Social Media Beats Out Conventional Marketing for Procter and Gamble

Social Media Beats Out Conventional Marketing for Procter and Gamble

If we had any doubt that social media was the future wave of marketing, there’s a case study recently put out by Procter & Gamble that will make you think twice.

Josh Bernoff, the co-author of Groundswell, demonstrated a social media technique that P&G judged four times as effective as their usual marketing tactics. Dollar for dollar, the social media approach was four times better.

Shhh…don’t talk about that product
P&G was marketing tampons, a product that no one especially wants to talk about directly, much less in advertising. So instead of marketing their products through conventional methods, P&G created a website called beinggirl.com, where its users could talk about anything from parents to music to problems at school to health issues – including, naturally, subjects that were handy lead-ins to tampon use.

They didn’t go for the direct sale, though. In sections where it was relevant, they simply put in a small message: brought to you by Always maxi pads and tampons. That simple technique – a place to open a dialogue and a small reminder about the host – was four times as effective as other tactics.