Proposed Solution

Our solution: the ISC Marketing Planner, a digital platform featuring a sortable library of marketing tactics and resources to help the sales team effectively build strategic marketing programs for their retailers and deliver on P&G's business objectives. The planner tool also helps upper management better support AEs to the ultimate goal of growing P&G's market share.

Product needs

• User login for security of site (no user features associated with login)

• 30+ media tactics including sample image, key features and filter tags

• Filter system for tactics based on criteria that will help P&G AEs narrow down tactics they are looking for

• Ability to save individual tactics as PPT files (image + copy);

• Contact form for help/guidance

Discovery & strategy

Based on our initial brief and conversations with high level stakeholders on the ISC team, we put together a preliminary user story and wireframes of key features: a landing page for marketing tactics, which displays high level information about every tactic along with a robust filtering system allowing AEs to find tactics specific to their needs; and a tactic detail page, which includes additional information to help them decide if this is the right tactic for them and take further action. 

We then organized out a series of interviews with AEs to ensure we understand their process and journey from determining a media plan for their retailer partners to gathering tactics to approving and executing the plan. We also used these conversations to collect information of what type of filters they would be most likely to use in searching for potential marketing tactics. We conducted hour-long interviews with 6 AEs who cover sales regions in Texas, the New York metropolitan area, and the Midwest. In speaking with the interviewees, we uncovered common threads among work and planning style, marketing needs, approach to strategy and challenges. We also heard several opportunities for additional exploration.

Interview findings

• Juggling sales/marketing hats along with short planning cycles and last-minute opportunities mean that AE's need a library of turnkey or customizable tactics/solutions to best support their customers

• While AEs independently create their own marketing plans, many default to P&G's pre-planned quarterly programs to fill out their calendars. 

• While AEs have some flexibility in their budgets, they are using that money across many scenarios (not just marketing)

• AEs want to better guide their customers on innovation/digital but don't know how or don't have the tools. 

• Speed (how soon can I do it), category and market fit seem to be most important criteria for determining tactics, with cost being secondary

user issues uncovered

• User has to make multiple decisions up-front to find content that meets their needs. Placing the onus on the user vs curating content/experience could lead to potential confusion and frustration

• Tactical-only content isn’t helpful for brand or category-related needs

• No way to easily identify ISC leadership’s recommended tactics

Final Product

Coming out of our user interviews, we knew AEs wanted more guidance in choosing tactics. We needed to revise the user flow to introduce an intermediate step between signing in and jumping right into tactics.

We then worked with a number of stakeholders in creative production, media buying, social media management, and analytics to populate our library of common marketing tactics and finalize our filter criteria. In the process, we discovered that most tactics could be executed at a wide range of prices and timelines--there were too many variables to put an exact dollar amount or time estimate on each tactic; when we tried to group tactics into a few set ranges, we found that most tactics fell into the same middle group which meant users weren’t able to narrow down the options in a meaningful way.

We decided a slider would be the best way to filter for time and cost--selecting a maximum dollar or time amount would include all tactics up to the selected point. Though stakeholders had initially been excited about the idea of filtering by store coverage, it was difficult to rule out tactics based on market size and AEs were already likely to select tactics for their smaller retailers based on lower budgets and shorter lead times. To better support the educational goal of the planner, we also added the ability to filter by business objective (also featured on the home page) and a toggle for recommended tactics that can be executed quickly and easily.

Once users have set their search parameters and selected a tactic, we wanted to ensure the information provided was well organized and easy to scan. At the top of each tactic detail page, users can find a sample image, key criteria (cost, time, and format), and a brief summary of what the tactic is and how to use it. Recommended tactics also feature a small label denoting that status. Though the primary goal of the planner tool is education, the tactic detail pages offer 2 potential additional actions for the user: they can download the detail page contents in powerpoint format to add to their sell-in decks, or they can reach out to get started on executing the tactic—the contact us button forwards the user to a form submission.

Next steps

• Plan builder: we hope to take the planner concept a step further and design a new feature that allows AEs to select programs a la carte to create a marketing plan, tabulate costs and lead time, and submit their plan for review by supervisors and/or retailer partners. 

• P&G expansion: other teams within P&G have expressed interest in adapting the planner to meet their specific sales and marketing needs

• White label: we see enormous potential in offering the tool we’ve developed as a product for other agencies, as well as small to mid-size businesses without an in-house team or agency partner—we’re in the process of white labeling the marketing planner to offer as a SAAS model or customized branded implementation, depending on customer needs.