While watching the Olympics and all of its glorious ads, one of the very notable “Thank You Mom” commericals would constantly come on. Not only would I ponder, what about thank you dad, but I started to wonder what were P&G’s other brands? Once I looked into their company’s brand page, I noticed tons of other P&G products were squished together between commercial breaks. Since they are sponsor of the London Olympic 2012 games, I wanted to break down these individual brands and steer away from P&G’s big corporate scope of “Thank You Moms”.
Here is a look into how some of P&G’ household brands are covering the Olympics:
Old Spice:
Old Spice kicks the games off by what it does best, incorporating their own quirky humor into the games. First step, setting up a spot light on Table Tennis player Tim Wang and really talking to their audience.
Thank you Old Spice. Here’s to American pride, table tennis, and photoshopping. Old spice continues to challenge and question the games especially when it comes to smelling good.
Mr. Clean:
Mr. Clean best encompasses brand voice, which I like to think is an old man’s voice or perhaps the voice on anyone on Facebook that shares way too many useless status updates. It’s like he is a real person! Mr. Clean really doesn’t try to do anything different for the Olympics except continually asking lots and lots of questions about it, as only an annoying Facebook friend would probably do.
Charmin:
Charmin’s Facebook page is usually up to some kind of bathroom humor, yet with the start of the Olympics I noticed a challenge that faced them. How do you package together the Olympics and bathroom jokes? Charmin had to accomplish this by thinking outside the box.
The result: Bathrooms with London flare. Engaging fans with their finds on some posh terminology and British bathroom culture.
Duracell:
Technology and Powering up the Olympics, this is Duracell’s angle for the London games. Duracell has created a Virtual Stadium where Olympians and their families are able to view videos, photos and messages from online fans on a screen using Kinect sensor technology. They are using Facebook to not only promote the campaign but to engage their audience in the real-time interactions with the Olympian’s family members, as shown in the above Facebook post. I only wish there were more than just one of these post, I love behind the scenes photography.
Takeaways:
I have learned quite a bit about this company after this research. Not only did I have no idea some of these brands were nestled under P&G but I have found that what their brand’s are doing within social is very different. I would have naturally expected every brand to have the same structure, same voice, same social media strategies, but no. To my surprise they have executed each product differently taking on an individual personalities. Looking beyond P&G’s core “Thank you Mom” campaign, this experiment helped me see each product differently, while understanding the importance of having a unique brand voice.
Nicole Monahan 