Proctor & Gamble’s LifeLab XR/Metaverse Case Study

Today P&G has annual sales in excess of $80B and sells its products globally, with the majority being sold outside North America. The company has 5 divisions and many famous brands:

• There is the Fabric & Home Care division with brands like Tide, Cascade, Febreze, Mr. Clean and more
• The Baby, feminine, and family care division with brands like Pampers, Tampax, Bounty, Charmin, and more
• The Beauty division with brands like Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Olay, Old Spice and more
• The Health Care division with brands like Crest, Oral-B, Pepto-Bismol, Vicks and more
• And the Grooming division with brands like Gillette, Venus, Braun and more

P&G’s success has always been their product innovation and their obsession with understanding their customer and delivering outstanding customer experiences. Which brings me to P&G’s LifeLab offering. LifeLab is an immersive hub where consumers can learn about P&G products and interact with P&G personnel from P&G's most iconic brands. LifeLab is all about showcasing consumers P&G’s commitment to innovative design and disruptive technology.

P&G entered the Metaverse for more than five years ago when it debuted LifeLab at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020. Here’s how LifeLab works. From your PC, tablet or cell phone (you and also enter using VR goggles), visitors start out by customizing their avatar that is needed to enter the virtual platform. Creation of the avatar is simple and fun as you select the color of your eyes, hair and skin as well as the clothes you will wear. You then use your keyboard to enter your avatar into LifeLab virtual world. LifeLab’s virtual platform feels like video game platforms such as The Sims or Second Life. The LifeLab setting is futuristic with beautiful and colorful scenery, many moving objects, lots of educational videos, and plenty of fun games to play.

You enter a futuristic elevator that presents P&G’s history before you arrive to a futuristic lobby that consists of multiple rooms or portals, where you begin your self-guided, virtual tour. LifeLab’s experience is immersive and expansive. It showcases P&G’s latest products like the Oral-B iO tooth brushing system, as well as P&G’s vision in other areas to include sustainability, water scarcity, waste management, and innovative product packaging – areas of increasing importance to buyers, especially GenZ buyers.

Your avatar can express emotions and mimic real-life actions, such as laughing, clapping, raising a hand, saying hello, answering yes or no, giving a thumbs up or even dancing. Heck, you and even take a selfie with the Charmin bear!

Here are three examples of the fun visitors can have inside LifeLab:

Example #1: I really like the Gillette razor portal, which they call ‘Gillette Labs’. You move your avatar through a digital museum that showcases the history of the Gillette razors until you get to the gorgeous Bugatti car. This is P&G’s way of introducing the Gillette/Bugatti heated, wireless charging razor, which is a limited-edition, blue-hued, piece of sophisticated shaving hardware that combines the sleek contours of the Bugatti together with Gillette’s technological innovation and beard-trimming knowhow. You see the new razor in 3D that demonstrates the innovation and technology being used. There was also a gamification component in the Gillette/Bugatti design, with users riding a virtual exfoliate surfboard across a racetrack – your face! – destroying every dirty particle in its path so you receive a superior shave.

Example #2: The Gillette Labs portal isn’t the only area in the P&G LifeLab that featured gamification. Another wonderful portal is the Oral-B and Crest portal that shows off the latest Oral-B tooth brushing technology and has a fun ‘Attack of the Cavity Creeps’ game where you use a laser gun to shoot small bacteria invaders located all around your teeth and where you use the latest Oral-B iO toothbrush system to scrub the creatures into oblivion. You will love this quick and simple ‘shoot-em-up’ experience killing the invaders of what LifeLab calls the town of ‘Toothopolis’, all while earning game points. It’s a great example of how Oral-B and Crest bring smart oral care solutions to children and young adults leveraging gaming entertainment.

Example #3: In the P&G LifeLab amphitheater, P&G hosts its annual Innovation Challenge where budding entrepreneurs pitch their latest innovative solutions for an opportunity to partner with P&G Ventures to pursue joint product development.

There are many additional, innovative portals to visit in LifeLab, but let me close this case study by focusing on the benefits of LifeLab to P&G and to its customers:

• P&G invests in this virtual platform because it is the best way to deepen engagement with consumers, partners, media and others around the world by inviting them to participate virtually with P&G products and executives in the Metaverse.
• P&G secures new customers who are happy to experience P&G products in a fun way.
• At CES, thousands of people visited LifeLab over the 3-day conference. P&G confirms that each visitor spent on average 20 minutes inside the LifeLab. That compares to the average consumer spending about 7 seconds reading a P&G ad, or 30-seconds watching a P&G ad. Think about that for a moment. But even more important, not only do visitors see really innovate technology and design, they also see how P&G is playing their part in driving sustainability and addressing climate change and other environmental concerns.

On the customer side:

• Customers love the opportunity to co-create new products with P&G within LifeLab’s virtual environment.
• Customers find LifeLab to be informative in an entertaining way, which drives outstanding customer experiences.

LifeLab is a real ‘win-win’ for both P&G and its current and prospective customers. It’s a great story of one of the world’s leading brands levering virtual world technology to open up an entirely new sale, marketing, and customer service channel. It feels like magic.

My Metaverse business partner, Tim Bajarin, and I are keen to assist institutions at each step of the way to ensure their successful entry into the Metaverse. To read about other aerospace and defense industry Metaverse use cases, I strongly recommend you visit ISM’s award-winning Metaverse Resource Center – www.ismguide.com/metaverse-resource-center – where in addition to hundreds of Metaverse use cases, articles and videos, you can also download ISM’s new “8 Steps to Do Business Successfully in the Metaverse” White Paper, and where you can also learn about and sign up for ISM’s complimentary, 2-hour Metaverse Bootcamp, which is targeted for a company’s executive team.

Barton Goldenberg (bgoldenberg@ismguide.com) is president of ISM, Inc. Since 1985, ISM has established itself as the premier strategic advisor leveraging leading edge technologies – the Metaverse, Digital Communities, and CRM – to create and implement customer strategy with a focus on sales, marketing and customer service. His thought leadership including creator of the ‘Business Success in a Virtual World’ podcast, creator of the award winning Metaverse Resource Center, and author of three business books including The Definitive Guide to Social CRM. He is also in high demand as a keynote speaker (www.bartongoldenberg.com).