Lysol's Multimedia Push

Reckitt Benckiser plc is using both online and offline media to build market share for its Lysol cleaning products line.

Dadi Akhavan, president/COO of E-Centives Inc., which developed Reckitt's site, said at DMD New York last month that the Wayne, NJ company is using its Web site (www.Lysol.com) to track online coupon redemption rates, analyze customer buying patterns and introduce new products.

The goal is to use the information to create personalized coupons for consumers.

“Don't treat every customer the same,” said Akhavan, who noted that Lysol's system prints out coupons of different values based on things like purchasing history or whether a site visitor uses a competitor's cleaning product.

But he was careful to point out that the Web won't work for consumer packaged goods on its own. Reckitt still needs to use such media as freestanding newspaper inserts, because even though buyers generated through FSIs can't be closely tracked, the format still has a much broader reach than the Web.

Rob Rubin, research director at Forrester Research, pointed out that consumers are most likely to go to packaged goods sites for coupons and such information as nutritional data or recipes.

Since consumer packaged goods are such ordinary products, they probably won't generate a great deal of customer involvement, let alone interest, Rubin said.

“Nobody goes to a spaghetti Web site, say, because they want to go to Italy,” he quipped.