AFTER BIG STINK OVER
DRY MAX, P&G SAYS ITS
SALES ARE STRONGER
HOWOFTENAMI
CHANGEDDAILY?
6. 3
U.S.
U.K.
3.73
Improved social media, ‘Miracles’ campaign
helped turn around negative buzz for Pampers
GERMANY
■ BY JACK NEFF jneff@adage.com
WHEN PROCTER & GAMBLE Co.
launched its Pampers Dry Max line
last year, it billed the thinner diaper as
the biggest category innovation in a
quarter century. But the launch also
unleashed a controversy as a small but
vocal group of parents blamed the line
for severe diaper rash.
Although Dry Max critics never
numbered more than the low five figures on Facebook—a tiny percentage
compared to the 8 million babies age 2
or younger at any given time in the
U.S.—they generated outsize publicity
that got national news coverage. For a
time it seemed as if the uproar was
hurting Pampers sales—or at least not
helping. Rival Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s
blue jeans-style diapers for Huggies
generated a bigger sales bump last
spring and summer with a small cosmetic change vs. Pampers’ vaunted
reinvention of the diaper.
So a year later,
what came of the
stink over Dry
Max? P&G contends it came out
smelling like a
rose.
Pampers’ all-outlet market
share in the U.S.
reached its highest level in 10
years in the fiscal
year ended June
30, up 2. 1 points
to 31.9%,
according to the
company, while
shares for Huggies and private label
both declined during the period, according to P&G. Those figures don’t jibe
with SymphonyIRI data showing
Pampers trailing both value-priced sibling Luvs and Huggies for the four-, 12-
and 52-week periods ended Aug. 7. But
the SymphonyIRI data does not include
Walmart, club or dollar stores.
Nor does it include e-commerce,
where P&G has made a particularly
hard push. Amazon is a top 10 Pampers
account and diapers are one of the
strongest packaged-goods categories.
Pampers’ average score in e-commerce
reviews—where it took a beating early
on in the Dry Max rollout—is now up
to 4. 5 on a 5 scale vs. 2. 5 a year ago, the
company says.
The Dry Max name disappeared
recently from Pampers packages, part of
a normal rotation in packaging and
products as Pampers launched its “three-
way-fit” improvement for Cruisers,
spokesman Bryan McCleary said. The
revamped diapers look a little thicker
than the Dry Max version, but he said
that owes to a new back sheet akin to
those on the Swaddlers line for younger
infants being added to Cruisers, not a
change in the basic Dry Max design.
FRANCE
5.66 5.06 5. 15 6.45 6. 3 4.44 3.84 9.03 Source:Procter&Gamble
ARGENTINA
PHILIPPINES
SAUDI ARABIA
INDIA
RUSSIA
JAPAN
Facebook actually believed we would do
something to hurt babies.” To be sure,
public skepticism about corporate
motives can be hard to fathom amid the
purpose-driven-marketing drive at
P&G, where folks inside the building
get a daily dose of the company’s
“touch and improve more lives more
often in more places”
mantra.
So much of Pampers’
“Miracles” campaign, an
online, social media, TV
and print campaign that
started last year focused
on Hispanic consumers
and expanded this spring
to the general market,
focused on showing the
world that the people
behind the brand
weren’t so bad after all.
The TV and online
ad as well as social-media campaign aim at
putting a human face,
tone and voice behind
the brand. Included are
a variety of “pay it forward” gifts to
new parents, often identified from posts
to the brand’s Facebook wall, including
care packages for parents of infants or
nurse teams at neonatal intensive care
units or “golden tickets” for a year of
diapers and wipes in random sample
packs of Swaddlers. When a mom
opened one of those packs bought during pregnancy after the deal expired,
Pampers made good on the year’s supply anyway.
Posts on the brand’s Facebook wall
have included updates about the pregnancy and childbirth for the community manager and pictures of kids from
others on the brand team. The brand
assembled a Pampers Baby Board of
mom bloggers to help spread word
about the Pampers Little Miracle
Missions, through which the brand also
encourages others to do something nice
for parents of newborns.
All that has helped turn around the
negative buzz for Pampers. But the reality is that the category turns over quickly as parents move in and out of child
rearing, so last year’s product hit or yesterday’s feel-good story won’t necessarily have much impact in a year or two.
Economy’s latest
casualty? Baby
bottoms: Diaper
rash cream sales
One of the
biggest
surprises for
P&G out of
the Dry Max
controversy
… was that
“people on
Facebook
actually
believed we
would do
something
to hurt
babies.”
on the increase
DIAPER RASH from p. 1
would be more reluctant to do so.
Unemployment has been persistently
high, and diapering, with costs estimated at $1,500 annually, is one of the
biggest line items on the new baby
ledger.
For its part, Pampers marketer
Procter & Gamble is having none of the
blame-the-parents theory. A
spokesman said in an email that the
company hasn’t identified a trend in
the U.S. toward people changing dia-
pers less often, though it has observed
Pampers began to
surface when P&G
started rolling out
significantly changed diapers in late
2009 without changing the packaging
or otherwise alerting consumers. P&G
made the move because it takes
months to totally change production
lines, and it didn’t change packaging
until the process is complete, even if
that meant shipping new diapers in old
packaging.
Sales of diaper-rash
cream are up for the third
straight year, even
though the number of
babies has kept declining.
parents trying to potty train their
youngsters earlier to save money.
As a possible guide for parental
quality benchmarking, P&G
research finds U.S. babies get their
diapers changed on average 6. 3
times daily. That’s more than the
normally fastidious Germans ( 5.06
times daily) or the French ( 5. 15)
and way more than the Russians
( 3.84), but not quite so attentive as
the Japanese ( 6.45).
