The Central American jungle country of Belize and the manicured neighborhoods of Loveland are thousands of miles and worlds apart, but not so different in at least one way.
"There's few universals, but cleanliness is one of them," says Andrew Manning, who has spent time in both jungles and kitchens as a cultural anthropologist working for Procter & Gamble, a company with a vested interest in cleanliness.
Manning, a Ph.D. in anthropology who has studied shaman rituals in Belize, now puts his insights into human behavior to use for P&G, figuring out why consumers do what they do. "The same skills I used in San Felipe, Belize, I've used in Loveland, Ohio, watching someone clean a floor," he says.
His anthropological learnings are used by P&G scientists, designers and marketers to make and sell products that consumers will buy. Manning recently summed up his job to a luncheon of the American Marketing Association's Cincinnati chapter: "I listen to consumers, and I use what they say to help create products."
Manning has wandered through the maze-like Hutong, winding, dense, urban neighborhoods in China, to figure out why Tide wasn't selling so well there. He learned that Tide's aggressive up-scale advertising needed a remake to play well in these neighborhoods, where a frugal lifestyle, slow pace and family-oriented social life dominate. The result: an about-face in P&G's Tide marketing in China and a bigger market share.
When P&G launched the Swiffer Wet Jet, the TV campaign featured a mom dancing her way through cleaning the floor with the new appliance and the tag- line, "Stop cleaning, start Swiffering." But when sales hit a plateau, Manning went to work in the kitchens of Madeira and Loveland analyzing housewives at work.
What he unearthed - "cleaning is serious business; we weren't conveying this," he says - led to a product redesign and a new campaign with the tagline, "Swiffer gives cleaning a whole new meaning."
The ad featured a comparison of how clean white socks fared on a mop-cleaned floor versus a Swiffered one. That touch was inspired by a Madeira housewife, who worried about the floor when her white sock-wearing mother came to visit.
"Every bit of that came from consumers," Manning says. "Right down to the socks."
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