Transcript
One of the most impactful books that I’ve read was a book called the p and g 99, and the p and g stands for Proctor and Gamble. And it was written by a former Proctor and Gamble executive that outlined 99 principles that Proctor and Gamble uses when they’re coming into, uh, creating new products, coming into a new market. And the the three that were the most impactful for me was, number one, was plan to dominate. And I thought to myself, man, you can’t even say those words without changing your physiology. It’s the way you approach something. You’re not just coming in to dabble in something, you’re coming in with a plan to dominate. Meaning you’re looking to be the number one brand in the category because there’s a premium for that. Number two was to treat, uh, to, to create the very best solution possible from the perspective of the client.
So you’re always outwardly focused on what’s the best thing. So if it requires these, uh, amazing, um, ingredients or something that’s expensive, whatever it is, you don’t limit it. You do the best thing and then price it accordingly for what it needs to, uh, be. And then the third is to treat each of these as an independent brand with its own p and l, its own team who’s only focused on that one thing. Now, you know, you look at it and Proctor and Gamble is the overriding company, but they’ve got 23 individual billion dollar brands, 23 brands that do a billion dollars. And many of them seem to compete with each other. If you just take the laundry category, it’s not just, Hey, let’s put some goop in a box and call it laundry detergent and get a piece of that multi-billion dollar laundry, uh, market.
No, they come in and they say, if we’re gonna dominate the category, what are the brands that we could create that solve the individual attributes that people are most concerned about? So they’ve got $5 billion brands that seem compete with each other, but they don’t when you break it down. So if you want to get your clothes as white as possible, you’re gonna use Tide. And they’ve got teams of people who wake up every day. Their whole mission in life is to focus on how do we make clothes? White U White U They’re constantly focused on improving that. Then if you want your clothes to smell great, there’s sunlight. If you want to get out tough stains, they’ve got era. If you wanna just throw it all in the laundry and not ruin it, <laugh>, if you’re like a bachelor or a student or a you know, college kid and you just want to do laundry, throw it all and do it at the same temperature. They’ve got cheer. So they’re serving all these individual niches that seem to be competing with each other, but collectively they dominate the category. So that’s how you can think like Proctor and Gamble.
