9 July 2021
It is no understatement to say that Australians have fundamentally changed their shopping behaviour over the past twelve months. Woolworths Group’s media business, Cartology partnered with FMCG research consultancy Advantage Group to survey 40 of Australia’s FMCG leaders on their view of the evolving landscape of customer needs and engagement. Their resounding response was that digital is the new front door of retail business, and the new world is a customer led one. And that’s backed by Woolworths’ own insights too.
In a 3-part series Woolworths, Cartology and brands will discuss how the industry is responding to a year of customer transformation. View the last in the series below.
Vice President Marketing, P&G Australia and New Zealand Zulfiqar Mahar reports that the fast moving consumer goods company has experienced monumental changes in customer behaviour in the last 12 months, with many of those habits and routines here to stay. The common theme amongst Australian shoppers has been the move to digital platforms in the way consumers search for, interact with, and purchase brands.
The key learning for Mahar is that in times of uncertainty and change, consumer centricity is even more critical.
P&G has adapted to the seismic changes in consumer behaviour by looking to reinvent how it builds brands. Consumers now see 10 times more advertising messages than they did a decade ago, so a reinvention of advertising was key for P&G, including making messages more impactful and with less clutter.
In this environment, creativity has never been more important for P&G in bringing content to life in digital environments and beyond. P&G is looking to increase its pull-based content that it wants consumers to engage with, and that content has to be matched to context and the media platform for each consumer group. Mahar points to P&G’s successful examples of this approach including Gillette Direct, the Oral B AI app and the Olay Skin Advisor, which provide the company with greater direct, one-on-one engagement with consumers.
Alongside that, the way messages are delivered via media platforms has also been reinvented to deliver mass reach with targeted precision – no small challenge for a company whose products are used by 95% of the population. It is a case of effectively delivering a message with frequency, but without wastage.
Personalisation is also key as consumers ask brands to engage with them directly, but there is a need to avoid being overly familiar, according to Mahar.
Key trends in digital adoption and usage have also informed P&G’s marketing strategy. As consumers become more comfortable shopping online, they search for products to buy and rely on the views of other product users. The way consumers search online has seen P&G aim to bring search together across numerous platforms, including retailers, to answer all the questions consumers have about brands, creating a seamless experience that is also more efficient for the company.
In ecommerce, P&G is also seeking to drive greater efficiencies and effectiveness in digital media and its advertising expenditure by matching content with context to maximise relevance and attention.
All the changes P&G is undertaking in its marketing, advertising and digital strategy is through the all-important lens of consumer centricity.
