EPR's canonical Procter & Gamble reference, including the company's founding history.
Who leads Procter & Gamble today?
Shailesh Jejurikar has been Procter & Gamble's president and chief executive officer since January 1, 2026, after P&G announced the succession in July 2025. Jon Moeller, CEO since November 2021, became Executive Chairman on that date. P&G announced on July 29, 2026 that Jejurikar would also become Chairman of the Board effective August 1, and that Moeller would retire from the Board on July 31 and from the company on August 14. Jejurikar joined P&G in 1989 and previously ran the Fabric & Home Care sector, home of Tide.
On the communications side, P&G's leadership page lists Marc Pritchard as Chief Brand Officer and Damon Jones as Chief Communications Officer. Pritchard, who joined P&G in 1982 and became its chief marketing officer in 2008, sets the company's media, marketing and advertising strategy.
What brands does Procter & Gamble own?
Procter & Gamble organizes its business into five segments, each with its own communications architecture and competitive set: Beauty, Grooming, Health Care, Fabric & Home Care, and Baby, Feminine & Family Care. The portfolio includes Tide, Pampers, Pantene, Gillette, Crest, Olay, Old Spice, Dawn, Bounty, Charmin, Vicks, Oral-B, Head & Shoulders, SK-II, Ariel, Always, Tampax, Febreze, Downy, Mr. Clean, Swiffer and Cascade. P&G employs approximately 108,000 people across more than 70 countries.
Beauty. Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Olay, SK-II, Herbal Essences, Aussie, Old Spice (deodorant and personal care), Native and Secret. The segment competes with L'Oréal, Unilever, Estée Lauder Companies and Beiersdorf.
Grooming. Gillette (the dominant razor brand globally), Venus, Braun and the Gillette King C. Gillette line. The segment competes with Edgewell (Schick, Bic), Harry's, Dollar Shave Club (Unilever-owned) and Philips Norelco.
Health Care. Crest, Oral-B, Scope, Fixodent, Vicks, NyQuil/DayQuil, Pepto-Bismol, Metamucil, Prilosec OTC and Align. The segment competes with Colgate-Palmolive, Kenvue (formerly J&J Consumer Health), Haleon (formerly GSK Consumer Healthcare) and Reckitt.
Fabric & Home Care. Tide, Ariel, Downy, Bounce, Gain, Cheer, Dreft, Dawn, Cascade, Mr. Clean, Febreze and Swiffer. The segment competes with Henkel, Reckitt, Church & Dwight, Clorox, SC Johnson and Colgate-Palmolive.
Baby, Feminine & Family Care. Pampers (the dominant global diaper brand), Luvs, Bounty, Charmin, Puffs, Always, Always Discreet and Tampax. The segment competes with Kimberly-Clark (Huggies, Kleenex, Cottonelle) and Edgewell (Playtex, Stayfree).
No single brand carries the corporation. P&G coordinates communications across 65+ major brands, keeps each brand voice distinct, and absorbs a category-specific crisis such as Pampers Dry Max in 2010 or the Gillette "The Best Men Can Be" debate in 2019 without structural risk to the enterprise. The corporate function stays largely invisible unless a situation requires escalation.
How does Procter & Gamble's communications operation work?
Procter & Gamble runs one of the largest corporate communications functions in the world, spanning corporate communications at its Cincinnati headquarters, brand communications teams embedded in each major brand group, regional teams across more than 70 markets, investor relations, employee communications and government affairs.
On the public relations side, P&G consolidated its global brand PR roster in 2014 to five agencies: Citizen Relations, DeVries Global, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, MMK+ (Marina Maher Communications) and MSL (Publicis Groupe), plus select independent local agencies where market expertise requires it. Ketchum has served as a longstanding corporate communications partner, and Burson (now Burson Cohn & Wolfe) has also worked with the company.
On the creative and media side, long-tenure relationships with Publicis Groupe, WPP and Omnicom anchor the spend. Brand-level creative assignments include Wieden+Kennedy (Old Spice), Saatchi & Saatchi (various brands), Grey (Gillette) and Leo Burnett (Always "Like a Girl"). Marc Pritchard, then P&G's chief marketing officer, restructured the roster in 2018 to cut its size, demand fee transparency and fold capability in-house through the Woven Collaborative model. P&G's marketing-spend rationalization cycle reshaped that roster further across 2019 to 2024.
Pritchard's January 2017 speech at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting called out media transparency, brand-safety failures and a murky programmatic supply chain, and P&G said it would stop paying suppliers that did not meet industry viewability and verification standards. It remains one of the best-known executive interventions in the adtech accountability debate.
What are Procter & Gamble's most famous campaigns?
Procter & Gamble's most-studied campaigns are "Thank You, Mom," Always "Like a Girl," Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like," Gillette "The Best Men Can Be" and Tide's "It's a Tide Ad." Each produced a distinct lesson for brand communications.
"Thank You, Mom," the Olympic platform. Beginning with the 2010 Games, P&G's "Thank You, Mom" platform anchored its Olympic sponsorship and became one of the most-watched brand storytelling efforts in advertising. It showed how a multi-brand parent can build corporate equity without diluting the equity of individual brands.
Always "Like a Girl." The Leo Burnett-developed campaign launched in 2014 and reframed a phrase historically used as an insult toward girls. The Super Bowl XLIX activation and Cannes Grand Prix wins made it one of the most-awarded purpose-driven campaigns, and it opened the purpose-marketing era for personal-care brands.
Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like." The 2010 Wieden+Kennedy campaign starred Isaiah Mustafa and added a real-time phase in which the brand answered consumer tweets with video replies. It remains a standard case study in brand repositioning and social amplification, and EPR's Old Spice case study sets out the reported results and their limits.
Gillette "The Best Men Can Be" (2019). The Grey-developed film confronting toxic masculinity was the most polarizing campaign in P&G's modern history. EPR's Gillette "We Believe" backlash case file covers the 125-year brand history and the recovery.
Tide "It's a Tide Ad." The 2018 Super Bowl campaign starring David Harbour became one of the most-discussed Super Bowl creative moments of its era, within a Tide creative program that has won awards consistently.
Pampers and baby-care communications. The Pampers brand has run one of the longest brand communications programs in CPG, including the 2010 Dry Max diaper rash controversy that drew heavy social media attention. EPR's Pampers trust-building PR case study details how emotional storytelling, inclusivity and crisis response built decades of parent trust.
How does Procter & Gamble handle crisis communications?
Procter & Gamble handles crisis communications through pre-built response protocols for each predictable category: product safety concerns, manufacturing issues, regulatory actions, social media flashpoints, executive transitions, marketing controversies and sustainability disputes. The crisis function runs alongside legal, regulatory, marketing, R&D and manufacturing, with 24/7 response capability and named first-responders in each category.
The corporate communications operation does not chase news cycles or build a celebrity-CEO profile. Jejurikar, a 1989 P&G hire who succeeded Moeller as CEO in January 2026 and as Chairman on August 1, 2026, is a career insider. Brand crises stay at the brand layer, and corporate communications keeps an institutional posture rather than a personality posture.
EPR's Crisis PR and Crisis Communications pillar covers the broader discipline.
What separates Procter & Gamble from other CPG operators?
Four structural factors separate P&G's communications operation from other large CPG companies.
Multi-brand portfolio coordination. P&G operates more major brands than any other CPG company, so no single product crisis can dominate the corporate reputation. A single-brand company carries its entire reputation in one product.
Brand-level voice, corporate-level architecture. Each P&G brand keeps a distinct voice, agency relationship and creative identity. The corporate function supplies procurement, agency standards, supply-chain ethics and regulatory compliance without imposing a voice.
Long-arc brand investment. P&G's investment cycles run for decades rather than quarters. Tide has been a P&G brand since 1946, Pampers since 1961, and Pantene since 1985, when P&G acquired Richardson-Vicks. Long-tenure agency relationships with Publicis, WPP, Omnicom, Ketchum, MSL, Citizen Relations, DeVries Global and Hill+Knowlton carry institutional knowledge that quarterly-cycle competitors cannot replicate.
Institutional crisis preparedness. P&G's scale produces continuous crisis exposure, so its response infrastructure runs permanently with named first-responders and rehearsed scenarios.
What is the history of Procter & Gamble?
Procter & Gamble was founded on October 31, 1837, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and its history includes the first mass-market branded soap, the invention of brand management and a series of broadcast-media firsts. The company has operated continuously for 188 years, with its 189th anniversary on October 31, 2026.
How was Procter & Gamble founded in 1837?
William Procter, an English candlemaker, and James Gamble, an Irish soapmaker, founded Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati in 1837 with $7,192.24 in capital. The two men had married sisters, Olivia and Elizabeth Norris, and their father-in-law Alexander Norris persuaded them to form a partnership rather than compete for the same tallow supply.
Cincinnati was then the meatpacking center of the United States, and meatpacking byproducts supplied the raw materials for both candles and soap. That position gave P&G early scale in both product lines.
How did Ivory Soap create consumer brand advertising?
Ivory Soap, introduced in 1879, was among the first branded consumer packaged goods in the United States. According to company lore, its signature floating quality came from a mixing machine left running through lunch, and chemist James Norris Gamble recognized the value of the accident. The "99 and 44/100% Pure" claim, in use from 1882, is an early example of quantitative product-claim advertising.
What was the 1931 McElroy memo?
The McElroy memo is the May 13, 1931 internal document in which Neil McElroy, then a 26-year-old marketing manager on the Camay soap account, argued that each P&G brand should be run by a dedicated team with its own responsibility for marketing, sales coordination and competitive intelligence. That structure became the operating model for CPG, beauty and consumer-products companies. McElroy later led P&G and served as U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1957 to 1959.
When did Procter & Gamble start its first PR department?
Oliver M. Gale founded Procter & Gamble's first PR department in 1949 and later served as special assistant to Defense Secretary Neil McElroy. EPR's profile of Oliver Gale, founder of P&G's first PR department covers his career.
What broadcast media firsts did Procter & Gamble achieve?
Procter & Gamble was a first mover in each major broadcast transition of the twentieth century, beginning with the radio serials that gave the "soap opera" its name.
- Radio, 1930s: P&G sponsored Ma Perkins from 1933 and The Guiding Light from 1937 on behalf of its Oxydol, Duz and Ivory brands.
- Television, 1950s: P&G produced and sponsored Search for Tomorrow (1951 to 1986), Guiding Light (1952 to 2009), As the World Turns (1956 to 2010) and Another World (1964 to 1999).
- Cable and digital: P&G moved meaningful spend to cable in the 1980s and was an early major advertiser on digital display and video in the 2000s.
How has the Procter & Gamble portfolio changed?
Procter & Gamble's portfolio is the product of nearly two centuries of category entry, acquisition, in-house development and divestiture. P&G acquired Gillette in 2005 for $57 billion, the largest consumer acquisition in history at the time. In 2014 it announced a plan to exit roughly 100 lower-margin brands to concentrate investment on its strongest lines. P&G has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1932 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PG.
How does Procter & Gamble compare with Unilever and General Mills?
Three operators define CPG communications at global scale: Procter & Gamble, Unilever and General Mills. Procter & Gamble runs 65+ brands from Cincinnati, led by Tide, Pampers, Gillette, Crest, Olay and Old Spice. Unilever runs 400+ brands across food, household and personal care, including Dove, Hellmann’s, Ben & Jerry’s, Knorr, Lipton and Axe. General Mills anchors food with Cheerios, Pillsbury, Häagen-Dazs, Betty Crocker, Yoplait and Nature Valley.
EPR ranks the agencies that serve this sector in Top 18 CPG PR agencies for 2026. See also EPR’s CPG coverage.
