Google, P&G Swap Employees: A New Era in Collaborative Marketing Strategy?
No commentsIt’s all over the news. Google and P&G have swapped workers to spur innovation. Each organization thinks that they have something to gain from one another. Hence they have started swapping employees. WSJ has reported in the article titled ‘A New Odd Couple: Google P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation‘, that about two-dozen staffers from the two companies have spent weeks dipping into each other’s staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where business plans get hammered out. Previously, neither company had granted this kind of access to outsiders.
This single event has far reaching impact on various aspects of Business Strategy discussion for all the organizations. But, I am going to focus this blog on the impact this has on P&G’s and Google’s Marketing Strategy. Companies P&G and other consumer staples companies have been slow to understand the impact of social media on the Marketing Strategy and they have a meek presence on the internet. Consumers ages 18 to 27 say they use the Internet nearly 13 hours a week, compared to viewing 10 hours of TV, according to market-data firm Forrester Research Inc. (quoting from the WSJ article), the consumer staples companies risk losing the younger (future) consumers.
Online social media is powerful tool in creating buzz marketing. For example, just look at how Blendtec, a 186-employee company in Orem, Utah, has successfully used YouTube to make an instant hit with its viral video titled ‘Will it blend?’. Blendtec has successfully able to leverage the viral marketing campaign to build its brand. Other Industrial Strength Blenders now have to work hard to uproot the buzz created by Blendtec. Because Internet lowers the barrier for new and small organizations and enables them to get same level of global exposure to the right demographics, established companies need to be vigilant about the new competitive threat.
P&G’s collaboration with Google gives them access to knowledge, knowhow on how to sustain competitive marketing edge in this new emerging media where the consumers are not passive but want to be proactive. I think it’s smart of P&G to recognize that the future consumers will be found online rather than in front of the TV. Instead of learning this new trend by themselves they are collaborating with Google to understand Internet – biggest disruption in Marketing.
I hope P&G also understands that the younger consumers are more active than the TV viewing older generation. This ‘connected’ generation wants to blog, twitter and create an online forum about their ‘experience’ with P&G. Hence I think P&G can learn from Google and build an ecosystem for this young generation and help create a captive prosumer.
Google will also benefit from its collaboration with P&G. P&G has been successful in building its brand and has been a leader in every marketing channel (except online where Google dominates) for the past two centuries. So embedded is the product branding that one of the Google swapped employee didn’t realize that Tide’s signature orange-colored packaging is a key part of the brand’s image (from the WSJ article). Tips like this will help Google to understand the subtle nature of brand creation.
I think this collaboration is a win-win for both Google and P&G. It will encourage other organizations to follow same pattern in swapping knowledge in Marketing Strategy, instead of learning from articles in HBR. Getting hands on experience and the implicit knowledge from the source itself is far more powerful than studying papers/articles in HBR… I think this could be a new dawn in Collaborative Marketing Strategy.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Marketing Strategy, Business Strategy, Collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
