When Procter & Gamble lowered its sales outlook in the middle of last month, it offered up the most traditional, generic excuses for what was wrong...and what it intended to do about it. The one novel item in the announcement garnered no more media scrutiny than the lame rationale that surrounded it.
The company is suffering from pantry deloading.
No, I'm not kidding. According to the Wall Street Journal's investigative reporting on the subject, pantry deloading is a common term in the consumer products industry, and it refers to the syndrome of consumers actually using the stuff on their cupboard shelves instead of simply adding to them.
It never occurred to me that consumer products marketing was dependent on an ever spiraling upward escalation in the items stuffed in pantries. Did you?
It seems that consumer consumption of products is a bad thing for P&G's premium brands; when the caps need to come off, the boxtops torn, and the packages otherwise opened, folks are opting for lower-priced brands and store brands (called "private label"). Perhaps P&G brands are purchased more as prized possessions, meant to be preserved and enjoyed...perhaps prominently displayed for family and friends to appreciate?
Pantry deloading. What an intriguing concept. So what is P&G going to do about it?
- Coming out with new permutations of its premium brands (and new ones altogether)
- Beating up the media to get better advertising rates
Just how these actions address the issue of pantry deloading, the company hasn't said If consumers don't feel the need to buy premium brands currently, what makes P&G think that they'll want more choices? And getting better ad rates might lower the cost of marketing, but it has no correlation to its efficacy; brands that don't compel people to purchase don't get more compelling if the advertising cost less.
I'm sure that I'm missing a lot on this one. P&G has driven brand marketing in consumer packaged goods for a long time. It effectively invented the idea of a soap opera, and has recently won awards at Cannes.
But relevance and utility are drivers of consumer purchase these days (I'd wager that they always were, only less obviously so when times were more flush). Premium brands can't just offer to make you feel better...but rather, they must do things better, faster, more often, longer, etc. "Need is the new want" in this networked economy of ours, and a price surcharge for a brand name without some substantive, survive-the-light-of-day benefits just won't cut it any longer.
It sure won't combat that nasty pantry deloading going on.
JSB, I thought I was the only one undergoing "pantry deloading" -- now that the practice has a name, probably more of us will cop to it. ...
I'm not a person to toss out an almost used bottle for a full one, so deloading won't make me use things longer. What it DOES do is let me see the things I buy and don't use (especially those impulse purchases of fancy pasta sauce) and it makes me FEEL more frugal.That feeling may or may not translate into spending less the next time I'm at the grocer.
When I worked at P&G, we called it "maintaining household inventory". The idea wa that if you had lots of, say, Pampers, you'd use them "freely" rather than stingily...leading to more frequent changing, more frequent purchases, etc. The real problem will come if, after we deload, we start to stretch and thin, using less overall.
Posted by: cv harquail | January 22, 2009 at 06:54 PM
I think that "pantry deloading" probably carries some weight. When you're about three quarters of the way through a bottle of dish soap, you buy a new bottle. Rather than using up the rest of the old one, you start using the new one. It's ridiculous, but the feel of a full bottle is more pleasing than the feel of an empty one. People are now actually using everything they have, rather than wasting a small portion in favor a new, full product.
Posted by: Matt J. | January 22, 2009 at 12:31 PM