CHICAGO -- The Food Marketing Institute presented the William H. Albers Award last week to John E. Pepper, chairman of Procter & Gamble Co., Cincinnati, for his industry statesmanship, his commitment to improving the industry and for community service.
the industry become more efficient by developing continuous replenishment and by working on the early development of electronic data interchange and category management.
Wegman also praised Pepper's "profound commitment to education" through the Cincinnati Youth Collaborative, which he helped to create to keep kids from dropping out of high school.
When he stepped to the podium, Pepper said he was accepting the award "in the name of the people who work in the customer development division of P&G, whose work produced the programs that led to this award."
Pepper said P&G's effort to develop strong relationships with its retail customers "stems from the belief that the power of collaboration by people with common goals and values enables them to get a lot more done together than separately.
"I learned from the customers I used to call on that people working together can solve problems by sharing ideas and using their imaginations to succeed together and that there's power when people really care about each other's success, without any hidden agendas."
He also acknowledged "the great opportunities we've had at P&G to use our knowledge of consumers to design better products, packages and marketing programs, because we must serve consumers as individuals, not as an aggregate."
The industry, and the world in which it operates, is changing, Pepper said, with new technologies like the Internet, extranet and e-commerce "making new business models emerge daily, which means the world will be much different and a lot better. But it will still require strong relationships among people.
"Business needs to be founded on trust, candor, the use of imagination and sheer hard work in order to serve consumers and build businesses and to seize opportunities we can't even foresee today."
