• Ad Age, Monday, March 22, 2010 10:52 AM

Jack Neff takes a look at the whole range of Procter & Gamble's forays into the service business from Mr. Clean car washes to Tide Dry Cleaners to MDVIP, a concierge-physician service in which participating primary-care doctors cut their patient loads roughly 75%.

Plus, chairman-CEO Bob McDonald sees the service mentality as extending beyond the growing franchise businesses. "We're also working on services on our existing brands, for example, where you walk up to the shelf, take a picture of the UPC code on your phone, and you can download information about the ingredients in that product, which you as an environmentalist may care about," he says.

Neff points out that P&G tested some service concepts a decade ago, including a cooking school and business consulting (it licensed home-grown marketing tips via a venture dubbed Emmperative). The difference between those ventures and today's is "scale, strategy and commitment," he writes.

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