There is no name more synonymous with brand building than Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s Chief Brand Officer, who spoke with Signal 360’s John Battelle for our year-end Signal Conversation. One hot topic we touched on: AI. The technology is speeding up marketing and ideation, and testing ads to see how they’ll land with viewers before they run.
Pritchard also shared his secret to succeeding at his role for exponentially more years than any of his competitors.
“I pretend to fire myself every 18 months,” he says. “Things change so quickly. You’ve got to come in fresh every 18 months and not be so wedded to what you’ve been doing that it gets stale.”
To hear more from this special conversation between Pritchard and Battelle — and what’s in store for Signal 2025 — watch our video below, or read our lightly edited conversation.
TRANSCRIPT
John Battelle
Welcome to a very special edition of the Signal Conversation in which we welcome Marc Pritchard, the Chief Brand Officer of Procter and Gamble. Marc, it’s so good to have you back. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve done one of these.
Marc Pritchard
It has been. It’s great to be back. Good to see you, John.
It’s good to see you. Thanks for joining us. I thought we’d start this kind of a year-end conversation, and I thought we’d start by looking back at what it feels like was only yesterday. July is now a few months in our rear-view mirror, but Signal happened in July, and I thought I’d ask you, now that you’ve had some time to reflect, what did you take away from it?
What we did in Signal this year is we really again aligned it with our company strategies, and tried to ensure that we had content that was going to reinforce what we’re trying to do overall, on our brands and on our businesses. This year’s theme was around superiority to drive market growth, which is very important, as you well know. Market growth, making markets bigger is the best way to grow. You bring in more users, you encourage people to use more, and you also encourage people to maybe pay a little bit more because they’re delighted by the product. That was a great theme, and we had some really great speakers, and it was really substantive. I would say that this year’s Signal, we always say this, but I think it was our best because it was so substantive, and it had the kind of substance that was going to help people be able to do their jobs better and inspire them to stretch for more. That’s the feedback we received. People really felt good about it.
We did get quite good feedback, which terrifies me as it relates to next year.
Raise the bar again.
Raise the bar again. The theme of market growth and value creation did resonate with everyone. As you think about the year that you just had and the company just had, are there any stories about that market growth and value creation that stand out for you as it relates to the company?
We actually devoted our global leadership council meetings and our Global Business Leadership Council meetings, which is the we call GBLC, the top people within the company who are SVP, so Senior Vice President and above, we devoted it to how to operationalize superiority to drive profitable category growth and value creation. There’s some great examples.
In fact, we had several examples that we sent out to everyone as pre-reading. There was the Charmin Smooth Tear example, the Pampers China example, the Swiffer Power Mop example, Downey, Brazil as an example, Nervive North America, Head and Shoulders and Pantene, both the US and in China. Trying to think of what are the whether we have Dawn and Cascade, and those businesses that are driving category growth, as well as Whisper India. We had several amazing and Gillette as well, which is very exciting and Oral B Power. Pretty much every category had an example of driving category growth and value creation. We focused these case studies on how we built these brands across the five vectors of superiority, product, package, brand, communication, retail, execution and value and then talked about what we needed to do to really put this into operation across our businesses. That was pretty exciting to be able to see so many great examples and inspire people.
Does any one of them stand out? There are folks listening who may not be employees, so I don’t want you to give away any trade secrets. But is there an example that you can give? One of those that you just listed that might be inspiring for those who are watching this?
I’ll just pick one just that that comes to mind immediately is, is Oral B Power. It starts with a consumer insight. The consumer insight is that you leave behind 50% of plaque bacteria when you use a manual toothbrush, because it’s a flat toothbrush, and so it doesn’t get deeply enough into the the parts of your teeth and gums that will clean off the plaque bacteria. Plaque bacteria leads to a lot of stuff that leads to cavities, at least to it could lead to gum disease. It leads to bad breath. I leads to a lot of things that you don’t want. Oral B Power is a superior performing product that cups that tooth and gets rid of that extra black bacteria so you get a perfect clean regardless of how your teeth may be formed. It’s in an awesome package. It’s in a beautifully sleek design. It’s now shelved at retail in a different way, and so it makes it easy to select. It’s got communication that communicates this perfect clean regardless of what your teeth are like. And it’s a pretty high-priced product, yet it’s a superior value, and it drives superior customer value. So it’s got all of the vectors, and it has driven category growth in the single digits as well as the brand growth in terms of high single digits and clear value creation, and it still only has household penetration below 10%. So there’s a lot of those upside.
A lot of upside.
That product entered our household this year. So we’re one of those. We made that 10%.
That’s good, that’s good, and your teeth are great. There you go.
Another question about the past year, more about your role. You’ve had your role for a very long time, and that’s unusual, and you’re an observer of the role. I’m curious if anything has changed in your role over the past year.
I don’t know about the past year, because a lot of what we focus on is what stays the same as the core strategy. That core strategy of the portfolio of products and categories or performance, drives brand choice and then delivering that superiority across those vectors, productivity to fuel that superiority, constructive disruption, to always see around corners, to move to the next frontier and an agile, accountable and empowered, outcome-based organization design. Where things are different is in that strategy of constructive disruption. We have to take it to the next level.
After six strong years of performance, which John Moeller talked about in Signal, as you recall, and really putting our company in fairly rarefied air in terms of market capitalization and performance behind this strategy, we have to keep going, and we have to keep moving to that next level. There’s lots of opportunity. As I just described that that situation on Oral B, it’s a great example, 50% black bacteria left behind. That means there’s another 50%. You need to deliver less than 10% household penetration, huge upside. But we have to raise the bar even higher, and that requires constructive disruption. So that requires the next level of brand-building performance on how do you drive superiority across all these different places that you can communicate? How do you leverage new tools out there, like generative AI to be able to move faster and more effectively. How do you ensure that we merge retail and communication, because they are really coming together on e-commerce and retail media. So those are some of the areas. And then how do we organize in such a way that allows us to be able to get things done on a far more integrated basis? Those are the things that I, along with my colleagues, are working on to move to that next level of constructive disruption.
I have to say it was a it was refreshing to hear John speak about that organizational opportunity slash challenge at Signal. I think that he kind of laid down a gauntlet and said, “We have to think about everything.” That was really honest and transparent of him. You mentioned something just now that I wanted to get to. So thank you for opening the door, because everybody’s talking about AI. When I asked John about AI, his answer was pretty funny. It was a laugh line. He’s like, in some respects, I just don’t care, is what he said. Can you unpack that in terms of what that means and maybe how it applies to your role?
I think the point is, what you need to care about is the outcome you’re trying to achieve, not the tool or the technology that is available to help you achieve it. The industry that we’re in, and particularly in my line of business and marketing, there’s a new shiny object every week, and there’s a new acronym and a new piece of jargon and a new concept. And generative AI is the latest frontier on that, even though it’s been around for quite some time. So what’s important is to determine the outcome you’re trying to achieve, and how can you leverage tools to get there? That’s exactly what AI does.
When we tried to figure out, how do we better target reach consumers, and do it in such a way that can be broadly across all the different touch points possible, given the millions of places you can reach people, particularly online, do so in a way that is precise, and then cap the frequency so you don’t go back to that same person over and over again and waste money. That’s called programmatic media buying, and it uses AI. But what we’re trying to do is reach people in an unduplicated way. What we’re now seeing is the ability to create ideas and advertising across every touch point and then use something we call AI Studios, which takes the decades of research that we have and allows us to ask one question, a reaction to an ad, and then be able to compare that those reactions to all the verbatims from reactions toward this vast database to then score to see if this ad is going to be effective or not. That uses AI generative.
AI is now allowing us to be able to create concepts and also ideas more quickly by putting in the right prompts in a structure to be able to come up with more ideas and then iterate on those much faster. It generates ideas and variations of those ideas more quickly and then evaluate them. The next frontier will be doing that with visuals and advertising. So it’s a tool to achieves outcomes faster and better and more efficiently for higher degrees of effectiveness and value creation.
A lot of that was on display at Signal. As long as we’re looking forward, we get to break a little bit of news here. I understand there is some change coming to the Signal event itself in terms of when. Can you tell us all what’s coming for Signal?
First of all, it’s probably important to frame that Signal has always been around seeing around corners and finding the signals and then bringing them into our company, so we can inspire people to look at new ways of doing things and and think about how to be able to build our business by seeing what others are doing, so bringing the outside in.
We’ve evolved, as you well know. We started with generally digital marketing, and then moved into our entire business, across all vectors. This last one was probably the most, as I said, focused on the five vectors of superiority to drive profitable category growth and value creation.
We’ve been thinking about this for a while because we always said, You know what? Maybe we ought to combine Signal with our year-end meetings, the GBLC meetings, where we have all of the senior vice presidents and above come into Cincinnati and have an opportunity to be able to engage. We do Signal, find all these great external speakers, and then six weeks later, we do the year-end meetings. And we’re always searching for outside speakers for inspiration, right? But we said, what if we combine them? So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to combine these two events. So we’ll have a portion where we’ll have Signal, the plenary activity, which will have external stimulation and engagement. It’ll be open to everyone, continue to be open to everyone, and then we’ll have workshops at the same time as we’ve always done, and make those available. We’ll probably do some special workshops for the leadership so they can kind of build, go into the next couple of days on their leadership meetings, and it’ll be a great combination. We’ll get external inspiration still for everyone, and then we’ll have some leadership workshops, and we’ll have some workshops for the for the broader teams to be able to continue to move forward.
It’s going to be quite a week in September, with single and leadership meetings all that week, plus the workshops and everything else. It’ll be a bigger stage, although at the same place.
At the same place, and I think it’ll be good, because if you think about what we did this last year, we’ve been in the last couple years, we’ve had the same theme for Signal that we’ve had for the GBLC leadership meeting. But since they’re disconnected, I’m not sure the dots connected. And we want to make sure the dots connect for everyone.
It’s exciting. I’m looking forward to it. All right. Last question, as the longest serving chief brand and marketing officer, really, that I can think of in the Fortune 500 I just have to ask you, because I got you here for the first time in a few years. What’s the secret to longevity? I think the average time that is in your seat is about two or three years. You know, you’re well past that on multiples. So what’s the secret to longevity in this role?
I actually think there are three things. One is this job is about focused on the business, the full business. It’s not uniquely focused on narrow slices of marketing or brand building. Building P&Gs company of brands. Brands are the manifest in the five vectors of superiority, and those five vectors of superiority are focused on meeting consumer needs in order to be able to grow categories and drive value creation. So productivity is a major part of this. So that wheel that we talked about in terms of the strategy, that’s what this job is about. I have many conversations with CMOs, and they say, “Well, how do you how do you get your CEO and your CFO to value what you’re doing?” You focus on what the core strategy of the company is, and what the brands are, and you deliver value creation. That’s one thing.
The second point I would say is I’ve said this before in a few places, so if I’m repeating, I apologize, I pretend to fire myself every 18 months. And I rehire myself right away, so John doesn’t find out, or before he finds out. But the concept there is to try to come in fresh every 18 months. Why 18 months? Typically, it’s the average CMO timetable, but it’s also Moore’s law of doubling data every 18 months, which now I understand, doubles information every 18 months. Things change so quickly, you’ve got to come in fresh every 18 months and not be so wedded to what you’ve been doing that it gets stale. But it also honors knowledge from the past, so using all the things that you know from the past, while still looking at the future in a very fresh perspective, and that helps constantly, constructively disrupt.
The last point, I would say, is back again, my job is about serving the business, serving the people in the business, serving our consumers. So I like to focus on being useful. Be useful. When you’re useful, then everything kind of pays forward. You think less about yourself, you think more about how you can help others. That’s what this is about. In my view, this job is about being useful to others and serving and supporting. When you do that, hopefully people keep asking you for help, and I’m always happy to help.
It is always good to talk with you. Marc, thank you so much for your time. I’m looking forward to working with you on the September version of Signal. We’re gonna have to get to work pretty soon here, so I’ll let you sign off for now, but look forward to seeing you again. Thanks very much for joining us for this Signal Conversation.
Thank you, John. Thanks for everything you do for us.
