P&G Advertising Strategy Essay Example for Free

PG Advertising Strategy Essay For marketing students at IIM Ahmedabad, 9th of January, 2011, is anything but a typical Sunday. They have resisted the temptation to join their batchmates in a lazy basketball game and appear oblivious to the cheerful riotous frenzy of the kite festival on the banks of the Sabarmati. Instead they have been pitted against each other all morning in a brand exercise organised and masterminded by PG. The prize? A dinner date for the teams with a man responsible for running the marketing function of one of the most powerful FMCG companies on the planet, Marc Pritchard , global marketing and brand building officer, PG. However, even students who do not make the cut get a chance to experience Pritchard firsthand when he addresses a respectably packed hall that evening. Soon after he’s done, the questions fly thick and fast. These include some potentially embarrassing posers. How does PG feel, one student wants to know, about its campaigns being ambushed by its archrival HUL? Few people have forgotten the teaser campaign about a mystery shampoo last year (that was revealed to be PG’s Pantene) being hijacked by Dove from the HUL stable. Pritchard opts to take the high road on this one: â€Å"We can’t prevent any competitor from ambush (surprise attack). But if you focus on the consumer, what your brand is doing to serve the consumer and if you have a big idea, you will win most of the time. † And that’s a running theme through pretty much everything that Pritchard has to say. Whether he’s addressing students at IIM-A, the media or an audience at the Cannes Lions Festival, he’s a tireless champion of brands serving consumers or â€Å"purpose driven branding. † PG spent most of the 1990s establishing a global footprint. Now, according to Pritchard, it finally has the chance to live up to its purpose. The first step was getting senior management to define a purpose for each of the brands in the PG stable: a blueprint on how the company could touch and improve lives. Pritchard explains, â€Å"We still have a core benefit but are thinking more broadly on how we can deliver it. We are very focussed on sharpening what the brands stand for, identifying human insights that can translate into big ideas. † Bold Gamble However those prepared for a lofty chronicle of CSR and corporate do-gooding are likely to step back, a little disappointed. Pritchard’s showreel of purpose driven work from PG includes pretty much every big campaign the FMCG has come up with recently. This includes the highly awarded work on Old Spice with its cocky ‘The man your man could smell like’ tagline. Pritchard says, â€Å"Purpose is much more than a cause or a corporate responsibility. We deliberately focused on making people define purpose as how brands improve everyday lives. A cause is just a piece of it as opposed to the whole thing. † This helps take purpose out of an ivory tower. It’s no longer something that resonates only with consumers in developed markets, fed up with hard sell, looking for corporates to do something more. Instead it could even be used as an effective go to market strategy. Which is pretty much the case with Pampers. Pritchard defines the brand’s purpose as â€Å"to improve a baby’s healthy, happy development. Its benefit is dryness and comfort that allows babies to sleep, play and explore more. When they do that, they develop better. By the way, it’s also making their mom’s lives a lot better if they sleep through the night. † To bring this purpose to life, PG sends pediatricians to villages with tips on how to help the baby sleep and advice on immunization, besides using this interface as a sampling opportunity. The one pack = one vaccine program run in association with the UNICEF is tied into this larger purpose too. â€Å"It helps bring the community of moms together since they like to help other moms,† says Pritchard. Even ‘Women Against Lazy Stubble’ for Gillette, a homegrown campaign, has something larger driving it. Purpose takes on a more meaningful role in developing markets,† he explains. The vans that propagate the program give young men tips on shaving, how to dress, handle an interview and talk to women. Purpose coincides well with PG making a concerted push into non-city markets not just in India but in other countries like Brazil and China that have a yawning urban-rural divide. PG is focusing on stores because it’s the first moment of truth for the rural consumer. Pritchard says, â€Å"We market back from there to create awareness to get them to that point. † There are approximately 7 million high frequency shops in India and PG has covered 4 million of these so far. A fair amount of product and package development is being done to cater to this segment. Using the store as the starting point also helps make the entire process less sporadic. Pritchard states, â€Å"It means you are always on. We have consolidated the number of distributors into a core highly capable, powerful group. We give them the material, knowledge and know how on display. † India is in some ways at the vanguard of PG’s rural drive. One of the things pioneered in India was generating more household trial. Pritchard admits, â€Å"It was Sumeet Vohra (chief marketing officer – Asia, PG) who created this machine to identify what it was going to take to get these products in the households, as well as the tools to measure performance. Much of what we learnt in India has been exported to other markets like Africa for example. † The recent acquisition of Paras by Reckitt Benckiser proves that multinational giants look to India for a lot more than its large consumer base. Pritchard gives a diplomatic answer when asked if there are any local heroes that he’s got an eye on. But PG invariably unearths little jewels with every acquisition, he says. Like Koleston which was not very big globally but strong in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, around the time Wella was acquired. PG took the brand to Mexico, Europe and are now launching in India. Pritchard goes further back for his next example: Richardson Vicks in 1985 had a very tiny brand called Pantene that accounted for $70 million in sales. He says, â€Å"We put the new technology in, and launched it in Taiwan and came up with Pantene Pro V. Now it is over a $3 billion brand. † To be chosen for the big push, the brand needs equity and it helps to have some sort of a story. Like Max Factor’s SK2 which was made with Pitera, a yeast extract used by monks in Japan which kept their skin in a better condition. â€Å"We built from that story, tested it in different markets and now it’s more than half a billion dollars and growing like crazy,† says Pritchard. In a classical FMCG battle, market observers may be tempted to brand PG as a pacifist, with hardly any aggressive countermoves towards competition. But, combining brand awareness with social programmes, driving its brands further into the hinterland and acquiring a knack of creating billion dollar brands, Pritchard knows that the company is pushing the right levers.

Jean Genet’s The Balcony Essay -- Literature Writing Papers

Jean Genet’s The Balcony The Methods of Cultural Appropriation in Jean Genet’s â€Å"The Balcony† The now-famous story of Jean Genet’s ascension to literary sainthood begins with an accusation. The young Genet, an orphan and an outcast in the rural Morvan, was subject to suspicion and, due to his dubious origins, finally accused of thievery. However, instead of shaking the label, Genet decided to embrace it to fulfill all the mordant potential that it promised. From this inaugurating act sprang the literary Genet. As Sartre says in his monumental study Saint Genet: â€Å"For him, to compose is to recreate himself†(584). As a result, Genet’s persona is as famous (or notorious) as his works are. Genet’s early initiation into a mental, if not physical, sort of underworld predicates his awareness of the problems of subcultural existence in a society ruled by signs, symbols, and rituals. His writing often focuses on the detailed qualities of inanimate objects, attributing meaning to them and in the process forging almost personal relationships with them. This is important because Genet is highly aware of the effects of the proliferation of images in the media and their uses for various interests. In his literary career, Genet moves from a consciousness of the importance of symbols and images in identifying and defining a particular subcultural milieu to an awareness of the ways in which these symbols can be appropriated by dominant culture, thus losing their subversive edge. It is in this way that dominant culture disarms potentially dangerous subversive or criminal elements. â€Å"The Balcony† illustrates to a superlative degree his awareness of image and symbol for subcultural elements and the danger of approp... ...ame time casts a leery eye towards the use of images to facilitate this process. However, by exposing the means of appropriation Genet allows leeway for re-appropriation, a way for subcultures to assert their own self-representation. This leads to a kind of cultural barter or negotiation between subculture and dominant culture; the methods of this barter must therefore become the primary concern of subcultures. Works Cited Genet, Jean. â€Å"The Balcony†. New York: Grove Press. 1966. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet. New York: Mentor Books. 1963. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. 1979. Plotz, John. â€Å"Objects of Abjection: The Animation of Difference in Jean Genet’s Novels†. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 1. (Spring, 1998). 100-118. White, Edmund. Genet: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1993.

The Importance of Setting

The path to becoming an adult is lined with a variety of childhood and adolescent experiences, some more painful than others. In T. Coraghessen Boyle’s short story, â€Å"Greasy Lake,† Boyle masterfully uses the setting and the protagonist’s experience to teach us an old but vital lesson: those who choose not to learn and grow from their past mistakes are destined to repeat them, and thus will never mature and realize their true potential.At the beginning of the story, the main character (who also happens to be the narrator) depicts his adolescence as â€Å"a time when courtesy†¦went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste† (621). The three thought of themselves as dangerous characters, riding around town wreaking havoc. However, it seems unclear to the main character and his two friends that in reality, they are not actually bad characters. Really bad characters don’t drive their â€Å"parents†™ whining station wagons† (621) or read intellectual French novels by Andre Gide.Boyle gives us a general thought that these three boys are just your ordinary, everyday, misguided juvenile delinquents with an unclear view of what it really means to be a man. Later in the story, the narrator depicts a scene at the main setting of â€Å"Greasy Lake. † There, the three boys provoke who is described as the â€Å"very bad character† (623). The events that took place led the three to realize the ugly truth: they are nothing more than just three kids on an adventure for the night; little did they know what was in store for them.After a lengthy description of the fight that took place between the four characters, the three boys find themselves attempting to rape the girl that was accompanying the â€Å"very bad character. † Luckily, before they can go any farther, another vehicle pulls into the scene, scaring the boys as the flee away. They all run in different directions, leaving them all separated from each other. The main character, with no place else to hide, plunges into the greasy lake.The water is completely contaminated; â€Å"it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires† (622). The setting of â€Å"Greasy Lake† contributes to the plot in a sense of the troubles of the three teenage boys. Much of the story takes place at Greasy Lake, which is not an ordinary, everyday, swimming with the family type of lake. There are crowded trees, which draws a picture of a dark forest with very little light seeping through. The island in the middle of the lake has little or no vegetation, giving the reader a feeling of death.It is also littered with things such as beer cans, broken glass, and bonfire remains. These are items that make you think of loss of control, violence, or even destruction. These ideas could surely lead to something bad happening . The water itself is described as â€Å"fetid and murky† (622). There are two different aspects of time to consider when looking at â€Å"Greasy Lake. † First of all, there is the fact that it is 2 a. m. The middle of the night is commonly a time of day when bad things occur. It is probably considered that the good, peaceful people are at home in bed.Therefore, if someone is up and about they are most likely wreaking havoc. Secondly, there is the year that the story takes place. It was written in the eighties, and it takes place in a time when â€Å"it was good to be bad† (621). Therefore, it is likely that something bad is sure to occur. The setting also serves a very important purpose to most stories by evoking a certain atmosphere. Work Cited Boyle, T. Coraghessan. â€Å"Greasy Lake. † 621 Kirszner, Laurie G. , and Stephen R. Mandell, eds. Literature: Reading, Writing. 8th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2013 Print.

Grow Your Own ( Gyo ) Teacher Programs - 1953 Words

Grow Your Own (GYO)Teacher Programs: A Review of Program Effectiveness NEA Research This review provides descriptive summaries of six evaluation studies on the effectiveness of Grow Your Own (GYO) teacher recruitment and preparation programs. The summaries include one nation-wide assessment of GYO programs and 5 state-wide assessments. Most all GYO programs included in these evaluations are operating in rural districts and communities, and most are geared toward hard-to-staff schools and subjects. Overall, the evaluation studies suggest that, while these programs effectively improve teaching and learning, the retention of the fellows in some of the programs seems problematic. National GYO Program Evaluation Dadisman, Kimberly;†¦show more content†¦In addition, most of the programs in the evaluation focused on recruiting and training teachers to fill positions in high-needs areas, such as math, science, English Language Learners, and special education. The programs also recruited a variety of participants, including career changers with backgrounds in math and science; minority teachers for placement in minority schools; bilingual paraprofessionals, parents and community members; and certified teachers being recertified in special education. In addressing the key concerns of teacher recruitment and retention, the GYO programs focus on the recruitment of community residents with roots in the local area, and focus on intensive mentoring of the program participants. Mentoring was found to be a key component of the programs with college level mentors helping program students achieve certification, and mentors in the schools helping them adjust to their new positions. By recruiting locally and focusing the teacher preparation programs on rural education, the evaluation concluded the GYO programs were highly supportive of key issues of recruitment and retention. Strong partnerships between the GYO programs and local school districts are also credited with helping both recruitment and mentoring of program students. One weakness in many of the GYO programs was found to be the funding stream currently in place to keep the programs operating. Although the majority receive state and federal funding,