ASIA: Company Visit to P&G I

We just spent a couple days in Guangzhou on company visits, and overall the experience was a little startling and very interesting. First of all, I was shocked at border control from Hong Kong to the mainland. We were traveling by bus, and when we hit the border everyone and all their belongings had to get off the bus, go through three separate checkpoints before getting back on the same bus on the other side. There were more checkpoints than there generally are at airports in a foreign country. I think of Hong Kong as being part of China (which it technically is), but its pretty clear that it remains even physically separate in big ways.

Our first company visit was at P&G, which was really cool. We got to actually go into the factory and see parts of the production line for shampoo and feminine products (sorry to the guys on the trip). We already had a great experience with P&G in Shanghai, where they took us around to three different retail channels to talk about their products. So it was really cool to be able to follow up to that and actually see those very products being manufactured. We saw the beginning of the shampoo line, which was really interesting because there were people (very rapidly) loading the unlabeled shampoo bottles onto the line to be filled. Seeing this impressed me with two different thoughts.

First, was surprise at seeing people doing things that I would completely have assumed to be automated - just another example of many that we've seen in China of the fact that it is cheaper to employ people than to buy the machinery for some tasks. The second thing that registered as we walked along the various shampoo brand lines was the fact that although I was only looking at the completely unlabeled bottle, I could tell exactly which brand of shampoo was on each line from the bottle's shape and color. I think this pretty clearly speaks to the power of P&G brands that each is totally recognizable with the bare minimum of visual cues.

-Erin Kazaz