Max Menozzi

101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior

Max Menozzi, Senior Vice President Grooming North America, Procter & Gamble

Max Menozzi has been part of Procter & Gamble for over 25 years. He joined in the Marketing department and quickly rose through the ranks to become a senior executive. He is currently the Senior Vice President of Grooming in North America. Mr. Menozzi’s highly successful initiatives secured Gillette a position as the global leader in the grooming industry. In addition to his devotion to achieving customer satisfaction, Mr. Menozzi is also heavily involved in fostering product innovation and ensuring his brands are fully active in social responsibility.

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“I believe it’s time the entire industry elevated its game and made sound a strategy; the consumer knows it, and we know it. We just have to work harder to make it a central choice.”

— Max Menozzi, Senior Vice President Grooming North America, Procter & Gamble

Reese: How important to you is sound in building a brand?

Menozzi: Sound is obviously important and is becoming more relevant because communication is getting faster. Music helps the consumer understand a brand’s DNA. Comparing and contrasting Venus and Gillette today, I would say that the communication of the Venus brand goes deeper because we have a music strategy that’s more targeted to what we want to say. While Gillette has leveraged various sonic elements for years, like our ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ sting, we’ve only recently started more seriously considering the importance of music in our brand-building strategy. In this new world, interaction with brands is more of a conversation, and that conversation must be deeper. Music helps this deeper connection.

Reese: Nobody can really know how we’re going to experience screenless technology in five or ten years’ time, but do you have an idea as to how to make a brand future-proof when it comes to sonic?

Menozzi: The only way to think about the future is to understand the evolution of human needs and behaviors. I mentioned above about the need of connecting faster; this is going to stay, whether it’s the evolution of Alexa, of non-visual communication, or the future of visual communication to be consumed in fractions of seconds. Sonic strategy will be essential in this because those different modes of communications will benefit from the addition of music. In the past, visual was the focal point, but now sonic must be front and center too.

Reese: There’s no best-practice case for sonic, so I always say James Bond – from Shirley Bassey to Billie Eilish – is my biggest inspiration. Do you think a DNA approach might be a solution? 

Menozzi: Having a ‘formula’ or consistent elements that you ruthlessly stick to with your sonic strategy is a great solution to help your brand stand out in the minds of consumers. For us, Gillette’s ‘The Best A Man Can Get’, which started as a full song, and is now used as a sonic sting, is an incredibly strong asset. We’re blessed to have it, and it’s been able to transition over the last 30 years with virtually no challenges in terms of how it’s evolved, been recognised and loved. That’s good news, but it’s a fraction of the work we must do. On Venus, for example, we were able to leverage one song which was connected to the actual birth of the brand and its name. It was at the centre of the brand strategy. The beauty of this approach is that we were able to evolve the music strategy and its impact on the brand’s equity with changes in the lyrics, sounds and chords. This made our executions positively evolve with the passing of time, but also fit within different contexts. More recently, we modernized the brand and positively embraced the debate on women and their roles in society; and the music strategy evolved with that. But at the end of the day, you still can hear that music and instantly connect it back to Venus. The strategic approach enabled the creation of sustainable and consistent assets for the brands that are also fully flexible in an evolving media and societal environment.

Reese: Should brands include music as part of the strategy at the beginning of the process, and should they have a sonic brand book, so they’re not always starting at zero?

Menozzi: First of all, I share the pain that sometimes we make music choices project by project instead of leveraging a proper strategy. The ideal scenario is to have a sonic strategy for each brand as a long-term asset, but the reality is that marketers are often more focused on the visual strategies, probably because we tend to know those better. Do we include music as part of our strategy from the very beginning? In my experience, at best, we do in fifty percent of the cases. There is certainly opportunity for more education on sonic branding in the industry.

Reese: Why has the industry been so late to the party, and how do we move forward?

Menozzi: Why so lazy on this? Probably because we felt we could do without, and lack the education and training on how to do sonic branding properly. I’ve found that there are stronger data and testing capabilities for visual marketing. As the media environment changes, younger generations give even more value to music as it has more meaning beyond pure sound. We must embrace the choice. One way this can be done is by using data, which is showing that music and sound have a significant role in building awareness and brand linkage. P&G began a significant investment in design many years ago because we felt the need to have a stronger point of view on design as a company and stronger design on our brands. I feel we must do the same with sound now.

“As the media environment changes, younger generations give even more value to music as it has more meaning beyond pure sound. We must embrace the choice.”

Reese: So, will P&G will make sonic a priority?

Menozzi: I think so. On several brands, we already have great sound strategies, as well as music and sound executions. On Venus, we focus primarily on music, and Gillette has the ‘click’ sound when the razor links with the cartridge, as well as our ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ sting at the end of a spot. I believe it’s time the entire industry elevates their game and makes sound a strategic investment. The consumer appreciates that, and the industry knows it. We just have to work harder to make it a central choice.

Note: The interview took place in Boston on November 11, 2020.

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