NEW YORK – Three days a week at 7:00 a.m., senior Procter & Gamble executives check in with each other about their customers: what they’re buying, how their needs are changing and whether the company’s products are hitting the mark.
“We need to stay very close to consumers and their habits, needs and desires, more now than ever,” the company’s chief financial officer, Jon Moeller, said during an earnings call last month.
Procter & Gamble, which owns brands including Tide, Fairy, Pantene and Gillette, is just one of the consumer goods giants that expects new habits formed during the coronavirus pandemic to permanently change the way consumers shop.
The early evidence suggests the shift to online buying is accelerating, consumers are buying more products for their health and home, and they are becoming increasingly cost conscious while choosing to save more.
On a call with analysts last month, Nestlé CEO Mark Schneider said the company is “working overtime” to understand what the economic crisis means for each of its product categories. Nestlé is the world’s largest food and drinks company, making everything from breakfast cereals such as Cheerios, to Maggi instant noodles, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Nescafé coffee and San Pellegrino water.
“To me that is super interesting work because clearly this is not going to be a quick recovery,” Schneider said. “This is going to be a several quarter, if not several year kind of process, where it is safe to expect some changed category dynamics.”
In an environment where nearly everything changed overnight, consumer goods companies need to figure out which new buying patterns are temporary, likely to end along with lockdowns or the arrival of a vaccine, and which will linger, reshaping the way consumers spend their money for years to come.
“We’re assessing market by market whether we need to make changes to our core products, prices and pack sizes,” said Hanneke Faber, president of foods and refreshment at Unilever, which makes Lipton tea, Dove soap, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
There’s no “playbook” for this recession, she told CNN Business. “It will require us to be extremely agile and flexible for the foreseeable future.”
