Customer analysis is as essential to the marketing of existing products as it is to new product design and development. In 1998, P&G initially leamed this lesson the hard way when it decided to expand the Pampers brand into China. Assuming that parents would prioritize price point over quality, the company launched a less expensive but poorer made version of the product. Sales lagged, and P&G eventually determined that Pampers’ consumers in China valued quality-based attributes like convenience, dryness, and softness as much as low product cost. This drove P&G to establish a new principle of “Delight, don’t dilute” when it came to product development in emerging markets and resulted in P&G successfully creating a Pampers line for China that delivered both good price and quality. Still, P&G was faced with the larger task of trying to change Chinese consumers’ purchasing habits. 

Around the same time, the company was conducting in-depth research among new parents that revealed two key insights: that the quality of a baby’s sleep and its impact on the baby’s development was a real concern. To understand whether this insight could be connected to Pampers’ attempted expansion in China, P&G commissioned a study at the Beijing Children’s Hospital's Sleep Research Center. The study showed that babies wearing Pampers fell asleep 30 percent faster, slept an extra 30 minutes every night, and had 50 percent less disruption throughout the night. 

Data from this research drove the Pampers team to launch the “Golden Sleep” campaign in 2007. The campaign’s objective was to frame disposable diapers as aides to quality sleep. P&G set up extensive advertising, mass carnivals, and in-store campaigns in urban areas, yet the cornerstone was getting women to post a picture of their baby sleeping on the Pampers website. Pampers collected so many photos that they broke the Guinness World Record for photomontages. Over 200,000 responses were received and subsequently displayed in a 7,000 square foot collection hung in a retail store in Shanghai.........

Questions:

1. Do you think “Delight, don’t dilute” is a principle that P&G can easily apply to other emerging markets? Why or why not? What customer analysis tool would be most helpful in making this determination? 

2. Why were the photos of sleeping babies more effective than just reporting P&G research reports?