MarketPlace

P&G partners with midwives to improve maternal healthcare services

team

Midwives from across the country at an annual conference in Mombasa last year. Focus should be on advancing this group of workers’ skills to improve service delivery. PHOTO | FILE

Global product manufacturer, Procter and Gamble (P&G), has announced a partnership with the Midwives Association of Kenya (MAK) to address gaps in maternal healthcare services, a marketing strategy that could see the company broaden its consumer database for its products.

“Midwives are often ignored in the majority of health systems, yet they play a critical role in the provision of quality and safe maternal healthcare,” said Anthony Nganga, P&G’s Commercial Director.

“Partnering with Midwives Association of Kenya will place more emphasis on the childbearing cycle. We will focus on advancing their skills so as to improve service delivery to expectant mothers,” he said.

The initiative comes as part of a long-term global programme: “We are proud to announce that P&G’s mother and baby healthcare programme has reached approximately 10 million mothers since its inception,” said Nganga.

In line with this programme globally, P&G will now open a direct marketing channel to deliver product information and free product samples to new mothers, by partnering with MAK.

“The partnership is a part of the P&G’s mother and baby healthcare programme, an educative programme where we visit different healthcare facilities around the country and talk to mothers who have just delivered and at the same time give free samples of our diaper brand, Pampers,” said George Owour the Government Relations Manager for P&G.

“As we conduct the educative programme, we also collect the mothers’ contact information so that we can do follow ups .”

Throughout this kind of database marketing, brands can create a long lasting relationship with consumers, which fosters brand loyalty.

“Such a marketing strategy creates brand visibility and once a consumer has a free sample of product there is a high chance they will continue using the same product afterwards, leading to brand loyalty,” said Jael Amara, the director of Consumer Options.

“And again, interacting with the consumers is an indication that the brand cares, thus creates a brand-consumer relationship that may be long term.”

For P&G, the strategy could see increased sales in their products while at the same time provide a competitive advantage in the market place.
According to an article on the impact of database marketing by Valient Market Research, a corporate strategy, market research and advisory firm, the effective use of database marketing can help a brand generate personal communication to its customers and differentiate its brand among competitors.

“It presents distinct advantages for certain brands that are willing to use its data to improve its marketing efforts.”

Another example of this is Road Runner Sports, a store that specialises in selling athletics gear in the US In 2006, it partnered with Experian Marketing Services, an information service company, in order to create and develop a database marketing solution to communicate with, integrate and understand their customers better, according to an article on the partnership by PRNewswire.

“The key to growing our business is to create a compelling shopping experience with every customer interaction,” said Peter Taylor, general manager for Road Runner Sports.

“To do this with the highest degree of effectiveness, we quickly realised that we needed a database marketing solution that would integrate our customer data across our entire enterprise to provide the foundation of analysing customer information.”

Road Runner Sports later reported it had increased sales on some types of shoes and boosted traffic from search engines by 30 per cent, according to an article by Internet Retailer, an online magazine that focuses on retailer news.

It said it also used site search analytics data to discover popular items consumers were searching for that it did not carry. Through this it was able to programme its site search to display similar items to decrease the chance that a consumer would abandon the site when they did not find the item they searched for.

-African Laughter