Problem 1: Deliver a persuasive written justification on what is perceived as the preferred methods of training, compensation, supervision, and motivation.
Problem 2: Deliver a persuasive written justification on what you perceive as the preferred methods of evaluation for individual and sales force performance?
For decades, Procter & Gamble has been at the top of almost every expert's A-list of outstanding marketing companies, The experts point to P&G's stable of top-selling consumer brands, or to the fact that year in and year out, P&G is the world's largest advediser. Consumers seem to agree. You'll find at least one of P&G's blockbuster brands in 99 percent of all American households; in many homes, you'll find a dozen or more familiar P&G products. But P&G is also highly respected for something else-its top-notch, customer-focused sales force. P&G's sales force has long been an American icon for personal selling at its very best. When it comes to selecting, training, and managing salespeople, P&G sets the gold standard. The company employs a massive sales force of more than 5,000 salespeople worldwide, At P&G, however, they rarely call t "sales." lnstead, it's "Customer Business Development" (CBD). And P&G sales reps aren't "salespeople"; they're "CBD managers" or "CBD account executives," All this might seem like just so much "corp-speak," but at P&G the distinction goes to the very core of how selling works. P&G understands that if its customers don't do well, neither will the company. To grow its own business, therefore, P&G must first grow the business of the retailers that sell its brands to final consumers. And at P&G, the primary responsibility for helping customers grow falls to the sales force. ln P&G's own words, "CBD is more than mere 'selling'-it's a P&G-specific approach which enables us to grow our business by working as a 'strategic partner' (as opposed to just a supplier) with those who ultimately sell our products to consumers." Says one CBD manager, "We depend on them as much as they depend on us." By partnering with each other, P&G and its customers create "win-win" relationships that help both to prosper. Most P&G customers are huge and complex businesses-such as Walgreens, Walmarl, or Dollar General-with thousands of stores and billions of dollars in revenues, Working with and selling to such customers can be a very complex undertaking, more than any single salesperson or sales team could accomplish. lnstead, P&G assigns a full CBD team to every large customer account. Each CBD team contains not only salespeople but also a full complement of specialists in every aspect of selling P&G's consumer brands at the retail level. CBD teams vary in size depending on the customer. For example, P&G's largest customer, Walmart, which accounts for an amazing 20 percent of the company's sales, commands a S5O-person CBD team, By contrast, the P&G Dollar General team consists of about 30 people, Regardless of size, every CBD team constitutes a complete, multifunctional customer service unit. Each team includes a CBD manager and several CBD account executives (each responsible for a specific P&G product category), supported by specialists in marketing strategy, product development, operations, information systems, logistics, finance, and human resources. To deal effectively with large accounts, P&G salespeople must be smar1, well-trained, and strategically grounded. They deal daily with high-level retail category buyers who may purchase hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of P&G and competing brands ann-- ally. lt takes a lot more than a friendly sn- ; and a firm handshake to interact with su:- buyers. Yet, individual P&G salespeople ca-' know everything, and thanks to the CEsales structure, they don't have to. lnstea: as members of a full CBD team, P&G sae:- people have at hand all the resources tr: need to resolve even the most challeng-; customer problems, "l have everything I n*: right here," says a household care accc--- executive, "lf my customer needs help from ,- with in-store promotions, I can go right dc,,,- the hall and talk with someone on my tear - marketing about doing some kind of pror:- tional deal. lt's that simple," Customer Business Development volves paftnering with customers to jo -: identify strategies that create shopper va,* and satisfaction and drive profitable sales :. the store level. When it comes to profita: . moving Tide, Pampers, Gillette, or other F+: brands off store shelves and into consume-: shopping carts, P&G reps and their tea-: often know more than the retail buyers i^:, advise. ln fact, P&G's retail partners often '=', on CBD teams to help them manage not c- , the P&G brands on their shelves but also e-- tire product categories, including compe:-; brands. Wait a minute, Does it make sense tc =i P&G advise on the stocking and placener of competitors' brands as well as its ov,-- Would a P&G CBD rep ever tell a retail bu.=r' to stock fewer P&G products and more c' . P&G Customer Business Development managers know that to grow P&G's business, they must first help their retail padners to sell P&G's brands. Jin Leeicetty lmages uSA, Inc. t' ehapter tO I Rersonal Selling and Sales promotion 479 :cmpeting brand? Believe it or not, it happens ai the time. The CBD team,s primary goal is :o help the customer win in each product cat_ egory Sometimes, analysis shows that the cest solution for the customer is ,,more of the :iher guy's product,', For p&G, that,s okay.
SnatchingDefeat FromThe JawsOf Posted at 26 Mar, 00:38h in Blog by jbhirsch 0 Comments I have very few regrets. When you take on a career in marketing you know there are going to be big ups and downs, or at least you should. Very little in this life is linear and predictable, especially in a world where we need to rely on collaborations with partners not always of our choosing to develop work, and then hope and pray that whimsical consumers will react according and grace us with their consideration. With the rise of the entrepreneur and the technology boom of the past 30 years, it's become chic to extoll the virtues of failure. If we don't take big risks, how will we ever change the status quo? How will we ever learn? Important life lessons or not, the feelings associated with failure are, unfortunately, never pleasant, whether they are closer to mild disappointment on one end of the spectrum or complete devastation on the other. I happen to be one of those people who loves to beat himself up over and over again when things go wrong. Whatever, happens, I always see to feel that it's all my fault, at least at first. Time, reflection and self-examination do eventually lead to a certain degree of objectivity, though I always seem to take more than my share of the responsibility. That's not entirely bad. There are those who deny all responsibility, place the blame others and sweep failure under the rug. A perfect recipe for getting stuck in a miserable, lifetime rut. But there those extremely rare times when things go off the rails and it's not your fault, not at all. You know you've delivered, but events completely out of your control snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as you watch helplessly. Which brings us to Crystal Pepsi, a product frequently cited as one of the most monumental marketing failures of all time. People still talk about it, even today, 22 years later, as in this MSN Money story, 5 Worst Product Flops Of All Time I played a central role in the development of Crystal Pepsi, and I can tell you that for all that has been written about this marketing debacle, no one has come close to getting it right. The concept grew out of a project that my company (called Hirsch Marketing at the time) took on for the new products team in the Brand Pepsi group. That initial assignment was very broad: Create a wide range of new, cola based products under the Brand Pepsi umbrella. Among the many 20 or more concepts developed was a "Clear Pepsi" concept, which was, in fact, inspired by the success of the new age soft drink Clearly Canadian that was basking in its 15 minutes of fame at the time. That's the one part of the story that's generally been reported accurately. Here's the concept, complete with the rain damage that occurred when my garage was flooded by El Nino rains in Los Angeles many years ago But the bottom dropped out very quickly. It seemed that after trying the product, no one liked it. Repeat levels were dismal and panic set in. What could possibly have gone wrong? No pun intended, but the explanation was clear to me as soon as I saw the spot. Despite spending over a million dollars on production, licensing one of the hottest songs from one of the hottest bands at the time, the spot was an exercise in selfindulgence on the part of the agency. They wanted to produce a great music video and they succeeded. It was a beautiful spot, but not representative of the creative brief. The ad does say "different," and at one point, "more refreshing." It also shows, briefly, a cyclist and a shirtless man, presumably after a workout. But the ultimate consumer take-away, confirmed by subsequent research, was that Crystal was essentially clear Pepsi, the exact same taste delivered in a more natural, new age, no-caffeine form. The ad barely hinted at, never mind directly expressing, that Crystal Pepsi was a new, different, unique cola taste. With the expectation that Crystal would taste no different from regular Pepsi, people were so unpleasantly surprised by their first taste that they didn't care for a second. One focus group respondent summed it up perfectly. "I like coffee and I like tea. But if you give me tea and tell me it's coffee, it's going to mess with my mind. I'm just going to spit it out because it's so different from what I expected." Sometimes "great creative" that departs from strategy does in fact succeed. I'm not a big fan of this approach, but if advertising leverages humor or some attention-getting device to make people sit up and take notice, positive sales results may follow. That's not only a roll of the dice, but it can only work in situations where people are already familiar with your product, or conversely, if they have absolutely no preconceived notions of what it's about. In the case of Crystal Pepsi, the advertising set up an expectation: this product tastes just like regular Pepsi while being clear and natural. The product simply could not deliver on that promise, because that's not what it was. It all might have been salvaged. We had identified the problem and there was a solution. An exercise we conducted in multiple focus groups across several markets was fascinating. Respondents were told that Pepsi understood the confusion and disappointment people were experiencing with Crystal, so the company had reformulated the product. Instead of the taste of regular Pepsi, the "new" Crystal Pepsi had "a taste all its own that was more refreshing than other colas." We were simply reading the positioning statement. We then poured the existing Crystal product into clear plastic cups and let respondents sample it. Nearly all said, "Now that's different! This is really good!" A follow up ad that simply explained what the product really was could have stopped the precipitous decline and put sales back on the right track. But it was not to be. The Brand Director told me that the brand's advertising budget was shot. They couldn't afford another million dollars to produce a new commercial. I pointed out that a simple talking head commercial that could be produced for well under $50,000 would most likely do the trick, but she replied, "The agency would never do that." It seemed that a million dollars was the ante to get the agency into the game. They were only interested in big productions. This was shocking to me until a friend at Pepsi reminded me how their advertising function was virtually independent of brand management, who had little say about TV ads. There was a very powerful, internal advertising guru who had the ear of the CEO and may as well have been an agency employee. "Pepsi," my friend explained, "was the only company where the agency is really the client and the client is the agency." It was totally backwards, like Seinfeld's Bizarro World. Amazingly, we still see agencies accepting a creative brief and then returning with executions that bear little or no resemblance to the agreed upon strategy. And with a straight face, at that. I once developed a brand position and personality that was characterized by sharing, warmth and delight. The target was moms with kids living at home. Somehow, the agency translated this into a spot that featured adolescent humor and selfish craving, featuring family members fighting each other for the product. There are most likely a number of explanations for this behavior of basically intelligent people behaving none too wisely. Clients may buy these way off strategy executions because they are intimidated by creative tasks in general, by their agencies or both. Some may feel that "great creative," usually defined by the incredibly vague and subjective terms "cool" or "funny," will be so "disruptive" as to command a disproportionate share of attention (we'll go viral!) and go on to win the hearts and minds of consumers. There are also many marketers with little or no sense of empathy, which is in my mind, the most essential quality for successful communications and marketing efforts. Often completely tone deaf when it comes to creative sensibilities and human insight, these marketing execs excel at process but have little feel for substance. They may even claim to have a "brand vision," but the inability to distinguish the needs, wants and sensibilities of their target markets from their own gets in the way. Clients may also be co-conspirators with agencies selling creative that is completely out of sync with strategy because they live in a world where CMO tenure is only about two years. They are under enormous pressure to make something happen now. So they talk strategy but engage in attention getting tactics in the hope that they score a quick win, rather than testing the patience of management with truly sound executions that build to more enduring, long-term results. Regrets? Yes, I've had a few. I'm not sure which is worse, when I have no one to blame but myself, or when failure was completely out of my control. I suppose it's more painful when I did everything right, developing deep, insight-based strategies that are truly proprietary, motivating and relevant. The kind of strategies that would have and should have provided a strong foundation for healthy growth, but are ignored or abandoned. But now that I think of it, on balance, there's not too much for me to regret about Crystal Pepsi. To be sure, it was a big opportunity missed from a mess not of my own making. Yet silver linings do exist. Of course, I would much rather prefer being associated with one of the biggest and best successful innovations of all time rather than being reminded, 22 years later, that I was a key player in a failed effort that is still perceived as one of the biggest marketing flops of all time. Still, many of the people I worked with at Pepsi, one in particular, became lifelong friends. They have proved to be more meaningful and valuable to me than any marketing case history could ever have been. And business not only didn't suffer as a result of that project, it thrived. Everyone working at Pepsi - those I worked with on Crystal and my many other projects there - eventually moved on to other companies. The great relationships built at Pepsi turned out to be a rich source of new projects, many in categories in which I had no prior experience. These included online retail, cable television, fast food, finance, pharma, health care and more. The Crystal Pepsi experience taught me a lot about humility as well. I took way too much of the credit for "creating the product" when it all seemed to be a sure thing, huge success. I may have played an important role, but there were a lot of other smart, capable people who did as much or more. Once the brand crashed and died, all that inappropriate braggadocio seemed quite foolish to me. I suppose that's the one true regret in all of this. I could have handled the success that was never to be with far more grace. There are always rumors running around the Internet talking about how Pepsi is going to revive Crystal Pepsi. They shouldn't. There's just too much baggage attached to it. But despite the fact that both sugary and artificially sweetened soft drinks have reached that part of their life-cycles where they've set off on their long, slow declines, cola remains a hugely popular flavor. Sure, it may be 22 years later, but isn't there still a lot of room for variations on cola? With variety seeking in food and beverage having gone mainstream, an explosion in the range of products now available and enjoyed by so many people, I would say now is a better time than ever. What do you say, Pepsi, want to try again? I don't know about you, but I have fully processed the life and marketing lessons from my clear cola experience. Time to put those lessons to good use.