Procter & Gamble, the fast-moving consumer goods manufacturer, believes that multicultural audiences represent a billion-dollar opportunity for its brands.

Marc Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2019 Multicultural Marketing & Diversity Conference in San Diego, California.

The company, he reported, has long “known it was important to respect and serve” all consumers, both from a societal perspective and an economic one.

“But we haven’t always appreciated the relative opportunities across multicultural consumer groups,” he said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Procter & Gamble’s four steps for enhanced multicultural marketing.)

In quantifying the scale of the opportunity, he asserted, “we had to disaggregate the data to get a clear view of the situation.”

And in measuring the performance of its brands among Black, Latino and Asian consumers in the US compared with the average across the general population, it made some profound discoveries.

“We established a system to measure market share, the market share ‘gap’ versus the national average, user growth, and sales growth among multicultural consumers,” said Pritchard.

And P&G, in fact, recorded a strong performance among these demographics – with 17 of its top 20 brands ranking first or second, and positive results also taking shape at the granular level with distinct cohorts.

“That’s encouraging, but we still have substantial gaps to close and opportunities to realise – especially when you consider the demographic and spending power growth projections of multicultural consumers,” Pritchard said.

Elaborating on this theme, he explained that if P&G’s brands matched their general-market performance with multicultural audiences, the financial impact would be considerable.

“The size of the prize is big – up to $1 billion in extra sales just by achieving market shares equal to the national average on all of our brands.

“That could represent up to three extra points of sales growth on our North American business and would significantly contribute to more market growth.”

WARC