Remember the four P’s of marketing?
- Product
- Placement
- Promotion
- Price
Sometimes as marketers it can be easy to think about marketing too narrowly. How can I make a better commercial? How can I offer the best deal? How can I get people excited about motor oil?
The four P’s show us that marketers have many choices when it comes to selling a product or service effectively. One case study I really like, which I often mention to encourage new ways of thinking about marketing, is the Huggies diaper example.
Until Kimberly-Clark introduced Huggies, Proctor & Gamble owned the marketplace for disposable diapers with Pampers. They controlled over 80% of the market at the time.
Think about trying to launch a new product in a market dominated by a major player. The usual marketing tactic might be to promote heavily to persuade people to switch brands. However, the marketing team at Huggies had a different plan. They researched and discovered that many parents receive Pampers when their baby is born in the hospital, and those parents often stick with Pampers for years.
So what if they could get hospitals to switch to Huggies? Would the parents who were given Huggies in the hospital switch to Pampers, or would they stick with Huggies? Kimberly-Clark thought they would keep the same loyalty to Huggies that they’d previously shown with Pampers. And they were right.
Huggies was aggressively marketed and sold to hospitals at below market cost so that hospitals would start using them over Pampers. The strategy worked. Within ten years of implementing the hospital strategy, Huggies cut Pampers market share almost in half. And the fight between the two brands continues to this day.