Write On !

If you are at all interested in what one of the largest, most highly regarded marketing firms is doing, you might want to check out the following article about P&G's acquisition of Gillette. (see link below)
http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=589&topicId=15026&isPreview=true&docId=l:255920758&start=1

It has lots of background and industry information as well as the following paragraph:

Meanwhile, the complexity of advertising, marketing and distributing branded consumer goods has soared, further pushing up costs. P&G is the world's biggest advertiser, with a budget of around $3 billion last year. A decade ago, 90% of its global advertising spending went on television. Today, for some products only about a quarter of the budget is spent on television. The audience for traditional media is fragmenting, making consumers harder and more expensive to reach. So, along with other consumer-goods companies, P&G is finding that so-called "below-the-line" forms of marketing, such as in-store promotions, posters, coupons and sponsorship, are often more effective.

Clearly there are many more "below-the-line" forms of marketing than are listed here... Word-of-Mouth, Internet and others... but the really interesting point of all this is that as P&G is finding their market more and more fragmented (and expensive to serve), that same fragmentation is boosting internet companies like Amazon as well as all the authors of books with limit sales (which would never have been picked up by a book chain).

How does this tie into P&G? And if they are on the "book chain" side with an old business model, what is the corresponding "Amazon" entity for their markets? How do they deal with the changes in marketing that are happening?

Stay tuned. (I might not have all the answers, but hopefully someone who reads this WILL!)