Procter & Gamble : Apple pie-ing it

Home thoughts look out of place on a global stage.

The Site

Procter & Gamble, the US-based household and personal products company, puts a heavy national gloss on its dot com home page.

Procter & Gamble has a picture-cover home page that currently opens with the headline caption ‘P&G. Proud sponsor of Moms’ and an invitation to ‘Watch our tribute to moms’. Clicking the invitation opens a short photo presentation in the picture panel featuring high-quality images of children and parents of various ethnic backgrounds and ending with a flurry of ‘Thanks, Mom’ captions in various languages.

A graphic link below the picture panel, ‘Proud sponsor of Team USA, and Moms’, launches a corporate campaign website linked to the winter Olympiad in Vancouver, Canada, and allied to the company’s backing of US athletes at the games. Its theme is ‘Thank You, Mom For the U.S. Olympic Team’.

The Takeaway

Anyone from outside the US and visiting the Procter & Gamble dot com site won’t fail to be struck by the parochialism of its home page: the word ‘mom’, for mother, is as quintessentially ‘American as apple pie’, to borrow an expression with which it is frequently coupled. A patriotic sheen is added by the overt association with the US winter Olympics team and the content of its campaign site.

While this will undoubtedly hit a spot with folks in Cincinnati, P&G’s home town, and their fellow Americans, the company needs to ask how it will go down with the rest of the world. Like it or not, a dot com site is regarded outside the US as a company’s default global website and will attract visitors from around the world on that basis. For an international company to treat it as the US home site – which P&G does here, but is not alone in – is understandable technically but sends out negative signals about its perspective on the world. If, as P&G professes, you aim to “serve customers in more than 180 countries” and grow “by touching and improving more consumers’ lives in more parts of the world”, then at the least you need to put on a nationality-neutral face for your dot com visitors and save the apple pie for home consumption.

First published on 25 February, 2010