At Procter & Gamble, the future of marketing research could well begin with the washing machine.
The owner of brands like Tide and Cheer detergent, as well as Gain and Bounce dryer sheets, has long been an expert in studying consumer behavior in the laundry room. But as new technologies for generating insights emerge, the ways of understanding how people wash and dry their clothes are changing.
“We used to do a lot of habits and practices studies – big surveys, very often, [and] diary-style type of things,” Michael Lancor, Procter & Gamble’s director/consumer fundamentals and insights, explained at The...