responsible for P&G’s brand building disciplines worldwide. He sets the company’s multi-billion-dollar media, marketing and advertising strategies, and leads marketing innovations that guide communication and brand-building for P&G’s portfolio of trusted, quality brands.”
Pritchard also won Global Marketer of the Year by the World Federation of Advertisers in 2020. And his company, P&G, earned the recognition of Brand Marketer of the Decade by Cannes Lions.
Marc Pritchard’s Career Loyalty
It’s often the case that I’ll start out these biographies with a list of the different companies that the marketer worked for. But that won’t be necessary here.
Why? Because Pritchard has worked for P&G for 40 years.
That’s not a typo. But it’s almost unheard of nowadays.
He began as a Cost Analysis in the Paper Division, back in 1982.
Pritchard has worked on his fair share of P&G products, including antiperspirants, hair care, tissues, and other cosmetics.
If you want to really get to know a company, understand its unique culture, and learn how to succeed there, you’ve got to stay awhile.
Pritchard stayed with the same big corp for four decades. That may have something to do with why he’s not only successful there, but successful in general.
“Constructive Disruption”
As somebody who spent 40 years with the same company and much of that time in marketing, you might think that Pritchard is somebody who might be “stuck in his ways.”
Nope.
In fact, he recently threw out a term you probably haven’t heard before: “constructive disruption.” Marketing is “constructive” because it doesn’t change the rules of the game, but it also creates value for the business.
“Performance marketing is how we reinvent brand building,” he says. “We’re moving from mass marketing to brand building with greater precision. Procter & Gamble still operates on a mass scale. But the tools have changed. We’re focused on obtaining data in a privacy-compliant way. Those analytics enable us to be able to best reach the consumers we serve.”
The Highest Priority
So now that the tools have changed, which of them does Pritchard think is most important?
Search.
He claims it’s “absolutely critical.”
You might not think of P&G as a company that does a lot with SEO, but it makes sense once you think about the company’s product portfolio.
Brands like Head & Shoulders shampoo, Luvs baby diapers, Downy fabric softener, and Bounty paper towels can all benefit from great search strategies.
According to Pritchard, search was the bridge that connected the company’s clients with its retailers.
But he’s also a fan of personalized marketing.
“For example, our Pampers mobile app engages with parents on a very one-to-one basis. Olay Skin Advisor is our direct-to-consumer effort. There’s also Oral-B apps for oral care, Gillette for shave care, and Braun, which is very much driven by performance marketing and digital technology.”
Propensity Modeling
As we all know, the rules changed once the pandemic hit. So how did Pritchard and P&G adapt?
With propensity modeling.
If you’re unfamiliar with propensity modeling, it’s a means of building predictive models. The models show how consumers will behave in the future based on how they acted in the past.
Pritchard also says that P&G worked with retailers during the pandemic. The company would combine its own data with retailer data.
“The goal is to understand how we might be able to generate more sales with a retailer on their platform,” he says.
Interested in building your own forecast based on historical data? Check out Certainty Tech by Ignite Visibility.
Wrapping It Up
Marc Pritchard represents the kind of marketer any company can love: he’s loyal to his employer and somebody who never stops learning.
I look forward to seeing where he takes P&G in a post-pandemic world.
