P&G on finding growth from the ‘insight behind the insight’

With brands including Pampers, Always and Gillette, P&G is one of the biggest players globally in FMCG. Yet, despite its market-leading status across a whole variety of sectors, the business is finding fresh ways to grow its categories.

Speaking at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing 2025 (2 October), P&G’s chief brand officer for Europe, Taide Guajardo, said the company’s brands are in almost nine out of 10 UK households.

“[There is] a bit of a difficult job to be done, because when consumers go to the store, they take, on average, seven seconds to decide which brand they will take with them,” she said. “It is very hard, therefore, to earn their preference and to delight them.”

She highlighted how brand-building being integrated into the business has a long history at P&G. In the 1950s, the company’s former president Neil McElroy saw that product, sales and advertising were all sitting separately and pioneered the brand manager role to bring it all together.

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This end-to-end approach still exists at P&G today, with the company activating across the business to drive brand growth.

Guajardo was joined on stage by Matt Thomas, senior director for brand function and media operations at P&G Northern Europe. Thomas shared how P&G drives growth in its highly penetrated brands by expanding its categories.

The first “secret” to growing categories that he shared was around consumer insight. He said 50% of parents of young children have to get up at night to change a leaking nappy, for example, and that less than 50% of consumers are satisfied with the cleaning performance of their current laundry detergent.

“These insights give us the ammunition and the hope as to how we can drive that market growth going forward, because we know, despite the highly penetrated categories that we operate, that consumers are still dissatisfied,” Thomas said.

He also shared how P&G harnesses “the insight behind the insight” to tap into growth opportunities. For example, the insight that doing the dishes is the second “most hated” household chore.

“Why does that matter? That is an insight but it’s not a great insight, right? Because all I’ve learned from that is that someone doesn’t like doing something with a product that we sell,” he said.

The only way you can drive market growth is by really understanding where people are currently frustrated, where are their coping strategies.

Matt Thomas, P&G

However, the “insight behind the insight” is why consumers don’t like doing the washing up. One reason for that is the length of time it takes to do dishes. This was an insight that informed the launch of Fairy Max Power washing-up liquid, which markets itself on enabling four times faster cleaning.

In just three years, the product has already delivered £52m worth of category sales, Thomas said, and has delivered 45% of all category growth within the hand dishwashing category.

Washing-up liquid is a category where P&G has extremely high penetration, he noted.

“You can say to me, how can you possibly grow a category where you’ve got 98% household penetration and people use you every single day? And the answer is, you create amazing products that are worth paying the money for, that means you’re delivering those unmet needs,” he said.

Thomas gave another example of people being frustrated by dishes coming out of dishwashers still dirty even after a wash. Consumers are adopting the “coping strategy” of pre-soaking their dishes before putting them through the dishwasher.

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“The only way you can drive market growth is by really understanding where people are currently frustrated, and what their coping strategies are. What are they doing, and how can we make sure that we’re delivering things which help them overcome those coping strategies,” Thomas said.

To overcome the frustration of having to pre-soak dishes, P&G created a Fairy product called Skip the Soak, which is a spray designed to remove tough grease or stains before the wash.

“This is a new category within hand dishwashing we’ve invented in the last nine months, and the results are, frankly, quite phenomenal, because it delivers exactly against that unmet consumer need from the insight,” Thomas said.

Within less than a year, the product has been able to drive 9% household penetration, Thomas said, and is 85% incremental to the category. In highly penetrated categories where P&G is the market leader, this is extremely impactful for the business’s growth, he said.