What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest

Chapter 5

Great Brands Sweat the Small Stuff

Marketers at the Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) coined the term “FMOT” in 2005. Pronounced eff-mot, it stands for “First Moment of Truth”—the three to seven seconds when a shopper notices an item in a retail environment. According to P&G managers, the FMOT is crucial because in that instant, a shopper will decide to either pick up a product or pass it by. P&G was so committed to the importance of FMOT that it created a new position, Director of First Moment of Truth, heading a fifteen-person FMOT department assisted by fifty FMOT leaders stationed around the world.1

Dina Howell, P&G’s first FMOT director, told the Wall Street Journal in 2006 that P&G believed its product packaging design should “interrupt” ...