1.

Has P&G India managed to carve out a distinctive position in the Indian
Detergents market?
2. Commnent on the companys journey towards achieving milestones as per
Project 2-3-4
3. What challenges does P&G India face in 2011?
4. Assess P&G Indias product line strategy.
5. What recommendations will you make to the P&G India team to help them
achieve the target set forth in Project 2-3-4?

Overview
It is clear that P&G was left behind in captureing Indias growth story in the
Detergents market. Currently P&G has a reach of 1.3m outlets (which is not far
behind HUL with 1.6m outlets). In terms of sales, India is one of the smallest
markets of P&G. To carve out a distinctive position in the Indian detergents
market, P&G initiated project 2-3-4 to double the number of indians using P&G
products and trebling the per capita spending by indians and quadrupling sales
in its india operations by 2015. I feel P&G even though it has captured market
leadership in 6 segments and a reach of 1.3m outlets still lags behind HUL
interms of overall product usage. According to the data given, P&G will not be
able to achive its goals by 2015.

Current Progress
Although this was successful, most of the categories that P&G dominated were
still small. In the segments that mattered such as detergents and hair care
which accounted a little over half of the home and personal care segment, HUL
was the leader.

Challenges
The real challenges faced by P&G for achieving the goals set by Project 2-3-4 are.
Increase BOP consumption (aka. Rural consumption)
Target mass market (high price sensitive consumers)
Restructuring of brand portfolio

Target Mass
Market
Resturcturing
brand
portfolio

Increase BOP
Consumption

Project
2-3-4

The challenges faced by P&G going forward includes playing catchup to HUL even
though they play in far lesses categories than HUL. P&G needs to decide whether it
should confront head on to HUL in categories such as detergents. Also, P&G needs
to figure out if it should make efforts to increase consumption and develop fledgling
markets such as skin care. Moreover, P&G needs to assess why the average
percapita spending on P&G products is much lower than the average of P&Gs top-
11 asian markets. Other decisions that P&G needs to assess are whether it should
launch another brand to compete with wheel and fill the void at the bottom of the
pyramid. Or whether it should launch more variants for its existing brands. Another
area that needs to be taken care of is advertising. How will advertising budget
changes impact the brands awareness.

Recommendations

If P&G has to achieve the targets set forth by Project 2-3-4, it needs to compete with
HUL at all levels and all products, including deep in the rural areas. P&Gs goal should
be to win in all the three market classificiations (India 1, 2 and 3). Further growth can
be driven by outreaching by running community-led programmes in rural india to
ensure awareness of their brands.
P&G should refrain from getting into price wars. They are poor pricing strategies. It
needs to come up with an effective long term pricing strategy and avoid short term
predatory strategies as HUL will always undercut them and make them ineffective.