Last week, I went to Cincinnati and spent a day and a half at Proctor & Gamble’s headquarters, visiting with some people from Pampers. You know, for one of those “we want to pick your blogger brain and also pimp our product” things. Since my kids are way beyond diapers, I wasn’t sure what to expect, or what Pampers could possibly want from me. But Melissa and Emily were going to be there, so how bad could it be, right?

It wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it was incredibly interesting. And we got to wear hair nets! What more could you ask for?

Blogging is safer with the proper protective eye gear.

Our tour included seeing where diaper prototypes are made, by hand. You heard me: teams of two make diapers BY HAND, as part of a process of refining and improving the existing designs (or creating all new designs). It seems kind of silly to make diapers by hand (and no, that’s not how the Pampers you put on the baby are made, those are created by a machine) but actually, it’s perfectly logical. If the designers are trying to tweak one aspect of the product — the elastic in the leg openings, say — they don’t want to mass-market thousands of diapers. They want a couple to look at and then maybe a dozen more to test. So instead of stopping a production line to make those, they assemble them by hand.

Honestly, I had never thought much about how a diaper is made. My diaper thoughts (which are blissfully all in the past) were always primarily about how many we had left and how many I needed in the bag if I was going to run to the grocery and how long it had been since I changed the child wearing the diaper. Charlie wore Pampers, but honestly I have no idea what Henry wore; most of what I remember about that first couple of years is just being tired. I do remember, though, just how tiny the diapers we brought home from the hospital with Henry were; when the Pamper’s researchers talked about how preemie diapers are different from regular newborn diapers (they are less absorbent to encourage more frequent changes, for one thing, and they have almost no “side” to keep the baby’s skin from getting irritated) I realized that I never thought about that at all when Henry was born. I just took for granted that a diaper was a diaper.

Silly me. Then again, if a company is doing it’s job, you really should get to take the product for granted, right?

In the post-WalMart age, when big box stores are driving smaller retailers out and offering poor customer service in return for community investment,  it’s easy to be critical of big corporations, to see them as out of touch with consumers or unconcerned about anything but profits. That wasn’t at all the experience we had with the Pampers team. They talked with sincerity and enthusiasm not just about their brand but about how their product makes life better for parents. We heard about the research that went into developing an affordable overnight diaper for the Chinese market; babies who sleep through the night function better socially during the day, so a disposable diaper that lets them snooze away is a good thing all around. We heard about Pampers partnership with UNICEF for the “one pack = one vaccine” program, designed to end Maternal & Neonatal Tetanus. We heard about P&G’s efforts to marry sustainability and convenience in their disposable diapers.

Distracting you from the controversy of disposable! diapers! with pictures of bloggers and their cell phones.

What impressed me the most about the Pampers team, though, was how truly interested they were in what we had to say, both about their product and about social media. They were very clear about the things they wanted us to know about them, but they were equally clear about what they wanted to know about — and from — us. They were willing to ask questions and they listened to our answers.

Bloggers talk a lot about the various marketing FAILs, about PR pitches that offer high-resolution images of products but no actual product, or press releases that say, oh, Michelle Obama has fat arms (just a for instance) or — my personal favorite — companies that send out “story ideas,” you know because we might be running out of things to write about and might want to pimp a product, for free!  Of course, there are good marketing pitches, too, but I suspect that the bad ones have many of us on the defensive. So to spend a day with marketing people who really understood what it meant to sell their company and their product to a defined group of consumers — and who were genuinely interested in hearing how they could do their job better — was really refreshing.

(I’ve had the good fortune to work with some great PR people, who have mastered blogger outreach in ways that I really admire. But I would say that for every one really sincere, personal, interesting pitch I get, there are three from folks who don’t have any idea who I am or what this blog is about, and I’m always so pleased to meet or hear from that sliver who are doing this outreach thing well.)

It was also just lovely to see Melissa, even if she did taunt me with tiny cupcakes and then leave them behind in her fridge, and Emily is one of those people who makes you laugh so hard that you’re wishing you had grabbed one of those hand-made Pampers for the road. And I got to hang out with Asha, who is that perfect combination of brilliant and funny and warm, and who makes you feel smarter just by talking with her. I also met Matt Logelin, who apparently uses the Internet as his personal dating service (ha ha kidding! he doesn’t really, although if he wanted to he totally could, or at least that’s what I gleaned from the gigantic number of “Matt please call me!” comments we got at ParentDish after interviewing him). Turns out he and Wade went to the same men’s college, although not at the same time because Wade and I are older than dirt and Matt is just a kid.

Thanks, Pampers — it was a great couple of days.