ORLANDO, Florida – In this purpose-driven marketing age, it’s only natural to sell toilet paper without showing or even talking about it. Instead, simply focus on things like grandparents, single moms and step parents. This is the path taken by Georgia-Pacific as part of its overall effort to portray women more accurately, according to CMO Douwe Bergsma.
“It translated into how we did our media planning and that we aligned ourselves with partners and publishers and media content that portrayed women accurately and that was more family friendly,” Bergsman explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
As AgencySpy reports, Georgia-Pacific via the Deutsch agency decided to take a different approach not only to selling paper products but metering out emotion at the right times and in the right places.
“Angel Soft started off with campaign where we highlighted and celebrated the challenges that single moms have,” Bergsma says. “Another video series for Angel Soft was about the challenges that step parents have with children that do not automatically love you back.”
Whereas G-P traditionally had been very functionally driven about promoting products like Dixie accessories, “We switched to recommending and inspiring people to be more here while they are at dinner. Put away their phones and connect with your mom and connect with your daughter,” says Bergsma.
The marketer’s media mix still consists in large part of traditional TV and video and has become “a little bit more emotional” in its online content compared with TV, according to Bergsma. “So what you see for Angel Soft on TV is different from what you see for Angel Soft in the social media space,” he says.
When it comes to in-store shopper marketing, G-P’s messaging is more functional than on TV for example. “So it’s kind of the closer you get to the point of purchase the more functional we get. The farther away we are from the point of purchase, the more emotional we are,” Bergsma says.
We interviewed him at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
