Customer intimacy by UPC and P&G

Yesterdag I had a presentation for the Dutch department of Finance. It was a very interesting day and during one of the discussions Dutch company UPC announced that they are actively participating on the many blogs and forums on the internet with a webcareteam. This teams exists now of three people. The surf the net looking for comments on UPC and try to understand their customer better. A great initiative from UPC (weblog Marketingfactsalso reports on this).

Talking about knowing your customer, Procter&Gamble remains one of my most favourite organisations in experimenting in innovative ways to interact with the customer. Here is a quote in which I really believe:

"This is not about selling products. It's about better understanding of consumers and learning about their needs and habits,...the more we learn about these consumers, the more it will allow us to create better products for their needs." Robyn Schroeder

P&G actively experimenting with social networking via the sites Peoples Choice and Capessa. Both sites have a different look and feel and even better...there are no adds from P&G. This is logical because the most trusted form of information nowadays is the consumers network self. So please let the consumers interact and learn form it as a organisation. This is also what P&G wants. Is it new and innovative. Not really, but I wanted to talk about it on this future blog because I think this is the way organisations will work in the near future.

P&G has been at the forefront of figuring out that the conventional mass media approach to marketing is on the decline and trying to come up with other ways to market their messages and relate more to consumers," Roland Rust P&G