Clicks of knowledge
Adam Sandler’s most recent adventure on the big screen, Click, was slain by critic after critic, making one wonder why anyone would invest a night on such entertainment. Last week the people overturned the critics’ voice, awarding Click the People’s Choice Award for best film comedy. Click is an example of a product that seems to defy convention with mass appeal. Tapping into the social preferences that can oppose the critical eye is what Proctor & Gamble’s People’s Choice Awards, launched a decade ago by the giant consumer goods producer, is all about. In the spirit of the awards show, P&G has launched two social-networking efforts in an attempt to better understand what best resonates with its consumer audience.
The first networking effort is an extension of the annual awards show. The People’s Choice Community site (launched last Wednesday, a day after the show) is celebrity and fan club driven. The second networking effort, Capessa, was launched last month. Designed for Yahoo’s health section, Capessa is a forum for women to discuss subjects such as parenting, pregnancy, and weight loss. According to a recent WSJ article, the marketing on Capessa will be subtle. P&G will not run ads for its products, but will occasionally offer some links to P&G experts offering tips about specific issues such as parenting or offer a P&G newsletter on a particular subject. Indeed, the only mention of P&G on the Capessa site is a line at the bottom of Web pages that identifies Capessa as being produced by P&G Productions.
These two efforts, particularly Capessa, are not about marketing to the communities, but rather learning from them. According to the article, both new sites will act as continuing focus-group-type environments where P&G–by monitoring consumer discussions on the sites–can learn more about its target audience’s likes and dislikes and what consumers in different stages of life care about; “It’s going to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers,” according to Jim Stengel, P&G’s global marketing officer.
Not only does P&G stand to gain knowledge from the discussions and patterns of its users, but the communities themselves will likely benefit from the resources P&G brings. Both sites will be produced by P&G Productions, a unit that is best known for producing popular soap operas such as “As the World Turns” and “Guiding Light”, and will be used to capture on film the stories of select community members. Utilizing these resources, the stories will likely be choreographed in a way that better communicates the experiences and knowledge they hold.
The resources and informative approach taken by the worlds largest marketer will allow the company to better understand the consumer preferences that can often run contrary to the beliefs and conventions of product developers’ critical eyes. P&G’s efforts stand a greater success of succeeding where others have failed (including Wal-Mart’s failed teen targeted social-networking effort, “The Hub”); the choreography and purpose they bring to the chaos that typically surrounds online communities ensures that ideas and knowledge are exchanged with the appropriate lighting.
The success of P&G in fostering online exchanges of knowledge will likely pave the way for other corporate sponsored, social-networking vehicles. Their success will rest squarely on their ability to not only interpret what’s hot and what’s not, but to provide the structure and resources to the knowledge they contain in order to set them apart from the garbage bins of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube…
Nick,
What an interesting twist to the notion of collaboration to learn. I’ve always been thinking in terms of sharing knowledge as opposed to learning about customer needs.
Smart!
Tom