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The Tree of Online
Success
At Procter & Gamble,
branding is
almost everything. In the age of the Web, P&G turned the
Internet into a
device for listening to customers – and for
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experimenting with its brands.
"We've been voted the best marketer of the 20th century," says Greg Icenhower, an associate director of corporate communications at P&G,
referring to a ranking published by Advertising Age magazine. "But that's
because we were the biggest shouters. In the 21st century, we want to be the
best
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listeners."
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IT Leader: New Roles of a CIO
P&G has stepped up its experimentation because it has discovered an ideal
laboratory for doing so: the Internet. To relaunch PG.com, Icenhower had put
together a skunk-works team that included him and seven other P&G people,
some of whom had no relevant Internet experience. While rebuilding the site,
the team undertook none of the intense testing that P&G would normally
insist on devoting to such a high-profile project. On the contrary,
Icenhower convinced his bosses that the focus of his team's work should be
on
experimentation. "I told
them that we wouldn't get everything right but that by making mistakes, we
would start learning lessons immediately."
For P&G Web strategists, the key to success on
the Net may lie in the union of content and brand. Using
test markets –
auditioning a product in selected locations in order to find out what sells
and what doesn't – is important when you
develop new products. Before
rolling out a new product nationally, the company typically spends several
months and millions of dollars to conduct
field tests in a handful of
midsize cities. But the Internet has fostered new, more efficient ways to
sound out customer attitudes toward
product innovation. As A.G. Lafley told shareholders in 2000, "By doing
a test online, we can do it for a tenth of the cost in a quarter of the
time."
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Benefits of e-Business
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Listening To Your
Customers
Customer Listening Tips
Selling (and Silence)
Customer Feedback
Retaining Customers
Customer Satisfaction
Measuring Client Satisfaction
Service-Profit Chain
Creating Customer
Value
Customer's Perspective of Quality
Customer Intimacy
Customer Service
Customer Feedback
Value Innovation
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Innovation Is Love
Customer Partnership
Best Practices and Success Stories
Succeeding Online
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