Instead, he confronted an unusually angry barrage from Wall Street analysts over the latest in a string of weak results from the world's largest consumer products company.

The analysts showed little restraint in venting their frustration after P&G lowered its profit outlook and said it would roll back recent attempts to raise prices in key markets.

P&G's sales rose 3%, which looked skimpy against an 8.5% rise for rival Unilever PLC and a 6.5% increase for Colgate-Palmolive Co.

P&G blamed weak developed markets and competitors' failure to follow its lead on price hikes. But some analysts blamed Mr. McDonald.

"It strikes me that from an execution perspective, P&G isn't delivering," said Citigroup analyst Wendy Nicholson.

"There's so many excuses: Not our fault, competition didn't follow the pricing; not our fault, Venezuela changed; not our fault, the developed consumer isn't robust," she continued. "And I just say to myself, God, where is the mea culpa?"

Tim Conder, a Wells Fargo analyst, and Ali Dibadj, a Sanford C. Bernstein analyst, echoed those sentiments, pointedly asking Mr. McDonald why P&G continued to stumble when its rivals managed to steer around the same obstacles.

"How much patience," Mr. Dibadj asked, "does the board have?"

Answering Ms. Nicholson, Mr. McDonald said: "Let me be clear. It is my fault. I am the CEO of the company. I do take responsibility."

The tone of the comments was remarkable by the often soft-shoe standards of Wall Street stock research.

Analysts are often accused of being overly forgiving with CEOs, a reputation they feed by regularly uttering words of congratulations on conference calls.

Good relations are important to preserve access to company executives, so criticisms, when they do come up, tend to be heavily couched.

But frustration is growing with P&G's performance. The company has failed to squeeze the expected results out of big areas like its beauty and grooming business, and has been slow to cut costs even as consumer demand weakened in the wake of the recession.

Those failings are evident in P&G's stock, which has changed little over the past two years. Meanwhile, Unilever's is up 13% and Colgate's is up 17%.

P&G shares fell 3.6% to $64.46 Friday, their biggest drop in 2½ years. The decline came after the maker of Bounty paper towels, Pampers diapers and other household staples reported a 16% decline in earnings amid high commodity costs and charges related to cost-cutting plans.

The consumer products giant cut prices aggressively in recent years in a world-wide battle for market share. More recently, it has tried to roll back some of those cuts as input prices have risen.

Those moves cut into P&G's market share, which fell in 55% of the categories and countries where it competes.

As a result, P&G said it would again cut prices for powdered laundry detergent in the U.S., as well as on oral care, automatic dishwashing detergent, and blades and razors in North America.

P&G is also lowering prices on its laundry detergent in the U.K. and Mexico. The company says it implemented $3.5 billion in price increases this year and plans to roll them back by $200 million.

P&G announced a cost-cutting program in February that involves eliminating more than 4,000 jobs, streamlining its massive marketing budget and chopping other expenses by fiscal 2016.

The company plans to steer savings from the cuts into expanding its position in emerging markets.

For the quarter ended March 31, P&G reported a profit of $2.41 billion, down from $2.87 billion a year earlier. For the full fiscal year, which ends in June, the company said it expects earnings of $3.82 to $3.88 a share. It had previously forecast earnings of $3.93 to $4.03 a share.

Price controls in Venezuela, which required price cuts of up to 25% on certain P&G products, are also weighing on results for the company.

—Paul Ziobro contributed to this article

Write to Emily Glazer at emily.glazer@wsj.com