So it was apparently P&G (Procter & Gamble) week for the Brand Center with an info session on Wednesday and an applied learning activity on Friday. Info sessions are always good for two reasons:

1) The opportunity to put names with faces of recruiters that will be visiting campus for interviews next year and to learn a little more about each company’s intern program.

2) Free product (yes, in B-school we refer to stuff in very technical terms so stuff or things are not options. We also use words like synergy and anthropological because we can.)

P&G brought no shortage of product. We literally walked out of the info with our hands full of various products. I walked home with a box of Puffs, Bounty paper towels, Dawn soap, travel size Tide (because you never know when you will need that), Covergirl makeup (for the fiancée, not me), Febreeze-scented Mr. Clean wipes (that is what we like to call synergy), and my personal highlight, the new Gillette Fusion Power Phenom razor with Duracell battery. I have to say that the funniest scene though was Jon Jones, Joe Worley, and myself walking home because Joe was carrying not one, but two, packs of Charmin toilet paper. Needless to say, we got a few looks and a number of laughs on that walk. Reminded me of the walk of shame as an undergrad, except Joe was carrying toilet paper.

On Friday, P&G hosted a joint applied learning session for the Brand Center and the A.C. Nielsen Center for Marketing Research. Carrie Rathod (CBPM ’05) returned to campus to help teach the session on ethnographic research. I had absolutely no idea what this was until today. Essentially, we were given the opportunity to follow a consumer through the grocery store while he or she selected hair care products. Carrie works in the consumer hair care category so this was very pertinent to her team. We would ask the consumer questions about their buying behavior or why they picked one product over the next. Our goal was to better understand the buying decisions a consumer goes through when selecting shampoo, conditioner, hair spray, detangler (not my word, but my consumer’s), mousse, and volumenizer (not sure on the spelling).

Typically, I am anti-stalking, but I will admit this was a very cool project. It was amazing how much insight we were able to gain in an hour of conversation with a typical consumer. When we returned, our teams met as a group and put together action plans for P&G to better position various products or adjust in-store marketing campaigns. These are exactly the type of projects that actual Brand Managers and CKMs (Consumer Knowledge Marketers or researchers) do on a regular basis. It is one thing to talk about this stuff in class, but another to actually do it.

All in all, great day and great week despite a killer Data to Decisions project. Time to enjoy the Fall weather before cold temps and snow flurries become the norm. Cheers.