Procter & Gamble decided it needed an objective way to benchmark its corporate website against competitors. It subscribed to the Bowen Craggs Index database to gain external validation of its digital efforts and secure management support. The database is now integral to P&G's continuous improvement process, allowing it to compare strategies and metrics with companies like GE and Cisco. P&G finds the thorough, methodical evaluations across stakeholders and metrics invaluable when planning website changes with its creative agency.

1. Case study Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble (P&G) decided a few years ago that it needed a credible mechanism
for comparing its corporate website with others. Initially, this was to unlock essential
budget. “We knew we were woefully behind but we didn’t have management buy-in to put
resources behind it,” Ivette Johnson, P&G’s digital brand manager at the time, says. “We
needed external validation and benchmarking to show digital is important.”
The company decided to subscribe to the Bowen Craggs Index database, which includes
all the analysis behind the FT Bowen Craggs Index along with a set of mechanisms to
highlight best practice within it.
The service
Access to the FT Bowen
Craggs Index database
The client
Procter & Gamble,
US-based consumer
goods multinational
“It’s something we can’t
get anywhere else.
Without it we’d be flying
blind.”
Ivette Johnson
•The database has since become integral to P&G’s
continuous improvement process, Ms Johnson says.
“We benchmark quite a bit with General Electric and
Cisco, so we are able to combine the learning from your
analysis with meeting those companies face to face. The
messages we get from both are very coherent – it makes
us feel good that they are so consistent.”
The company also finds the database invaluable when
discussing ways forward. “Whenever we do anything on
the site we look at the database. It’s really helpful when
we’re planning with our creative agency. We go through it
metric by metric and use it to create an action plan,
identifying where we’re doing well and where we’re not
doing so well. We see how other companies are doing
better – it’s almost as useful for us to look at their analyses
as our own. Often times we’ll look at the best practices
and pull out the recommendations that are most feasible.”
•“The Bowen Craggs database is quite different from
anything else in terms of having something so thorough
and methodical that evaluates against multiple
stakeholders, paying attention to a proper set of metrics,”
Ms Johnson says. “It’s something we can’t get anywhere
else. Without it we’d be flying blind.”
Before using the database, “everything we did was
absolutely qualitative – looking at other sites and saying if
these companies do it, it must be cool. There was no
scientific method behind it to validate our results. We
needed something that looked at companies besides
ourselves, and gave an ROI on our and their efforts”.
Ms Johnson also appreciates Bowen Craggs’ approach to
social media. “Last year you had a good quote about the
website being the centre of the system but social media
making up the planets – we have to look at it but keep
prioritising the site. I like to show my colleagues that,” she
says, “to show these guys get it.”
© 2012 Bowen Craggs & Co Limited Case study Procter & Gamble 1