Identifying what's needed begins with understanding the consumer. We need to find out exactly who our consumers are, why they choose to use certain products, why they prefer one product over another, how they use these products, how they evaluate current products and what improvements they would like to see.
In order to develop such an understanding, Procter & Gamble is constantly conducting consumer research, using a variety of tools and techniques. We send our people out to observe our consumers in real-life situations, in their homes, while they clean, while they do the laundry. We organize focus groups to ask our customers what the ideal product would look like to them.
Equipped with what they learn, our product developers are much better able to design products against a benchmark of what our consumers are telling us would be ideal.