Don't Shout, Listen

Work the Brand

Sometimes, of course, a powerful new approach to branding looks a lot like an old, tried-and-true approach. In Tide.com, brand managers for Tide have created a site that isn't at all shy about trading on the laundry detergent's trusted name or on the red-and-yellow bull's-eye logo that has become a Pop Art icon. Indeed, it is the brand's formidable aura that draws people to the site, which offers handy features like the Stain Detective -- a digital tip sheet on how to remove almost any substance from almost any fabric.

"Consumers told us that Tide actually had a right to be the source of information about cleaning your clothes," says Bob Gilbreath, 29, who joined the Tide team last September as an assistant brand manager in charge of interactive marketing. "People trust Tide to 'get the stains out.' "

P&G leaders didn't always think that way. Back in 1996, they created a site called "clothesline.com," which they believed would be better suited to the Web than one that blared "Tide." In the early days of the consumer Internet, the conventional wisdom of Net strategists was that the Web would be a relatively unbranded territory. But the Tide team listened to consumers -- and learned that it was okay to be, well, a brand. According to Gilbreath, Web users were typing "Tide" into their search engines, hoping to find a site that didn't exist back then. So in July 2000, the team followed its customers' lead by launching Tide.com, which carried over most of the earlier site's content, including the Stain Detective.

"Consumers have more of a bond with Tide.com than they have with something like laundry.com," says Gilbreath. "Tide has been used by families for more than 50 years. Some consumers were actually bathed in Tide as children." Users can still reach the Tide site by booting up their browser and typing in "clothesline.com" (or, for that matter, "laundry.com"), but the vast majority of hits now come from people who punch in "Tide.com."

Gilbreath and his colleagues regard Tide.com as a vehicle for reinforcing the trust that Tide has built up among consumers. Their goal is to create a surrogate for the fabric-care advice that Mom used to provide -- and a place where Mom herself (as well as Dad) can go to find such information. To solidify that bond with customers, the Tide.com team also works on improving ease of use: Visitors to the site can even download the Stain Detective to a Palm computing device.

For P&G Web strategists, the key to success on the Net may lie in the union of content and brand. "We have massive expertise behind all of our brands," says Icenhower. "The people at Pampers, for instance, know a ton about parenting." Just visit Pampers.com, and you'll see that those people are eager to share what they know -- about pregnancy, feeding, health, child development, and more.

"At first, we thought that people would rather go to a site that wasn't branded," says Todd Borgerson, 29, brand manager for corporate marketing at PG.com. "But they told us they didn't know who was behind the information that they were getting. That was a turnoff. They wanted sites that had some reason for offering advice on laundry or parenting." That insight has led P&G over the past year to put several unbranded URLs -- beautiful. com, flu.com, thirst.com -- on the auction block. At the same time, in cases where it makes sense to market products through an unbranded, theme-driven site, P&G readily follows that strategy.

The lesson here is that when you have a brand that works for people, you should work the brand. "People prefer to see some brand selling on our sites," says Greg Icenhower. "Consumers say, 'Do what you have to do. We know who you are and what you sell. But give me good content.' "

Test the Brand

Vince Hudson faced a challenge that brand managers for a well-known product like Tide rarely if ever confront. Hudson, 29, is brand manager for global new business at P&G. Two years ago, he was charged with building brand awareness not just around a new offering but also around a new kind of offering -- a tooth-whitening product called Whitestrips, which P&G introduced nationwide this past May. Part of his solution: He and his colleagues transformed a corner of the Internet into a virtual test market.

Using test markets -- auditioning a product in selected locations in order to find out what sells and what doesn't -- is old-time religion at P&G. 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, middle-American 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."