The Procter & Gamble Company

THE BEST PART OF WAKIN' UP IS FOLGERS IN YOUR CUP CAMPAIGN
CLEANER CLOSE CAMPAIGN
GOT THE POWER CAMPAIGN
HABITS CAMPAIGN
INGENIOUS PROTECTION FOR INGENIOUS WOMEN CAMPAIGN
SHARING AND CONNECTING CAMPAIGN
SINK BOY CAMPAIGN
STRANGE BUT TRUE CAMPAIGN
TASTING IS BELIEVING CAMPAIGN
WHEN YOU'RE STRONG, YOU SPARKLE CAMPAIGN

One Procter & Gamble Plaza
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
USA
Telephone: (513) 983-1100
Fax: (513) 983-9369
Web site: www.pg.com

THE BEST PART OF WAKIN' UP IS FOLGERS IN YOUR CUP CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

During the 1970s Procter & Gamble (P&G) helped establish its Folgers line as one of the two leading ground-coffee brands in the United States, along with General Foods' Maxwell House. By 1998 Folgers held the lead over Maxwell House in the $3.1 billion instant-and ground-coffee industry. For ground coffees, a $2.0 billion segment, Folgers held a 29.4 percent share in 1997, compared to 21.1 percent for Maxwell House. As the coffee market expanded, fueled by emerging competitors such as Starbucks, both companies faced new challenges.

To build its Folgers brand and drive business, in the 1960s Procter & Gamble turned to strong television advertising with a campaign created by the New York firm of Cunningham & Walsh that featured the advice-dispensing Mrs. Olson. In the mid-1980s Cunningham & Walsh introduced a new campaign built around the theme "Wakin' Up." By 1987 P&G had moved its Folgers account to N.W. Ayer. In 1998 Folgers continued to use the jingle "The Best Part of Wakin' Up Is Folgers in Your Cup" in its radio and television advertising, which was supplemented with print ads. Although P&G kept a close watch on company information, the fact that it spent $136.1 million on Folgers's advertising in a 20-month period during 1996 and 1997 suggested that the budget for the 1998 campaign was high.

The success of its "Wakin' Up" campaign led P&G to keep both the theme and its familiar jingle into the first years of the new millennium, despite changes in its advertising agencies. In 1999 the Folgers account was moved from Ayer to the agency's sister, D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles. That agency was closed in 2002 by its new owner, Publicis Groupe, and the Folgers account was shifted to Publicis shop Saatchi & Saatchi. The campaign was updated by Saatchi & Saatchi to introduce each Folgers line extension, including the launch of its Folgers Café Latte, an instant coffee designed to appeal to latte-drinking younger consumers and to take on upscale coffeeshops such as Starbucks.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In 1850, during the California gold rush, James A. Folger began selling coffee beans to miners. Eventually he established J.A. Folger & Company, which during the next century began to spread eastward throughout the United States. With the 1960 merger of its San Francisco and Kansas City divisions, each of which had operated almost as separate companies, Folgers began to take the Midwest by storm. By 1963, when it became a subsidiary of Procter & Gamble, it had annual sales of $160 million.

During the mid-1960s P&G battled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which questioned its purchase of Folgers as a possible antitrust violation. P&G eventually obtained FTC approval of the purchase, but as early as 1962 it was clear that a few large companies were becoming dominant in the industry; in that year the top five coffee producers controlled a combined 62.9 percent share of the market.

Folgers began to expand into large Eastern markets, aided by the Mrs. Olson commercials, which ran from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. These spots featured an attractive elderly woman played by actress Virginia Christine, who appeared with a seemingly endless array of young couples. Although the commercials never developed much of a backstory for Mrs. Olson, her name and accent suggested she was Swedish American, and her role was that of an advisor to the almost interchangeable newlyweds under her tutelage. The solution to all problems, to judge from Mrs. Olson's advice at least, was Folgers.

The Mrs. Olson years saw numerous changes in the coffee industry, among them a sharp increase in prices brought on by poor Brazilian harvests and other world events during the mid-1970s and the rise of decaffeinated coffee during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although Folgers responded to these changes, its market share slipped somewhat, from 27.3 percent in 1979 to 24.9 percent in 1983. By the mid-1980s P&G had adopted a new strategy with the "Wakin' Up" campaign.

TARGET MARKET

The switch to "Wakin' Up" arose from a realization among P&G executives that, despite the effectiveness of Mrs. Olson at one stage, that campaign was no longer effective in reaching younger consumers. The youth market, although it was the segment least inclined to drink coffee, also represented the best area for future sales. During the mid-1980s, as consumers increasingly moved away from coffee and toward soft drinks and other beverages, P&G made the switch to ad agency NW Ayer and developed the "Wakin' Up" theme, which centered on images of morning and newness. Eventually this evolved into the "Best Part of Wakin' Up" jingle, which started to get heavy exposure during the early 1990s.

At the same time a surprising thing happened in the marketplace. Suddenly, coffee, long considered the drink of one's parents or even grandparents, was perceived as a fashionable beverage. It had appeared for a time that coffee would go the way of its old companion, cigarettes—marginalized as an unhealthy, antisocial product—but by the early 1990s coffee had emerged as a new favorite among consumers under 35. Leading the trend were coffee bars, a phenomenon that first sprouted on the West Coast and then, like Folgers itself, spread eastward. In contrast to cigarettes, coffee now seemed decidedly healthy, part of an active lifestyle, and coffee bars appeared as a positive alternative to old-fashioned alcohol bars.

This new trend offered great promise for established brands like Folgers, but it also presented new challenges. It was true that the much-sought-after youth market was drinking coffee in great numbers, but they were buying it from retail chains such as Starbucks. In response to the trend, P&G in the mid-1990s stepped up promotion of Millstone, a specialty blend sold in stores. Millstone offered buyers the opportunity to make the kind of coffee they would normally buy at coffee bars, but to do so at home. As for Folgers, in 1998 it introduced its own whole-bean coffee line alongside a heavy advertising campaign orchestrated by NW Ayer.

COMPETITION

In 1990, before the coffee-bar phenomenon exploded, Bill Saporito in Fortune described the fierce competition between Folgers and Maxwell House in these terms: "Think of two large men competing to see who can keep his hand in a pot of scalding brew the longest. For more than ten years," Saporito wrote, the nation's two leading brands had been "locked in an often profitless struggle to dominate the market, warring with blasts of advertising, perpetual rounds of price cutting, and millions upon millions of cents-off coupons." Although Folgers held the lead among all brands, Saporito reported, General Foods had a larger overall share through its control of the Yuban and Sanka brands, along with Maxwell House.

Taster's Choice was a brand produced by the Nestlé Beverage Corporation that exceeded both Folgers and Maxwell House in the instant-coffee category, a segment accounting for nearly $600 million in annual sales by 1994. Since 1991 Taster's Choice had been running commercials that created more buzz than those of either of its large competitors. These spots revolved around the "Taster's Choice Couple" as their romance built over cups of Taster's Choice. Successive installments in this saga offered ever more intriguing details, "from their first meeting as neighbors to the surprise visit of a young man calling the woman 'Mom,' " as Leah Rickard wrote in Advertising Age. At the end of the next spot, which aired during the highly popular CBS program Northern Exposure on June 13, 1994, Rickard reported, "Viewers will find out the young man is [the woman's] son, Jeremy, who is home from college. Later that evening after meeting with her son, the woman calls her suitor on the phone to tell him how much Jeremy liked him. He asks, 'Is there anything else you forgot to tell me?' The spot ends with her answer: 'Volumes.'" Industry analyst Ronald Morrow told Rickard, "It's a very effective advertising campaign. The campaign is part of the reason why Taster's Choice has increased market share."

By 1997 all traditional coffee brands faced a new and fierce competitor: Starbucks, which began test-marketing specialty coffees in supermarkets. The retail chain, Alice Z. Cuneo reported in Advertising Age, "expects to surpass P&G's category-leading Folgers in [supermarket] sales. Indeed, Starbucks—which predicts it will have $1 billion in coffee revenue this fiscal year—already claims to be the leading brand, thanks to its retail outlets and alliances with United Airlines, Nordstrom, and other partners. But the new thrust is intended to tap the store shelves from which 80 percent of the nation's coffee is purchased, a venue now dominated by Folgers and Kraft's [General Foods' parent company] Maxwell House."

MARKETING STRATEGY

Folgers had much to fear from new competitors in the late 1990s, but it also had plenty of advantages on its side, thanks to its parent company. A survey conducted by Shopper Report in early 1997 revealed that "a very high number of P&G brands"—including Folgers—"popped up in response to our request to name the best value products on the market this year." These results suggested "that advertising, coupled with high performance, continues to play a major role in brand value perception." Folgers's advertising had long won acclaim. In 1998 advertising executive Harry Beckwith cited a 1980 spot for Folgers freeze-dried coffee as an example of what Walter J. Schruntek in Foodservice Director called "a study in superior brand positioning … and a lesson for today's 'brand-reinventors.' "

To an extent, Folgers's "Best Part of Wakin' Up" commercials had reinvented coffee advertising with the contributions of French-born medical anthropologist G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose work with autistic children in Europe had resulted in a concept he dubbed the "mental imprint." Applying this principle to Folgers marketing, Rapaille had urged that the company emphasize aroma over taste, because, in the words of the Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Ball, "aroma invokes feelings of home." Thus many variations of the "Best Part" jingle mentioned aroma, as in "the aroma wakes him up." An example was a spot in which a young soldier, home from the army, entered the family kitchen and put on a pot of Folgers. As Ball noted, "Its aroma wakes up his mother, who senses immediately that her son has returned."

WE SUBSTITUTED INSTANT FOLGERS …

During the 1980s Folgers ran a television spot that, although it never attained the notoriety of the famous "Mrs. Olson" spots, nonetheless proved memorable. The commercial, for Folgers instant, showed diners at a fine restaurant being served coffee at the conclusion of the meal. As a voice-over informed viewers, the restaurant's patrons did not know it, but the staff had substituted Folgers instant for their regular brand. The climactic point of the commercial came when several of the restaurant customers, informed that they had been drinking Folgers instant, proclaimed it every bit as good as the restaurant's usual brew.

"If you're at all skeptical," wrote Caroline Knapp in Boston Business Journal, "you probably assumed the whole thing was a scam … Well, food snobs and cynics, guess again." In fact the responses were real, although the diners themselves had been carefully selected during five months of marketing research. It was an elaborate process, but one to which Folgers's parent company Procter & Gamble had become well accustomed in its many years as a leading marketer of consumer brands.

With the help of New York-based Tom Dale Market Research Company, P&G had carefully whittled down a large sample of survey respondents in the Boston area. The interview subjects had no idea that coffee was the focus of the study. According to P&G spokesman Don Tasone, in order to "throw respondents off, we ask[ed] them about everything—what airline they fly, how often they go to movies, that kind of thing." Eventually the group of respondents had been narrowed to just 50, who in exchange for their time were invited to dinner at one of Boston's most upscale restaurants, Maison Robert. On the appointed night, 36 of them showed up in a restaurant that—unbeknownst to them—had been equipped with a one-way mirror, microphones, and hidden cameras. After the dinner, the maitre d' went from guest to guest, serving them chocolate truffles and coffee and chatting with them. Ultimately he worked the conversation around to the subject of the coffee they were drinking, and from a series of discussions, the company pulled three particularly glowing appraisals for the commercial. Participants who signed interview release forms were given gratuities of $50 each.

To compete more directly with Starbucks and other premium lines, in late 1997 Folgers introduced Folgers Select Whole Bean coffee to test markets in Massachusetts and Wisconsin. This was accompanied by an N.W. Ayer campaign that offered a variation on the "Wakin' Up" theme: "Wake Up to a Whole New Folgers—Folgers New Whole Bean." The campaign continued to evolve each year. One 1998 spot used the singing talents of the a cappella group Rockapella for the Folgers jingle, while another capitalized on interest at the time in Gaelic dancing as popularized by the Riverdance Broadway show.

By the middle of 1999 Folgers was introducing its Whole Bean brand extension throughout the nation. A massive campaign involving print, broadcast, coupons, direct mail, shelf takers, and in-store sampling accompanied the launch. Folgers also moved into the new field of high-definition television (HDTV) with a spot titled "Crew Morning," first broadcast on July 15, 1999. In late 1999 P&G introduced another Folgers brand extension, instant Folgers Café Latte, which, like its whole-bean variety, also sought to compete with coffeeshops such as Starbucks and to target young, hip consumers who patronized coffee bars. Additionally, new spots for traditional ground Folgers were released on network television. While continuing to use the long-running "Best Part of Wakin' Up" theme, the commercials were more contemporary. One holiday spot featured a group of friends who were prepared to cut down a Christmas tree, only to change their minds when they saw how beautiful the tree looked in the snowy forest.

To celebrate the 150th birthday of Folgers, Procter & Gamble sponsored a competition in 2000 for which the prize was a chance to sing the familiar "Wakin' Up" jingle in a new television commercial. The winning group, Indiana-based funk hip-hop band Zambow, joined the ranks of other music stars who had performed the song in commercials since 1984, including Aretha Franklin, who starred in a Folgers commercial in 1988.

OUTCOME

Throughout the late 1990s P&G concentrated on gaining market share in the growing areas of specialty and whole-bean coffees. This it did in part through Millstone, to which it devoted increasing advertising dollars, and through Folgers Whole Bean. Folgers extended advertising to the Internet and continued to wage war with Maxwell House. The two brands still dominated the market, with one or the other assuming first place, only to be overtaken by its competitor.

Clearly changes were afoot in the world of coffee marketing, and Folgers—thanks to heavy advertising campaigns built around the "Wakin' Up" theme—continued to weather the changes and hold its place at or near the top end of the segment. In 1999 the brand's marketing was moved from N.W. Ayer to sister shop D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B). Another agency change happened in 2002 when DMB&B was closed by its new owner, Publicis Groupe. At that time the Folgers account was moved to Publicis shop Saatchi & Saatchi. Despite agency changes, shifts in the industry, and evolving consumer tastes, the "Wakin' Up" campaign followed the path of the long-running "Mrs. Olson" campaign and remained a constant. Twenty years after its 1985 introduction the campaign was still going strong, as evidenced by a visit to the Folgers website (www.folgers.com), where the promise "The best part of wakin' up is Folgers in your cup" was still prevalent in 2005.

CLEANER CLOSE CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

In 2003 the Procter & Gamble Company felt that its Daz laundry detergent, the number four brand in its category in the United Kingdom, had become outdated, thanks in no small part to a long-running advertising campaign perceived as artificial and old-fashioned. Procter & Gamble (P & G) thus charged advertising agency Leo Burnett's London office with the task of dramatically redefining the Daz brand in the United Kingdom and Ireland. With an eye toward attracting a younger generation of homemakers, Leo Burnett crafted "Cleaner Close," a series of commercials that was modeled after, and that openly spoofed, a television soap opera.

The TV spots began appearing in March 2003 during the top U.K. soap operas of the time, mimicking the conventions of the genre with a cast of recurring one-dimensional characters interconnected chiefly by sexual infidelity and intrigue. Each commercial, however, hinged on the cleaning capability of Daz. For instance, an adulterous husband hiding in a closet was, in one episode, literally sniffed out by his wife because of the "beautiful … citrus … unmistakable" smell of his underpants, the only article of clothing he was wearing. In another commercial a mother reprimanded her son's "grubby" taste in women after finding a dingy white bra in his room; she exhorted his girlfriend to use Daz, only to find out that the bra in question was not the girlfriend's. Storylines involving these and other characters evolved in characteristically absurd fashion over the campaign's subsequent years. Supporting print ads featured characters from the TV spots, and Daz packaging provided ministories related to the ongoing melodrama. Consumers could likewise visit the Daz website to view all of the "Cleaner Close" episodes and to fill in their knowledge about the series as well as the brand.

Conflicting data about Daz sales during this time obscured the campaign's practical impact on the laundry-detergent industry, but the campaign won two Gold Euro EFFIEs in 2004, suggesting that P & G had achieved its primary goal of reinvigorating the Daz image.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble was founded by brothers-in-law William Procter and James Gamble in 1837 as a candle and soap company. Though the market for candles declined precipitously with the invention of the lightbulb, P & G did extremely well in the soap business, introducing the iconic Ivory brand in the 1870s while selling numerous other varieties of soap in smaller numbers. Branching out in the early twentieth century, P & G launched another American product that became a household name, Crisco vegetable shortening, and 1930 saw the company expand geographically, making its first entry into Europe with the acquisition of England's Thomas Hedley & Sons, the makers of the Fairy Soap brand. In the following decades P & G continued to expand its range of products and move into new product categories, while progressively establishing its global network of companies. Tide detergent, Prell shampoo, and Crest toothpaste were among P & G's top new products at midcentury. The company also acquired Charmin Paper Mills and entered the market of toilet tissue, napkin, and paper towel products. P & G continued to build a stable of products central to modern life—Downy fabric softener, Pampers diapers, Folgers coffee—and to expand at a rapid pace across product categories and national borders. In 1980 the company's annual sales topped $10 billion; by 1993 sales had reached the $30 billion mark. In 2002 P & G owned 12 brands that generated more than $1 billion apiece in annual revenue; with the 2005 acquisition of Gillette, P & G added five more billion-dollar brands to its portfolio.

A familiar brand in the United Kingdom since its midcentury debut, P & G's Daz, that country's number four brand of laundry detergent, had an outdated image by the start of the twenty-first century. This was at least partly the result of a decade-long advertising campaign that was seen as anachronistic and artificial. Known as the "Doorstep Challenge" campaign, the effort depicted lower-tier celebrities arriving, as if randomly, at the homes of ordinary housewives and then demonstrating the superior cleaning attributes of Daz. At the campaign's close in 2003, the Sunday Times noted that the doorstep challenge commercials had once been voted the most annoying spots on TV and asked sardonically, "If a week is a long time in politics, what's 10 years in commercials? Answer: about eight years too long." P & G acknowledged that younger consumers in particular were unmoved by the doorstep-challenge scenario, perceiving it as an overtly fake, old-fashioned marketing stunt. The company asked Daz's agency, the London office of Leo Burnett, to rethink the brand's advertising dramatically.

TARGET MARKET

Daz's traditional target in the United Kingdom was value-conscious homemakers, but the brand's image, as communicated with the "doorstep challenge" commercials, had alienated women at the younger end of this target group's age range. The "Cleaner Close" campaign was meant to correct this problem and endow the brand with an energized personality while still transmitting Daz's traditionally down-to-earth image and attributes such as good value, whitening capability, and honesty. Because Leo Burnett believed that younger women had been alienated by Daz's image, it specifically targeted 25- to 34-year-old homemakers who used competing brands of detergent.

Leo Burnett determined that TV soap operas were extremely popular among this target group, and the agency accordingly created a series of mini soap-opera spoofs set in an area dubbed "Cleaner Close." Using the "soap" television format for commercials on behalf of actual soap was, in Leo Burnett's view, a fun and offbeat way of communicating the populist values of the Daz brand. The agency felt that the concept had the potential to energize the target group's interest in the product; the campaign thus had the feel of a brand relaunch.

COMPETITION

The United Kingdom's leading laundry detergent brand during this time was Persil, owned, in an uncommon corporate arrangement, by Lever Faberge (which took the Unilever name in late 2004) in the U.K. and Henkel in Germany. (Each company had, over the years, tried unsuccessfully to buy the brand outright from the other. To complicate matters further, the detergent formula branded as Persil in the U.K. was sold by Unilever as Omo, Skip, and Ala in other markets.) Despite these brand anomalies, Persil's U.K. roots ran particularly deep: launched in 1908, the brand became in 1955 the country's first laundry detergent to advertise on TV in the U.K., and it had maintained a consistent marketing profile in the years since, balancing an appeal to young people with more traditional messages relating to cleaning power and maternal caring. Persil shifted marketing tactics significantly in 2005, when it adopted a "Dirt Is Good" theme. The message that children should be encouraged to get dirty, and that Persil could handle the fallout of such a parental attitude, was uncommon in an industry whose advertising tended to focus on dirt as a problem to be solved.

P & G's own Ariel was the United Kingdom's second-best-selling laundry detergent. One of the brand's defining advertising campaigns focused, in the late 1970s, on the testing of Ariel versus a competitor's brand in the cleaning of two fishmongers' soiled aprons; the person judging whose apron was cleaner was their mother, an archetypal motherly perfectionist in the matter of laundry. This maternal-themed, product-attribute pitch gave way in the 1990s and the decade that followed to messages that reflected changing gender roles while acknowledging that women remained the primary target market for Persil. For instance, a 1997 TV spot showed another mother-son relationship, but this time the teenage son, returning from a rock festival with a soiled shirt, was told by his mother that in her day they did not wear clothes at such events. A 2002 spot was likewise irreverent, showing a man in his underwear who, while attempting to do his own laundry, was forced to ask his wife, "What load do I put it on?" The wife, who was sitting and talking to a female friend at that moment, said, as though making reference to her husband in his underwear, "Small load." The two women laughed, while the man remained oblivious to the comic substance of the exchange.

IMITATING THE IMITATION

Although Daz's "Cleaner Close" series of mini-soap operas overtly poked fun at actual soap operas, its creators in the London office of advertising agency Leo Burnett apparently mastered the conventions they set out to parody. The first episode of "Cleaner Close," in which a mother confronted her son and his girlfriend in a local pub after finding a dingy white bra in his room, appeared in March 2003, and approximately two months later the popular BBC soap opera EastEnders, set in a working-class London suburb, recycled the commercial's plot almost exactly. In the actual soap opera the mother-son relationship was changed into a half-sibling relationship, and the bra in the Daz commercial became a pair of "knickers" in the EastEnders episode. But the half sister's encounter with her half brother took place in a pub, as in the commercial; the girlfriend with whom the half brother was sharing a drink responded to the half sister's comments by saying that the knickers were not hers, as in the commercial; and the actual owner of the knickers, present in the pub at the time of the confrontation, dropped her glass in response to the girlfriend's admission, as in the commercial.

MARKETING STRATEGY

"Cleaner Close" referred, in a British usage uncommon in the United States, to a housing development that served as the mini-soap opera's setting. The British pronunciation of the word "close," used in this sense, rendered the soap opera's title a homonym of "cleaner clothes." As in a real soap opera, the "Cleaner Close" series of commercials featured recurring characters whose schemes and love affairs brought them into absurdly melodramatic conflict with one another. In "Cleaner Close," however, each episode ultimately hinged on Daz detergent. The openly unrealistic nature of "Cleaner Close" and the soap genre as a whole was acknowledged not just in the tone and staging of the commercials but in the campaign tagline, which appeared at the end of each episode: "Daz: the soap you can believe in."

The first "Cleaner Close" spot, which appeared in March 2003, opened with a scene of a mother, Maureen McGrath, cleaning her young-adult son's room. Finding a bra under his bed, Maureen marched indignantly outdoors and through the streets with it and then entered a pub where her son was sharing a drink with his girlfriend. "If you're going to play around in my house, Sean McGrath," Maureen said, waving the bra in front of her son, "don't play around with a grubby girl." Maureen then proceeded to lecture her son's girlfriend about the cleaning properties of Daz, which would render the "grubby" bra as white as Maureen's own blouse. Maureen handed the bra to the young woman, who said, "But that's … not my bra." A barmaid in the corner dropped the glass she had been holding, and the camera focused on her nervous expression as she backed away into another room, implying that the bra was hers.

The series, as in an actual soap opera, relentlessly focused on infidelity, and Episode 3 introduced another set of characters whose sexual lives uncomfortably intersected. The voice-over informed viewers, "Pat's convinced she's finally caught [her husband] Mick with Jackie Strong," and showed Pat bursting into Jackie's bedroom and asking, "Where's Mick?" Pat then pulled a box of detergent from her shoulder bag and said, "Have you heard of new Limited Edition Daz Citrus Blast?" As Pat described the "beautiful … fresh … unmistakable citrus fragrance" of the product, it became clear that she smelled that very fragrance in Jackie's apartment. Pat then said, authoritatively, "Out you come, Mick," and Mick emerged from a closet wearing nothing but white underwear. "Brilliant white, aren't they, Jackie?" Pat asked. "Or hadn't you noticed?"

The series continued to evolve over the course of 2004, 2005, and 2006. Episode 8 showed Pat, having left Mick, at the altar with Steve Grey. Mick interrupted the wedding, however, to point out how much whiter his own shirt was than Steve's, effectively reestablishing himself as the right man for Pat. Maureen McGrath's death, meanwhile, yielded new plot developments in Episode 9. At the reading of her will, it emerged that she was a multimillionaire, but to her son Sean's frustration, she had left her fortune to "her beloved Daz," and the money had been converted into Daz coupons. Another plotline focused on Jackie Strong's husband, Vince, recently released from prison, and his relationships with former lover Pandora Packer, with his current (male) lover Rick Daniels, and with DC Strange, the police detective determined to catch him in a criminal act. When Vince was "blasted" by lemon and lime in Episode 13, consumers were directed to consult packages of Daz to determine who was responsible for the misdeed.

The commercials ran primarily during major U.K. soap operas—in keeping with the insights about the target market that dictated the creative strategy—and were supported by print ads that focused on the characters introduced in the TV spots. "Cleaner Close" story snippets appeared on Daz packaging, and the Daz website, www.dazwhite.co.uk/, was also integrated into the campaign. Consumers could visit the site to view the TV commercials, read biographies of the "Cleaner Close" characters, and find a variety of campaign- and product-related information.

OUTCOME

According to P & G, as a result of the "Cleaner Close" campaign Daz's market share increased for the first time since 1996, growing from a precampaign figure of 6.5 percent to 8.2 percent after the campaign's first year. Marketing, however, reported that Daz sales declined 15 percent between 2002 and 2004. Leo Burnett pointed to research indicating that "Cleaner Close" was the best-known laundry-detergent campaign of its time in the United Kingdom and Ireland and that the new advertising approach had effectively updated the Daz brand. The campaign won two Gold Euro EFFIE Awards in 2004, one in the "Household" category and one in the "Brand Revitalisation" category.

GOT THE POWER CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

Procter & Gamble created the disposable-diaper market in 1961 when it introduced its Pampers brand. Despite being the first successful disposable diaper, by 1985 Pampers was falling behind competitor Kimberly-Clark's Huggies brand, which was introduced in 1968 but was not rolled out nationally until 1977. The Pampers brand continued to slip in the market, and by 2001 Pampers' market share had fallen to more than 14 percentage points behind Huggies. The relaunch of Pampers in 2002 with the introduction of Baby Stages of Development disposable products, which included a line of training pants for toddlers, helped narrow the gap between Pampers and Huggies. To help push Pampers further ahead, the company introduced a new disposable training pant for toddlers, called Feel 'n Learn Advanced Trainers, that was designed to help make toilet training easier.

To rebuild consumer awareness of the Pampers brand and to support the introduction of the Feel 'n Learn Advanced Trainers, the company contracted advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi New York for the creation of a marketing campaign. The new campaign, themed "Got the Power," began in August 2004, at a time when many parents were trying to get their toddlers toilet trained before entering preschool. No specific amount for the campaign's cost was available, but estimates placed it at more than $20 million. "Got the Power" included television spots set to the 1990 hit song "The Power" by Snap. The campaign also employed print ads that appeared in national consumer magazines and "Potty Power" training kits that were sold through national retail outlets.

Within weeks of the campaign's launch it became clear that both it and the new training pants were a hit with parents of toddlers. According to a report in Advertising Age, Procter & Gamble's market share in training pants jumped to 30 percent in September, and by October 2004 Pampers had closed the gap, with Huggies falling behind by three points. The campaign won a Bronze EFFIE Award in 2005 for successfully increasing awareness of the Pampers brand and for encouraging consumers to try the Feel 'n Learn Advanced Trainers with their toddlers.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Procter & Gamble Company was founded in 1837 by William Procter, a candle maker, and James Gamble, a soap maker. By 1859 the company was thriving; it reached $1 million in sales that year. During the Civil War it had a contract to supply candles and soap to the Union Army. Procter & Gamble introduced Ivory Soap to consumers in the 1880s. As electricity became more common, in the 1920s the company stopped making candles and focused its attention on a diverse variety of consumer products, including Crisco shortening, Prell shampoo, and Tide laundry detergent. In the 1950s chemical engineer Victor Mills, a Procter & Gamble employee, took an idea developed in 1946 by Marion Donovan—a mother tired of leaky cloth diapers and the rashes her babies often got from wearing wet diapers—and built on it. The idea, disposable diapers, evolved into Procter & Gamble's Pampers brand.

The new product was introduced to consumers in Peoria, Illinois, in 1961, followed by launches the next year in Sacramento, California, and two years later in Saint Louis, Missouri. Pampers diapers went on sale nationally in 1970. Busy parents appreciated the convenience of the disposable diapers, and as demand grew, Procter & Gamble kept improving on the product. Changes included adding tape fasteners, switching from creped tissue to fluff pulp for the diaper's base, and adding new products to the diaper line, such as Luvs, which had a better fit for older babies, and smaller diapers for newborns. The line continued its growth with the addition of diapers specifically designed for girls (extra padding in the back) and boys (extra padding in the front).

Although Pampers had created the disposable diaper and built a market for the product, by the 1990s the brand had fallen behind Kimberly-Clark's Huggies brand, which was launched in limited markets in 1968, some seven years after Pampers. Kimberly-Clark expanded the Huggies line to include Pull-Up disposable training pants for toddlers in 1989. Pampers did not introduce its own disposable training pant for toddlers until 1993, four years after competitor Huggies, leading Pampers' market share to drop further behind its competitor. Getting the jump on Huggies, in 2002 Pampers introduced its Toddlers Transition line of products, which included First Steps disposable absorbent pants, designed for pulling on while a child was standing, and Easy Ups for toddlers who were not fully potty trained but ready to pull their underwear on by themselves. The new products helped improve Pampers' standing in the market. In 2004 Feel 'n Learn Advanced Trainers, designed to assist in the potty-training process by letting the toddler feel wet and learn to stay dry by going to the bathroom, was added to the line. To promote the new product and increase brand awareness, the company launched its "Got the Power" campaign.

TARGET MARKET

"Got the Power" had two target audiences: the toddler who was going through toilet training, and the parents, typically mothers, who were helping with the process. Based on research by potty-training coaches, parents thought that potty training a child would take about five months, when in fact the process usually took eight to ten months. It was also found that during that time the toddler would have accidents and parents could not always prevent them. Parents could not make their children learn to use the toilet or master the skill faster; rather, the toddler was best off if he or she was allowed to move through the process at his or her own pace, with encouragement and support from parents.

The marketing challenge was to reach both working and stay-at-home mothers 25 to 34 years old and to convince them that Pampers' new Feel 'n Learn Advanced Trainers could help them and their children in the toilet-training process. The campaign targeted mothers on an emotional and intellectual level. Emotionally, moms could see that the trainers enabled them to be cheerleaders for their toddlers' successes. Intellectually, moms could recognize that the trainers allowed them to empower and motivate their toddlers to go to the bathroom and use the toilet on their own. A side target market was day-care centers and preschools, which were believed to have a strong influence on parents and their decisions about child training.

COMPETITION

In 1968 Kimberly-Clark Corp., best known for its paper products, such as bathroom tissue, paper towels, and feminine-hygiene products, introduced Huggies disposable diapers. The product put the 125-year-old paper company in direct competition with Procter & Gamble's Pampers. By 1985 Huggies had passed Pampers to become the number one disposable diaper in the United States. In 1989 Huggies introduced the first disposable training pants for toddlers, called Pull-Ups. From the mid-1990s and throughout that decade Huggies was the market leader in disposable diapers and training pants, pushing ahead of Pampers by more than 14 points in the third quarter of 2001. Kimberly-Clark also took on Johnson & Johnson, the leading maker of toiletries for babies, when it introduced its own 20-item baby-care product line under the Huggies brand in 2004. Prior to the new line, Huggies had only offered two baby-care products, a basic wash and disposable washcloths. The new toiletries included shampoo, lavender-and-chamomile and shea-butter lotions and baby washes, diaper-rash cream, and liquid baby powder. To promote the new product line the company employed direct mailings, promotions attached to packs of Huggies diapers and Pull-Ups training pants, and television spots and print ads produced by the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather New York.

F. Carlyle Harmon, who joined Johnson & Johnson in 1947 and soon thereafter became head of the company's fabric-research department, developed the non-woven, highly absorbent material used to make disposable diapers. Johnson & Johnson produced Chux disposable diapers in 1948; eventually, however, the company discontinued the diaper and shifted its focus to what went on the baby's skin before the diaper. The company was best known for introducing Johnson's Toilet and Baby Powder in 1890. While the company never expanded into the disposable-diaper market like its competitors Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble, it slowly evolved into the market leader for baby-care toiletries. In the 1920s it introduced baby cream. Johnson & Johnson's baby powder held 60 percent of the market share in 2004, and its baby shampoo held a 70 percent share. To promote its products and show consumers that the company understood the needs of new parents, Johnson & Johnson launched its "Having a Baby Changes Everything" campaign, developed by Lowe & Partners Worldwide New York. In 2004 the campaign, which included print ads and television spots, won a Gold EFFIE Award for strengthening the company's already strong brand image.

PAMPERS BRAND INTRODUCES KANDOO PERSONAL HYGIENE LINE FOR TODDLERS

After giving kids the power to master the potty with its line of training pants, Pampers took toilet training to the next level by introducing a line of personal-hygiene products just for kids. The new products—flushable wipes and hand soap—were designed for kids aged two to seven. To ensure that the products helped youngsters learn bathroom basics, the Kandoo wipes and soap came in fun scents and easy-to-use, kid-friendly packages. The new product line was the first venture by Pampers' parent Procter & Gamble into toiletries for kids. Kandoo's launch was supported by a national marketing campaign with a cartoon spokescharacter called the Kandoo Frog and a new website, www.kidskandoo.com.

MARKETING STRATEGY

When Pampers introduced its training-pants product Feel 'n Learn Advanced Trainers in 2004, it charged its advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi New York, with the job of creating a marketing campaign that would achieve several goals. Besides the primary challenge of quickly building brand awareness for the new product, the campaign was also expected to increase market share for the new training pants and to support Pampers' overall product brand. Timing of the campaign's release was crucial. It had to reach parents whose toddlers were getting ready to start preschool and who faced the dreaded no-diaper rule enforced in most preschools (which meant that children who were not toilet trained could not be enrolled in classes). The "Got the Power" campaign began in August, toilet-training crunch time for millions of parents and toddlers.

The campaign, estimated to cost at least $20 million, was a multifaceted marketing blitz that included Pampers naming August as "national toddler 'We Can Do It' month." Saatchi & Saatchi created television spots with "The Power," an upbeat 1990 hit by the dance-music group Snap, playing in the background. The TV spots kicked off in August. Print ads ran in publications beginning in September to coincide with back-to-school activities. The ads featured cute toddlers at play in various situations, but with surprised looks on their faces. The copy read: "Uh-oh, here comes that gotta go feeling again."

Also supporting the campaign were "Potty Power" training kits, sold at national retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, and Safeway, that included toilet-training tips and suggestions for parents, reward stickers for kids who made it to the toilet in time, and a CD of potty songs based on traditional children's songs such as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." It also included the theme song from the television spots, "The Power." For parents who were anxious to motivate their toddlers, press-and-play sound chips were available that could be attached to the toilet lid. When the little one did his or her job, he or she could press the chip and hear words of praise from cartoon characters Dora the Explorer or Spider Man. The characters also embellished the training pants: Dora on girls' pants and Spider Man on boys'.

OUTCOME

Signs that the campaign resonated with its target market, parents of toddlers, included studies that indicated a 52 percent brand recall among consumers who were surveyed following the launch of "Got the Power." In addition, the campaign helped Feel 'n Learn Advanced Trainers capture 10 percent of the training-pants market, and within nine weeks of its launch the product shipped 31 percent of the planned one-year goal, far surpassing shipment expectations. In addition to consumer recognition, the campaign earned honors from the advertising industry. In 2005 "Got the Power" was awarded a Bronze EFFIE from the New York American Marketing Association for achieving the goal of increasing consumer awareness of the new training-pants product.

HABITS CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

According to a survey by National Clothesline, a trade publication for garment-care professionals, approximately two billion items were cleaned each year by dry cleaners. In an effort to offer a cleaning alternative for nonwashable items and garments, Procter & Gamble (P&G) created a new product and a new market category: home dry-cleaning kits. In 1997 the company began test-marketing the kits in a limited area, and in 1999 it introduced its home dry-cleaning kit, Dryel, nationwide.

To support Dryel's launch, help build the brand's newly created category, and quickly establish the product as the category leader, Procter & Gamble's ad agency, Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, created a marketing campaign with a budget estimated at more than $20 million and themed "Habits." The campaign embraced its challenge: changing consumers' long-standing habits by convincing them that they could turn their home clothes dryer into a dry cleaner without damaging their clothes or other dry-clean-only items. Included in the campaign were teaser ads that appeared in newspapers and on billboards beginning in late 1999. Ads included the tagline "Suddenly, 'Dry Clean Only' Isn't." In 2000 television and radio spots began airing. Another part of the campaign was a $15 million field-marketing effort called the Dryel National Mall Tour, which hit the road in September 2000.

The "Habits" campaign produced mixed results. Consumers were willing to try Dryel, resulting in $45.7 million in sales in the first six months that it was on the market. The product also earned a Good Housekeeping "Good Buy" endorsement. The campaign was named one of Promo magazine's 50 Best Promoted Brands of 2000, and it won a 2000 Silver EFFIE Award. On the downside, the International Fabricare Institute, which represented dry cleaners, filed a complaint against Procter & Gamble with the Federal Trade Commission alleging the campaign made "false and misleading" claims about Dryel. Sales of Dryel failed to meet P&G's first-year goals of selling more than $100 million, and as sales began to slip further at the end of 2000, a new series of television spots and print ads was released.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Since the introduction of Dreft laundry detergent in 1933, which was followed by industry-leading Tide laundry detergent in 1946, Procter & Gamble had built a reputation for helping consumers take care of their washable clothes in their own homes. But there was an untapped niche in the home-laundry market: dry-clean-only garments. Those articles of clothing, such as wool sweaters, silk blouses, and satin dresses, among others, could not be cleaned in the home washing machine without risk of fading or shrinkage or colors running. To fill the gap in the home-laundry market and offer consumers the option of eliminating regular trips to the dry cleaners, Procter & Gamble developed the Dryel Fabric Care System. Not only was Dryel a new concept in the home care of clothing, but it also created a new product category.

P&G began test-marketing Dryel in 1997 in Columbus, Ohio. In July 1999 the product hit stores nationwide, and six months later the product had recorded $45.7 million in sales. The national launch was supported by a marketing campaign created by ad agency Leo Burnett USA, Chicago; it consisted of print ads and billboards with the tagline "Suddenly, 'Dry Clean Only' Isn't." Despite the early sales success, consumers were intimidated by the new alternative to dry cleaning and worried about tossing their expensive garments into the home clothes dryer. Further, competitors such as the Clorox Company quickly jumped into the market, releasing their own versions of home dry-cleaning kits. In 2000 Dryel's marketing effort was expanded to include television and radio spots. The campaign also included a shopping-mall tour to give consumers an opportunity to see Dryel at work firsthand. The expanded campaign was themed "Habits," based on its idea of changing consumers' deeply entrenched dry-cleaning habits.

TARGET MARKET

According to the information provided by Leo Burnett in the brief it submitted for the EFFIE Awards outlining the Dryel "Habits" campaign, more than any other demographic, professional career women were the most likely to buy and wear dry-clean-only clothes, from sweaters and slacks to dresses and suits. Additionally, because of their busy schedules working women were usually inconvenienced when forced to fit into their hectic days trips to the dry cleaners to drop off or pick up clothes. With working women accounting for some 60 percent of those using dry-cleaning services, Leo Burnett created the Dryel "Habits" campaign to appeal to women. More specifically, the campaign targeted working women aged 18 to 54. Leo Burnett further described the campaign's target consumer as "the clothes lover that's inconvenienced by the dry cleaner."

COMPETITION

In March 2000 the Clorox Company, best known for its bleach products, introduced its own home dry-cleaning kit, called FreshCare. To promote its new product and entry into the emerging home dry-cleaning category, Clorox turned to advertising agency DDB Worldwide, San Francisco. FreshCare's national marketing campaign, estimated to cost between $15 million and $20 million, included television and radio spots and print ads that ran in consumer magazine such as People and Good Housekeeping. Despite heavy promotion, in September 2001 Clorox reported that it was discontinuing FreshCare. According to Advertising Age, a Clorox spokeswoman stated that one reason for the decision was that the home dry-cleaning category "wasn't as big as projected." The company reported that FreshCare registered sales of $11.6 million for the 52 weeks ending July 15, 2001, compared to Dryel's $50.6 million in sales during the same period.

Also jumping into the home dry-cleaning market was the Dial Corporation (producer of, among other things, Dial and Coast soaps) with its 1999 purchase of the Custom Cleaner home dry-cleaning section of Creative Products Resource, Inc., a company based in Fairfield, New Jersey. Creative Products had introduced Custom Cleaner in 1996 as its main product offering. Partnered with Dial in the purchase was the German consumer-products company Henkel. At the time that Dial/Henkel acquired Custom Cleaner, the product's annual sales amounted to $10 million. In 2001 Dial/Henkel reported that sales of Custom Cleaner had reached just $12 million for the 52 weeks ending July 15 and that the company was discontinuing the dry-cleaning kits.

With both Clorox's FreshCare and Dial/Henkel's Custom Cleaner home dry-cleaning kits off the market, the only competition remaining for Procter & Gamble's Dryel brand was Dry Cleaner's Secret, which was introduced by Dry, Inc., of Portland, Oregon, in 2000. The start-up company was headed by Scott Heim, a former executive for Kimberly-Clark Corp. and DowBrands. Supporting the new product's launch were television and radio spots created by ad agency Bates Southwest of Houston, Texas. The campaign targeted consumers in 17 U.S. markets and touted the benefits of the product compared to the competition, such as a lower cleaning cost per garment and not requiring that clothes be placed in a bag before tossing them into the dryer. Although Dry Cleaner's Secret reported sales of just $2.5 million in the 52 weeks ending July 15, 2001, Dry, Inc. was not ready to throw in the towel. The company anticipated increased growth in its sales with the exit of FreshCare and Custom Cleaner from the market.

MARKETING STRATEGY

When Leo Burnett began planning its marketing campaign for Procter & Gamble's new product, Dryel home dry-cleaning kits, the challenges included changing the long-standing habits of consumers specific to how they cared for their dry-clean-only clothing. The campaign also had to help consumers overcome their reluctance to try a unique new product, and it had to respond to their skepticism about the product's effectiveness. Additionally, the campaign's goals were to help create a new product category and assure that Dryel would establish itself as the brand of choice, because it was assumed that competitors in the category would soon follow Dryel's lead.

With those goals and challenges in mind, Leo Burnett developed the "Habits" campaign. It included teaser ads prior to the product's launch as well as traditional advertising methods, including television and radio spots and print ads in consumer magazines and newspapers. No specific budget was available, but the agency noted that it was more than $20 million. Teaser ads appeared in print and outdoor executions such as on billboards and included the tagline "Suddenly, 'Dry Clean Only' Isn't." Another ad showed a "Dry Clean Only" label with a slash mark through it. Television spots that followed explained to consumers that they could clean dry-clean-only clothes at home with Dryel rather than taking them to a dry cleaner. The first TV spot in the campaign was released in 2000 and featured a woman frustrated when she arrived at her dry cleaner after hours and so was unable to pick up her clothes. A follow-up spot showed a woman who tried to wash her sweater rather than take it to the dry cleaner. The result was a sweater shrunken to doll size. In early 2001 a new series of print ads was introduced that portrayed women dressed in professional business attire doing atypical jobs, such chopping down trees. Another ad showed a woman wearing an evening gown while milking a cow.

Based on research indicating that 85 percent of all dry-clean-only clothing was purchased at shopping malls, the campaign included a tour of malls to demonstrate the product directly to consumers and give them hands-on experience with Dryel. The field-marketing effort, called the Dryel National Mall Tour, began at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in September 2000. The tour was planned to continue through March 2001 and appear at 275 malls in the United States and Canada. Included were demonstrations that featured working clothes dryers and Procter & Gamble representatives showing consumers how Dryel worked to clean and freshen clothes. Also appearing were guest speakers helping to promote the product, including actress Alison Cuffe from the daytime soap opera General Hospital and Cathy Turner, an Olympic-gold-medal-winning speed skater.

PROCTER & GAMBLE'S LAUNDRY SPA

Despite being known for its home laundering products, including Tide and Cheer detergents, Febreze fabric freshener, and Dryel home dry-cleaning kits, in 2001 Procter & Gamble began test-marketing a home-laundry valet service dubbed the "Laundry Spa." The service's actual name, Juvian, was being offered in suburbs in and around Atlanta, Georgia, and included picking up dirty laundry at the customer's home, cleaning the items, and returning them to the customer. The service cost $17 per bag, which was the equivalent of two loads of dirty laundry. Extras included "aromatherapy" treatments for $5 per bag and "hue and tone preservation," also $5 per bag. The service was not limited to dirty clothes. Customers could also send their shoes in for repairs and shining or draperies, bedding, and rugs for cleaning.

OUTCOME

Although Procter & Gamble's Dryel home dry-cleaning kits were met with mixed reviews from consumers and industry watchdogs, its marketing efforts were well received. Within one year of the start of the campaign, Dryel sales had reached $115 million, and Good Housekeeping magazine named Dryel one of seven new products to win its "Good Buy" award in 2000. The award was based on the product's ingenuity, value, and exceptional performance. On the flip side of the consumer coin, following the introduction of the new product CBS television consumer reporter Herb Weisbaum stated during a CBS This Morning broadcast that, while Dryel had its uses in "limited circumstances," he would not give up his dry cleaner. In addition the International Fabricare Institute (IFI), a dry-cleaning trade organization based in Silver Spring, Maryland, ran Dryel through a series of scientific tests at the request of Procter & Gamble and found that the product came up short of its advertised promises. In December 1999, based on its test results and Dryel's teaser advertising, the IFI filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission and the National Advertising Council of Better Business Bureaus against Procter & Gamble, alleging that the Dryel campaign made "false and misleading" claims about the product.

The campaign received accolades from Promo magazine, which listed Dryel as one of its 50 Best-Promoted Brands in 2000. As further recognition, in 2001 the "Habits" campaign earned a Silver EFFIE Award (in the New Product or Service Introductions category) for successfully educating consumers about the product and helping change entrenched habits about how to clean dry-clean-only clothes. Procter & Gamble reported that the Mall Tour effort reached more than 1.5 million consumers in malls. An additional five million consumers requested product information.

INGENIOUS PROTECTION FOR INGENIOUS WOMEN CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) acquired the Tampax tampon brand in 1997 when it purchased the parent company, Tambrands Inc., of White Plains, New York, in a deal valued at nearly $2 billion. Tampax tampons had been sold to women since the mid-1930s, and at the time of the acquisition by P&G they were the number one brand in the tampon segment of the U.S. market for feminine hygiene products. But by 2002 the Tampax brand was losing market share to other brands, including its closest competitor, Gentle Glide tampons, made by Playtex Products. In an effort to reverse the decline, P&G introduced Tampax Pearl tampons. The new product featured a plastic rather than a cardboard applicator and thus was in direct competition with Playtex's Gentle Glide tampon, the number one selling plastic applicator tampon.

To support the introduction of the Tampax Pearl tampon, an aggressive marketing campaign was created by the brand's agency, Leo Burnett USA. The campaign, with an estimated budget of between $30 and $40 million, included television spots and print ads that used the tagline "Are you a Pearl girl?" It also raised the ire of Playtex, which quickly filed two lawsuits against P&G. One lawsuit, based on the design of the Tampax Pearl plastic applicator, cited patent infringement. The second lawsuit alleged false advertising for P&G's claims that the "Pearl girl" product was superior to Playtex's Gentle Glide tampon. In 2003, ruling that there were enough differences between the Tampax Pearl and the Gentle Glide plastic applicators that no patent infringement had occurred, a court dismissed the first lawsuit. P&G lost the battle in the false advertising lawsuit, however, and was ordered to pay $2.96 million in damages to Playtex and to cancel all Tampax Pearl advertising that claimed it was a better product than the Gentle Glide tampon. Complying with the ruling, the "Pearl girl" ads were pulled, and Leo Burnett revamped the campaign. In 2004 the campaign was relaunched as "Ingenious Protection for Ingenious Women."

The new campaign appeared to have success in achieving its goals of increasing awareness of the new Tampax brand product and of expanding the sales of Tampax Pearl tampons. In addition, the campaign was honored with a 2005 Silver EFFIE, and Tampax Pearl was named one of Advertising Age's 2005 Marketing 50 for product creativity and marketing innovation.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

P&G entered the tampon market in 1975 with the introduction of its Rely brand. The company recalled Rely tampons and discontinued their production in 1980, however, after use of the product was linked to toxic-shock syndrome, a sometimes fatal disease that usually affected women using tampons. P&G reentered the tampon market in 1997 when the company acquired Tambrands Inc. and its Tampax brand. At the time of the acquisition, Tampax had been sold to consumers for more than 60 years and was the number one tampon brand in the United States. Following completion of the $1.85 billion purchase, P&G assigned the Tampax account to the Chicago advertising agency Leo Burnett. By 2002, although Tampax was still the brand leader, its market share had dropped from 45 to 40 percent of the overall tampon segment. In an effort to reverse the brand's declining sales, P&G introduced Tampax Pearl, the first Tampax product to use a plastic applicator rather than the standard cardboard, in 2002. A marketing campaign, estimated to cost between $30 and $40 million, supported the new product. Created by Leo Burnett, the campaign used the tagline "Are you a Pearl girl?" and included television spots and print ads.

Before Tampax Pearl tampons ever reached retail stores, however, rival Playtex filed a lawsuit against P&G, alleging that the new tampon's design infringed on the patent Playtex held for the plastic applicator used in Gentle Glide tampons. Despite the lawsuit, in September 2002 P&G proceeded with the introduction of Tampax Pearl tampons and the supporting advertising campaign. Soon after the new campaign was launched Playtex was back in court, claiming that the P&G Tampax Pearl ads made false claims about Playtex's Gentle Glide tampons.

In 2003 the court dismissed Playtex's claim of patent infringement against P&G, ruling that the Tampax Pearl did not violate the patent because its plastic applicator had rounded surfaces as opposed to the flat surfaces of the Playtex plastic applicator. In the same year, however, a judge ruled against P&G in the suit alleging that its advertising made false claims about rival Playtex and its Gentle Glide tampons. P&G was ordered to pay Playtex $2.96 million in damages and to withdraw its advertising campaign for Tampax Pearl. A P&G statement published in USA Today said that the company had begun to comply with the judge's orders to stop making advertising claims that Tampax Pearl offered "superior wearing comfort and superior protection versus Playtex Gentle Glide." In response to the court's orders, Leo Burnett revised its campaign for Tampax Pearl tampons, and in 2004 the "Ingenious Protection for Ingenious Women" campaign was launched.

TARGET MARKET

The average woman experienced 12 to 13 monthly periods annually for 35 to 40 years, or until she reached the beginning of menopause in her early 50s. This created a large and ongoing market for feminine hygiene products. According to the industry, the market was also divided by three specific categories of use: age, personal needs, and financial resources. Research by P&G indicated that women made up 80 percent of the customers for the company's range of products. Further, young women in their 20s and 30s were the largest market for tampons. Thus, when P&G added Pearl tampons to its Tampax line, the product's design and packaging were created with the 20- to 30-something age group in mind. A strand of pearls was pictured on the box, and a window in the front allowed consumers to see the product inside. Tampax Pearl also targeted girls in their teens, those just entering the feminine hygiene market. Efforts included wrapping individual tampons in noncrinkle plastic so that teenage girls could discreetly use the product in public bathrooms. Also targeted were women with the resources to buy higher-end feminine hygiene products with a higher price point, which included Tampax Pearl tampons. The new tampon was about 30 percent more expensive than other brands, including traditional Tampax with cardboard applicators.

COMPETITION

Playtex Products, Inc., based in Westport, Connecticut, had introduced the first tampon with a plastic applicator, the Gentle Glide tampon, in 1968. In 2001 Playtex's Gentle Glide brand was the leading seller in the plastic applicator tampon segment. The brand was also entrenched in the number two spot in the overall tampon segment and was winning market share from the number one brand, P&G's Tampax, which had been the tampon segment leader for years. At the end of 2001 the market share for Playtex's Gentle Glide tampons had climbed to 21.7 percent. The situation changed in 2002, however, when P&G added a tampon with a plastic applicator to its Tampax line. This new product, Tampax Pearl, went head to head with the Playtex Gentle Glide tampon. Following the introduction of the Tampax Pearl, sales of Playtex's Gentle Glide tampons dropped 7.4 percent, while the sales of the Tampax brand grew 9.4 percent. In response to the new product and its marketing, Playtex filed two lawsuits against P&G, one for patent infringement and the other for false advertising. In 2003 Playtex's patent infringement lawsuit against P&G was dismissed, but its false advertising claim was upheld in court. Despite winning a battle, Playtex appeared to be losing the war. Playtex reported that its feminine care segment posted a drop in net sales to $48.8 million in the first quarter of 2003, compared to $61.1 million for the same period during the previous year. According to an article in Nonwovens Industry, "Playtex executives attributed the income decline, in part, to the extensive spending in the tampon category, in response to the launch of Procter & Gamble's Tampax Pearl plastic applicator tampon." At the end of 2003, however, the company reported that its tampon segment had stabilized, with 26 percent of the market share, and a new product—Beyond tampons—was set to be introduced in January 2004.

Although Kotex, made by the Kimberly-Clark Corp. of Irving, Texas, was the number one feminine care brand in the United States, its Security tampons were a distant third in the tampon segment, with a market share of 12.7 percent in 2001. To reach younger women and to update its brand image, the company launched its "Red Dot" advertising campaign in 2000. Created by Ogilvy & Mather Chicago, the campaign took an approach to advertising feminine care products that was more honest than usual, with the red dot symbolizing women's periods. It was described in PR Newswire as taking a "frank, you-go-girl tone." Kotex was the only brand that offered products in all three feminine care sectors—sanitary pads, pantiliners, and tampons—and the campaign emphasized that the products and packaging made women feel special. In 2003, responding to the changing tastes of women, Kotex introduced an improved line of products and packaging, including updated packaging for its Security tampons that was designed specifically to appeal to younger women. At the end of 2003, the sales of Security tampons, while still in the number three spot, had inched up 2.8 percent, to $74.2 million, compared to sales during the previous year. Kotex's "Red Dot" campaign evolved in 2004 to give a better portrait of the world of young women, encompassing all major aspects of their lives and not just the times of their monthly periods.

MARKETING STRATEGY

When P&G introduced its new Tampax product, Pearl tampons, in 2002, the brand's agency, Leo Burnett USA, created an aggressive marketing campaign using the tag-line "Are you a Pearl girl?" to support the product. In 2004, responding to a 2003 court order requiring P&G to pull all of its Tampax Pearl advertising that included claims of the product's superiority to competitor Playtex's Gentle Glide tampon, Leo Burnett revamped the campaign. The new campaign, "Ingenious Protection for Ingenious Women," included television spots and print ads. Similar to the original campaign, the new ads had a fashion look and were designed to resonate with contemporary women. Using humor, the ads also helped remove the stigma often associated with women's monthly periods, while encouraging them to be proud of their intelligence and ingenuity.

PROCTER & GAMBLE USES INTERNET TO EDUCATE WOMEN ABOUT FEMININE HYGIENE

The Procter & Gamble Company used two websites to educate women about the firm's feminine hygiene products and how to choose the correct products for their individual needs. The Tampax.com site included a section on frequently asked questions about tampon use. Through an "Ask Iris" link women were able to address personal questions about menstruation, reproduction, and health to Iris Prager, the North American education manager for Tampax. Another link, "Help Me Choose," helped women decide which feminine hygiene products were best for them. The BeingGirl.com website targeted younger girls and offered lifestyle advice for teens (for example, on the importance of cliques and on inappropriate crushes), health advice (on preparing for a first visit to a gynecologist), and other information, as well as articles on popular celebrities and an "Ask Iris" link.

The television spots were aired on cable channels, including MTV, and on national networks during programming that typically attracted a female audience, such as Law and Order. In one spot, titled Leak, a happy looking couple were shown drifting on a lake in a small boat. When the boat suddenly began to leak, the man panicked, uncertain about what to do. His ingenious female companion saved the day when she pulled a Tampax Pearl tampon out of her day pack and quickly plugged the leak. The spot used the new tagline, "The one. The only." In another spot, "Embarrassment," an attractive woman dressed in white caused the heads of passengers in a passing bus to turn as she walked down the street. As she continued to walk, a man sitting in a café turned to look at her. The attention was not because she was beautiful but because, as she noticed when she checked herself in a mirror, the hem of her skirt was caught in her panties. The tagline was "Embarrassment happens. Leaks shouldn't."

Print ads appeared in national publications that were read by young women, including Seventeen. The ads were heavily shaded in blue, the color of the Tampax Pearl box. One full-page ad, for example, featured a woman skin diving in the depths of a deep blue ocean while a shark swam toward her. The text read, "A leak can attract unwanted attention." In the bottom right-hand corner of the page was a picture of a Tampax Pearl box with the tagline "The one. The only." Another ad pictured a young woman, dressed in blue slacks and sweater and wearing a pearl bracelet and ring, cuddling a pudgy puppy in her lap. The puppy looked guilty, and the text read, "Certain leaks can be forgiven." Again, the Tampax Pearl box appeared at the bottom of the ad, with the tagline "The one. The only."

OUTCOME

The "Ingenious Protection for Ingenious Women" campaign achieved or surpassed its goals of building buzz about P&G's Tampax Pearl tampons and of increasing product share within the feminine hygiene market. The company reported that following the launch of the campaign in 2004, shipments of Tampax Pearl tampons to retailers increased 74 percent and that market share increased six points over the same period in 2003. The campaign won a Silver EFFIE in 2005 for its unique advertising that connected with young women. The TV spot portraying a woman with the hem of her skirt caught in her underwear was included on Advertising Age's Top 20 list for likability. In addition, Advertising Age recognized Tampax Pearl as one of its 2005 Marketing 50, cited for attracting consumer interest in the product through the use of innovative marketing, creative product design, and other outreach efforts.

SHARING AND CONNECTING CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

In 1995, after two years of testing, the Procter & Gamble Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, was ready to introduce a new product: Febreze, which eliminated odors in fabrics. Not only was Febreze a new product, it was also the pioneer brand of an entirely new category for Procter & Gamble and the marketplace in general. Because of that the launch campaign was more difficult than most. In addition, there was a natural skepticism on the part of consumers that Febreze would bear out the advertising claims. Procter & Gamble's advertising agency, Grey Advertising of New York City, created a campaign whose two primary objectives were to educate consumers about the new product and to drive purchases of it.

The campaign, which began in July 1998, was titled "Sharing and Connecting." It cost approximately $65 million and included television spots and print ads. Each of the initial spots was 45 seconds long and consisted of a montage of people discussing Febreze's uses. The product's identity was reinforced with the tagline "Febreze cleans bad smells out of fabrics. For good."

The "Sharing and Connecting" campaign was successful all around. Not only did sales of Febreze exceed Procter & Gamble's expectations, but Febreze was also one of the top 10 best-selling new consumer packaged goods of 1998, even though it hit stores in midyear. The campaign ended in 1999 and won a 2000 Silver EFFIE Award in the New Product category.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Founded in 1837 by two Cincinnati businessmen, candle maker William Procter and soap maker James Gamble, the Procter & Gamble Company by the end of the twentieth century had become a global leader in home-cleaning products. Nevertheless, many (as much as 75 percent) of the household surfaces that needed regular cleaning were fabrics, and most of the dry-cleaning of these fabrics was done to remove odors, which odor-fighting products had at best only been able to mask.

In the mid-1990s Procter & Gamble began testing a product that the company hoped would capture an as-yet-unidentified market. In fact the new product, which was named Febreze, created a whole new category for the company: fabric refresher. Quoted in a 1998 Proctor & Gamble press release published by PR Newswire was R. Kerry Clark, president of North American laundry and cleaning products at Procter & Gamble: "With Febreze, we're expanding beyond our core franchise of laundry and cleaning products. Now we can offer a broader range of home fabric and textile care … [Consumers] will be able to permanently eliminate odors from a wide variety of fabrics, including upholstery, carpet, and clothing." It was not the first time that Procter & Gamble had broken new ground, but in an age when consumers had become savvy and hence skeptical, the introduction of a new product required careful preparation. Thus, Febreze had gone through testing and test-marketing well in advance of its national release.

TARGET MARKET

Initially Grey Advertising and Procter & Gamble had pinpointed the primary target market for Febreze as specifically as possible. In the Brief of Effectiveness that the agency submitted in consideration for an EFFIE Award, this target consumer was described as a woman between the ages of 18 and 49 and who had children. Furthermore, because Febreze was expected to be an ideal low-cost alternative to dry-cleaning, the average income of individuals in this group was less than $30,000 per year. Test-marketing and in-store sampling broadened the target market. Also, brand and advertising commentators saw the product as appealing to young professionals whose after-work club hopping would of course make their clothing smoky.

COMPETITION

Almost from the beginning competing companies jumped into the fray, bringing out their own products within a year of Febreze's introduction. In fact, before the "Sharing and Connecting" campaign had ended, companies such as Reckitt & Colman, Clorox, and Bioshield Technologies were preparing to launch their own brands: Resolve Fabric Freshener, Fresh Care, and OdorFree, respectively. Meanwhile Unilever and S.C. Johnson were also readying their own fabric-refresher products. Christine Bittar noted in a March 1999 Brandweek article, "Priced in the same range as Febreze, the new products are expected to perform similarly by 'lifting' odors out of fabrics rather than merely masking odors." Earlier that year the car-care products company Turtle Wax had introduced Odor-X, an odor eliminator and deodorizer for the upholstery and carpets in cars.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND FEBREZE

The basic hows and whys of Febreze were revealed by Rachel Ross in an October 2003 Toronto Star article. Breaking the science down into simple terms, she discussed the main active ingredient in Febreze, cyclodextrins. Cyclodextrin molecules, which contained a minimum of six dextrose units, were ring-shaped. As the water from the spray solution evaporated, cyclodextrin became molecular crystals, and the odor molecules bound to the inside of the ring, which neutralized the smell. There were various types of cyclodextrins, Ross further explained, some of which were allowed in food, while others were "used in a wide variety of products, including AIDS drugs and lipsticks."

In the second half of 1999 Reckitt & Colman released an approximately $15 million advertising campaign for Resolve, while Clorox spent about $25 million on advertising for Fresh Care in early 2000. Bioshield Technologies began with a regional campaign to promote OdorFree in Texas in April 1999 but had enlarged the campaign to a national one by the end of the year. The cost of the OdorFree campaign was approximately $20 million.

MARKETING STRATEGY

For two years prior to its national launch in 1998, Febreze went through a series of marketing trials in Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Boise, Idaho. These early trials did not go as well as expected, forcing Procter & Gamble and Grey Advertising to refocus the marketing of the product. Early on the product was described as an odor neutralizer, which may have caused some consumers to think that it merely masked odors. Also, during the early testing it was marketed solely as a way of removing cigarette-smoke odors. After conducting extensive interviews with people who liked Febreze but were putting it to different uses, Grey Advertising devised a series of 45-second television spots in which satisfied consumers discussed Febreze and the various ways they used it. Later in the campaign 30-second spots were employed. Procter & Gamble also redesigned the packaging of Febreze. By the time of the national release in July 1998 more than half a million people were familiar with the product.

After the launch Procter & Gamble also used in-store sampling to broaden consumer awareness of Febreze. Richard Turcsik, in a 1998 article published in the Brand Marketing Supplement to Supermarket News, quoted Drake Stimson, who at the time was Febreze brand manager. "What we have learned with these 'new-to-the-world' categories," Stimson said, "is that there are two critical objectives: educating consumers and creating an in-store presence." Stimson also mentioned that Febreze had to overcome heavy consumer skepticism and that live presentations were the best way to do that. Turcsik clarified that, because Febreze was a new product, shoppers had not yet made it a regular item on their shopping lists. He also noted that in-store sampling of Febreze had occurred at every retail level, including club stores, drugstores, supercenters, and supermarkets.

Although Febreze was made available in stores in the United States in March 1998, the actual national launch of the product, with the supporting advertising campaign, came in July of that year. The 52-week "Sharing and Connecting" campaign began with television spots and introduced print advertising in consumer magazines six months later. As Grey Advertising explained in its EFFIE Brief of Effectiveness, this approach was used in order to create a maximum awareness of the new product.

In their depiction of common household conditions for which Febreze would be needed, the television spots were intended to inform the public about the product and make it seem excitingly relevant. The choice of actors for the spots was considered crucial, since they had to be able to impart the new information and at the same time connect with consumers. The agency believed that the latter trait would play an important part in overcoming consumers' initial skepticism. In order to emphasize that the product was not just another masking spray, the campaign used the tagline "Febreze cleans bad smells out of fabrics. For good."

The campaign received a boost before it had even begun when Febreze was awarded the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Toward the end of its run the campaign was further bolstered by a June 1999 Consumer Reports article that gave Febreze good performance marks. The unsigned article stated, "In our tests, it [Febreze] got rid of heavy cigarette odors and the smell of sautéed onions and garlic from lightweight draperies, nylon carpeting, and wool sweaters in a matter of hours."

There was one glitch during the campaign, and that was an Internet rumor that claimed that Febreze was harmful to pets. The Consumer Reports article touched on this issue by mentioning that the National Animal Poison Control Center was investigating the allegations and had not found any problems by the time the magazine had gone to press. Nevertheless the rumors persisted. Good Dog! Magazine also decided to investigate the rumors. The magazine contacted both Procter & Gamble and the National Animal Poison Control Center. Spokespeople for the former related the chronology of the rumors as they knew them, while an official statement from the National Animal Poison Control Center contradicted the rumors. Still, they remained, causing more of a public-relations headache than an advertising problem.

OUTCOME

Febreze was a success from the start. The campaign achieved both of its objectives: informing consumers about the new product and driving trial and consumption of it. This was borne out by statistics that the agency supplied for the EFFIE Brief of Effectiveness, in which it noted that Grey Advertising and Procter & Gamble had set a benchmark of getting 4 percent of consumers to make a trial (i.e., first) purchase in the first three months of the national launch, but in fact Febreze achieved 9 percent. The agency also noted that, by the end of one year on the market, the product had achieved a 40 percent trial-purchase rate and a 30 percent repurchase rate. The "Sharing and Connecting" campaign was awarded a 2000 Silver EFFIE from the New York American Marketing Association; the EFFIE Awards was one of the most prestigious award programs in the advertising industry.

Six months after the campaign began, Procter & Gamble was claiming that Febreze had become one of the country's top 10 laundry and cleaning brands. Quoted in a March 1999 issue of MMR, Mike Jensen, Procter & Gamble's director of research and development, said, "People are really impressed with the product's versatility. We have found that once people use Febreze, they find more and more uses for it."

By the time the "Sharing and Connecting" campaign ended in July 1999, a number of competitors had entered the fabric-refresher category. Febreze, however, was the category leader by late summer 1999. In fact, with approximately $107 million in sales for 1998, Febreze ranked seventh on the list of top-selling new consumer packaged goods for that year. Because of its later release the product was only on the market for 36 weeks in 1998. For comparison purposes Febreze was placed in the rug/upholstery-cleaner category, where it was the best-selling brand for the 52-week period ending January 31, 1999. The number two brand was category competitor Resolve. Procter & Gamble noted that Febreze was the most successful product launch in the company's history (and that included such venerable name brands as Ivory soap, Tide detergent, Crest toothpaste, and Mr. Clean floor cleaner).

Because the "Sharing and Connecting" campaign and its product were so successful, Procter & Gamble did not hesitate to make Febreze available in other markets worldwide. It was introduced into the United Kingdom in February 1999. By the end of 1999 Febreze was available in 18 markets in Latin America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.

Febreze not only created a category that other manufacturers rushed to fill but also became a successful Procter & Gamble product line of its own. By 2006 the original fabric refresher was available in five different scents, and there were an additional four specific solutions. There was also Febreze Air Effects, which used the same technique to eliminate odor molecules in the air. A second Febreze air-freshener product was Febreze NOTICEables. Plugged into a wall socket, each Febreze NOTICEable had two scents that alternated. There were five different pairs of Febreze NOTICEables on the market by 2006. The final Febreze product was by far the most technologically advanced and a natural progression from the plug-in. Febreze Scentstories were disks that gave off scents when played on a special player. Marketed as being similar to a scented candle, though longer lasting, Scentstories was available in six scents.

SINK BOY CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

Pert Plus, a combined shampoo and conditioner, was a major seller for the Procter & Gamble Company in the 1980s and early 1990s and prompted other companies to produce competing brands. Later in the 1990s, however, the convenience of two-in-one products was apparently offset by the problem, real or perceived, of residues these products left in one's hair. Usage had reportedly dropped off among women in particular, though the company maintained that the product still had a strong following among men.

Procter & Gamble reformulated Pert Plus to include a water-based conditioner, eliminating any oils or waxes. In order to inform consumers (particularly women) about the change, the company decided to use an advertising campaign that would evoke the product's lightness without overwhelming users with detailed information. Leo Burnett USA of Chicago created the Sink Boy character based on the established man- (or woman-) on-the-street concept that had been used successfully in previous Procter & Gamble advertising in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the first television spot, run in late fall 1998, Sink Boy roamed the streets of South Beach, Florida, with a portable sink, scoping out volunteers to demonstrate the new Pert Plus. While the general concept of the campaign was old, it incorporated elements of flippant humor and took the nontraditional turn of directly criticizing the old product and describing why the new product was better. The campaign ran on television, in print, outdoors, and on the Internet. Sink Boy went on to appear in other commercials at locations around the country.

The campaign was a hit with consumers. A Sink Boy fan club (composed mostly of women) sprang up, and members urged the traveling hair-care demonstrator to come to their towns. Sink Boy's website also appealed to consumers. Procter & Gamble reported that, in the week's following its launch, an average user visited the site 1.9 times and lingered about six minutes each visit. Sink Boy was put on hiatus in December 2000. In 2002 Sink Boy was shelved for good, and plans for a new Pert Plus campaign were announced.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Pert Plus was reportedly created almost as an afterthought. Procter & Gamble scientists spent years developing the formula for a new two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, only to get a cool reception from top executives, who were more focused on other brands in the mid-1980s. When they got around to figuring out what to do with the new formula, company managers were cautious. Because the shampoo market was so competitive and consumers could be fickle, the company decided not to launch a new brand but to incorporate the formula into an existing product. Pert, a brand introduced in 1981, was practically washed up, with barely 2 percent of the U.S. shampoo market. The company reformulated the product and called it Pert Plus. The company test-marketed the product with relatively low expectations, but it quickly realized it had a hit when results came in. Within a year Pert Plus was made available throughout the United States and then expanded into overseas markets. The product was reported to be one of the fastest-growing hair-care brands in the country during the late-1980s, and in January 1991 Pert Plus was the best-selling shampoo worldwide. The product's phenomenal success prompted other companies to develop and market competing two-in-one brands.

During the 1990s, however, shampoo/conditioner combos fell out of favor, and sales of Pert and similar competing products dropped. One explanation offered by Bob Garfield of Advertising Age was that the "convenience of 2-in-1s sent the category skyrocketing … but the heavy, gummy residue eventually turned consumers, especially female consumers, way off." In a bid to revive the brand, Procter & Gamble changed the formula to eliminate waxes and oils, but the company still faced the task of communicating the change to consumers, particularly women. In late 1998 Procter & Gamble ran a television campaign developed by advertising agency Leo Burnett USA in Chicago geared toward changing people's minds about Pert Plus.

TARGET MARKET

Although the new advertising campaign was targeted at both men and women, the company had a particular interest in persuading women to reconsider using Pert Plus. A company spokeswoman said that Pert Plus still had a strong following among men. In May 1999 Brandweek reported that 55 percent of Pert Plus users were men. The company sought to reach consumers through print media, television, outdoor advertising, and the Internet.

COMPETITION

Drug & Cosmetic Industry reported in September 1998 that the hair-care market had been declining steadily since 1994 and that this was a result in part of a saturated consumer base. The market was highly competitive, with products being deeply discounted to increase market share. The shampoo segment was reported to be the largest category worldwide, however, and shampoos had $1.83 billion in retail sales in the United States in 1997.

A SHAMPOO BY ANY OTHER NAME …

When Procter & Gamble was planning to launch Pert Plus in the mid-1980s, one problem the company had to deal with was the name. While Pert Plus was acceptable in the United States, in some other countries it was too similar to other products already on the market or it violated trademarks. So Procter & Gamble departed from its usual strategy of using one name for a product around the world and sold it under various names in different countries.

According to the December 6, 1990, issue of the Wall Street Journal, the shampoo was known as Rejoy in Japan and Rejoice in Singapore. It was also sold under a Vidal Sassoon label in Germany and Britain. The Journal reported that marketing one brand under different names would not necessarily hurt its sales. One observer noted that the two-in-one product's launch might have been faster if the company had used one brand name, but that by using different names Procter & Gamble ended up with many successful lines instead of just one.

Procter & Gamble held almost one-third of the mass-market shampoo category, based in large part on the success of Pantene, according to the February 1, 1999, issue of Advertising Age. Pantene held the top spot among shampoos with 14.3 percent of the market. Procter & Gamble products made up 30.6 percent of the market during the quarter that ended September 30, 1998, while Unilever held 18.5 percent with its Suave and Finesse brands. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. held a 14.4 percent share, buoyed by the continued success of Clairol Herbal Essences and the launch of the Daily Defense line.

The intense competition prompted shampoo marketers to revamp existing brands or issue new ones, often aimed at niche markets or highly specialized needs. Bristol-Myers Squibb's Daily Defense brand was being pitched as a shampoo with ingredients that helped protect hair from pollution, excess heat, and other environmental stress factors. Revlon Inc. expanded its ColorStay line of shampoos and conditioners for tinted hair to include color-specific products. The Pantene Pro-V line was expanded with four new products: heat-activated conditioner, antidandruff shampoo, and eight formulations of two different brands of hairspray. In October 1998 Procter & Gamble announced that it was "restaging" Pantene Pro-V with a new name (Pantene Ultra-V), new formula, and new package. In addition, Chain Drug Review reported in March 1999 that Procter & Gamble planned an overhaul of the Vidal Sasson line to include a texturizing shampoo, conditioner, and a two-in-one product called Ultra Care, and intended that each product be offered in one of four versions: voluminizing, body building, moisturizing, and for color-treated hair. Alberto-Culver Co., in an ambitious move, was budgeting $300 million for reviving its decades-old VO5 line.

Amid this vast and ever-changing array of specialized hair-care products, Pert Plus occupied the middle of the pack among the top 10 best-selling shampoo brands, ranking fifth in dollar sales and sixth in unit sales, as reported by Chain Drug Review in March 1999. Two of the brands that beat it out, Pantene and Head & Shoulders, were owned by Procter & Gamble.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Leo Burnett developed an advertising campaign based on an old idea from its London office, which had done advertising for Procter & Gamble's Daz detergent. In those commercials a mock television news team would go door-to-door, offering to do the household wash with Daz. This approach was later used in Gain detergent commercials in the United States. According to the Rose Sheet, the strategy was also similar to one Procter & Gamble used to sell Sure antiperspirant, in which people on the street were asked to use Sure and compare it with their current brand. Leo Burnett once again used the man-and woman-on-the-street approach and developed the campaign around Sink Boy or Sink Guy, who walked the streets with a portable sink offering to wash people's hair. Sink Boy was described by the company as a "goofy, offbeat" character who did the "unpredictable." The campaign invoked quirky humor and, in a departure from the norm, dealt candidly with the perceived shortcomings of old Pert Plus. Actor Michael Collins was hired to play Sink Boy in the television commercial, which was filmed in South Beach, Florida.

PUTTING SPARK IN THE DULL, LIFELESS SHAMPOO COMMERCIAL

Procter & Gamble was not the only company trying to liven up its shampoo commercials. The Globe and Mail in March 1999 noted a number of brands that were getting away from the old formulaic approach, in which a model bemoaned some problem with her hair, used the shampoo, and ended the spot by triumphantly flipping her tresses.

In particular, companies favored edgy humor, usually geared toward female viewers. A Lever Pond's commercial for Salon Selectives showed a young woman reading a magazine article titled "Is he right for you?" In a brief fantasy, her boyfriend transformed into a hunk, but the dream ended when he belched. The voice-over said, "If only you could customize a man like you customize with Salon Selectives." Clairol Herbal Essences was relaunched with a campaign that drew inspiration from Meg Ryan's fake orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. It featured women using the product and exclaiming, "Yes, yes!" after which sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer showed up and added, "If you think that's great, the new conditioner is really intensive." While some thought it was "a different approach" that seemed to work, other industry observers though it was "kind of in poor taste."

The 60-second spot opened with Sink Boy saying, "Hi! We're in Miami. We've got a sink, new Pert Plus with 'clean conditioning.' We're washin' hair and we're changin' minds." The commercial then proceeded, by way of on-the-street interviews, to discuss the problems with the old product. Sink Boy asked passersby, "Have you ever used one of those shampoo and conditioners in one?" and they responded with remarks like "Didn't like it," "I hated them," "Kinda … uhhgh," "Limp and dead," and "Weighs your hair down." Sink Boy said, "We're 0-for-4, my friend," then offered to wash their hair with new Pert Plus, explaining that the company "redid it, it's been revolutionarily, like, redesigned with a water-based conditioner. There's no oil, no wax, so your hair's gonna feel clean, clean." When he was finished, the participants' comments were "Wow!" "It feels light," and "It does seem lighter." The lightness of the commercial's tone was meant to reflect the lightness of the product. The spot ended with the tagline "If we can wash your hair, we can change your mind."

After the original South Beach spot aired, Sink Boy commercials were filmed in other locations, including Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Chicago. According to Brandweek in May 1999, the television commercials were "all ad hoc, based on real customer reactions, without reliance on storyboards or scripts." The new campaign was supported with in-store displays, point-of-entry marketing, and a toll-free number. In accordance with the trend toward offering specialized products, the reformulated Pert Plus was launched in four different versions—normal, dry/damaged, fine, and oily.

The concept behind the campaign was the desire to "get people to rethink and retry" the product, according to Kevin Burke, Pert Plus brand manager. To do this, Burke said, the company needed to overcome "a predisposition against 2-in-1 products," but to do so without inundating consumers with information. The "Sink Boy" campaign attempted to reach people with tongue-in-cheek humor, as well as its upfront discussion of the old product versus the new and a kind of in-your-face spunkiness in the character of Sink Boy. Although Procter & Gamble had generally favored conservative advertising, it tried a different approach with this campaign. According to Procter & Gamble spokeswoman Stefani Valkonen, "What we wanted was to really establish a new image … we wanted it to be looked at as more contemporary and more fun."

OUTCOME

As Brandweek reported in May 1999, the Sink Boy television spots became "the cornerstone of an integrated marketing effort, one component of which was the introduction of Sink Boy into on-line society." The Sink Boy website, developed by Giant Step, a Leo Burnett-owned interactive agency, was considered a "natural extension" of the more traditional forms of advertising. According to Pert Plus brand manager Burke, a "light bulb went off" when the company and the advertising agency saw how "adaptable" Sink Boy was on television, and "we challenged Leo Burnett to turn it into more than TV." Giant Step reportedly intended to "further explore the [Sink Boy] character, building on the TV commercials." Mark Rattin, director of creative development at Giant Step, said, "We'll probably extend the understanding of [Sink Boy] … allowing some interesting personality facets to come out online and using those humor instances to allow users to interact with some relationship components."

The Sink Boy website reportedly drew substantial interest, with the average user visiting the site 1.9 times during the six weeks following the site's launch and spending an average of six minutes viewing the site. Brandweek reported that Sink Boy "is apparently warming some hearts. Providing users the chance to write back has created a devoted Sink Boy fan club made up mostly of women, according to Burke, who says they seem to want to get to know the character. Some have even invited them to set up a hair-washing stall in their hometowns." Brandweek noted that, since the.

Burke said in May 1999 that Procter & Gamble was looking at other places to send Sink Boy, based on the mail that was coming in for him. The company did not plan at that time to set up chat rooms or bulletin boards, relying instead on consumer-to-consumer contact to promote Web traffic. The company did intend to include occasional product news updates on the website. Brandweek also reported, "The site will … be updated to reflect the evolution of the traditional advertising campaign, incorporating some new Burnett ads that Rattin says are 'even crazier.'"

Despite the Sink Boy campaign's success, in December 2000 it was put on temporary hold. As competition from other brands, such as Unilever's discount-priced Suave shampoo, began chipping away at Pert Plus sales, in 2002 Procter & Gamble announced a complete makeover of the product. Rather than revise the Sink Boy campaign, it left it on the shelf permanently and planned a new campaign that was also developed by Leo Burnett.

STRANGE BUT TRUE CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

By 2004 the Procter & Gamble Company's Gain detergent brand had been available to consumers for nearly 38 years. Gain was best known for its distinctive citrus scent, which many consumers embraced but which was considered a generic fragrance by others. Although Gain was the number-two brand of powdered laundry detergent in 2004, its sales had dropped 4 percent from the same period in 2003. That slip came after an 11.9 percent drop from the same period in 2002. With Gain's sales on a steady decline, Procter & Gamble charged ad agency Leo Burnett Canada with pushing Gain ahead of the competition, increasing sales, and turning Gain's fragrance into an important element of the brand experience.

Leo Burnett approached the challenge from the aspect of Gain's fragrance. But rather than tell consumers what they already knew—how the detergent smelled—the agency asked them to consider how the fragrance made them feel when they smelled it on their freshly laundered clothes. From that idea the "Strange but True" campaign evolved. The campaign, released in 2004, entailed television spots based on the "strange but true" love stories told by Gain users.

The campaign achieved its goals of increasing market share, improving brand identity, and driving consumer awareness of the product. Six months after it began, Gain's share had jumped 10 percent. The campaign also succeeded in increasing consumer awareness as people logged on to the product's website to share their own Gain detergent "love stories." In addition, the campaign's television spots earned praise from the ad industry. Adweek described one of the spots as "sophisticated." The campaign also won a 2005 Bronze EFFIE Award.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Procter & Gamble built a reputation for getting laundry clean, first with its Dreft detergent, introduced in 1933 as an improvement over the washing-machine-clogging, fabric-dulling soap flakes that consumers had used since the 1920s. Tide brand, introduced in 1946, took laundering another step forward, cleaning not just lightly soiled laundry as Dreft did, but tackling heavily soiled clothes. By 1964 Tide laundry detergent had been through 22 transformations, with each change improving the product. In 1966 Procter & Gamble started selling a new detergent brand, Gain, which featured a distinctive green color and a unique citrus scent. In response to changing consumer preferences Gain liquid was introduced in 1993.

Ten years after its initial introduction Gain had acquired a loyal following of consumers, who loved its cleaning power and fresh scent. The powdered variety of Gain was the number-two powdered laundry detergent in 2003 with a 13.8 percent market share, but it trailed far behind the number-one powdered detergent, its big brother Tide, which claimed a 46.9 percent share of all powdered detergents sold. In the liquid detergent category liquid Gain came in even further down the list, ranking fifth. As Gain's unique qualities—especially its fragrance—were gradually getting lost in a market saturated with laundry-detergent choices, in 2004 Procter & Gamble's ad agency Leo Burnett Canada created a new marketing campaign designed to help boost brand identity, increase sales, and push Gain ahead of the competition.

TARGET MARKET

Although the EFFIE Awards website summarized the "Strange but True" campaign as the stories of all fanatics who loved the scent of Gain, the typical user of laundry detergents was women. Women were also the ones usually found in supermarkets buying the product. But Procter & Gamble also targeted another market with its Gain detergent: Hispanic consumers. According to a report in the Cincinnati Enquirer, "Gain is a symbol of the company's success in targeting certain brands to consumers in certain ethnic groups." In the United States the text on each box of Gain appeared in both English and Spanish. Further, consumers in target communities received direct-mail offers printed in Spanish. The report in the Cincinnati Enquirer also noted that in 2003 Procter & Gamble spent $80 million on marketing that targeted Hispanics, an increase of 15 percent from the previous year. As a result of such targeted efforts, sales of Gain to the Hispanic market increased notably, surpassing the brand's U.S. sales in general. And although Gain's scent was described in the EFFIE summary as a "hedonistic experience" for all consumers, the fragrances were particularly important to Hispanic consumers. A BusinessWeek Online article noted that Procter & Gamble had added a new scent to its Gain line after a study found that 57 percent of Hispanics liked to smell their product purchases before buying.

COMPETITION

The company name Church & Dwight Co., Inc., may not have been familiar to consumers, but one of its brand was: Arm & Hammer. The Princeton, New Jersey-based company, founded in 1846, was the number-one producer of baking soda, but it also offered a variety of products with the Arm & Hammer label, including laundry detergents in both powder and liquid forms. Instead of relying on advertising, Church & Dwight strengthened its detergent brands through acquisitions. In 2001 the company acquired USA Detergents for $120 million. The addition of USA Detergent's brand Xtra—which was ranked the number-six liquid laundry detergent in the United States that year—was expected to boost Church & Dwight's sales. The acquisition also pushed Church & Dwight into the number three laundry-detergent spot, with sales of powdered and liquid brands combined hitting $400 million (an 8.8 percent market share). Unlike its competitors, including Procter & Gamble, Church & Dwight reportedly had no immediate plans to gain customers by expanding into foreign markets. In 2004 Arm & Hammer detergents were given a new fragrance and redesigned packaging. Despite such efforts, for the 52 weeks ending October 31, 2004, Arm & Hammer brand's powdered-detergent sales slipped 13.6 percent to about $55.2 million, and it was ranked number four in the U.S. powdered-detergent category. During the same period the brand's liquid-detergent sales dropped 2.3 percent to about $107.6 million, putting it in eighth place among liquid detergents.

Unilever, based in London, England, offered U.S. consumers a variety of laundry detergents, including All and Wisk, but its market share was as varied as its products. With $246 million in U.S. sales (a 10.1 percent share) for the 52 weeks ending October 31, 2004, the company's All brand liquid detergent claimed the number-two spot in the liquid-detergent category in the United States. This meant that it ranked just behind Procter & Gamble's giant seller, Tide, and well ahead of Procter & Gamble's Gain. But with $15.3 million in sales, the powdered version of All ranked near the bottom of its category for the same period, claiming just a 1.8 percent share. Also during that period Unilever's Wisk liquid laundry detergent fell in at number six among liquid detergents, with sales of $124.7 million (a 5.1 percent share).

To give its brands a boost in the U.S. market, in 2004 Unilever switched creative responsibilities for its All brand from Lowe Worldwide to Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Creative for the Wisk brand remained with Lowe. Both brands also launched marketing efforts in 2004. The All brand released two campaigns, "Look on the Bright Side" and "Small Chef—Big Mess Challenge." The "Look on the Bright Side" effort encouraged consumers to find the humor in life's small mishaps, such as red wine spilling or freshly washed clothes being dropped on the ground. The "Small Chef—Big Mess" campaign featured a cooking contest for children in which the winner would receive a $25,000 scholarship and a chance to cook with Food Network chef Rachel Ray, known for her cooking program 30 Minutes Meals. Both campaigns also promoted All's promise that it could get 99 top food stains out of clothes.

PROCTER & GAMBLE'S ACQUISITION OF COLGATE-PALMOLIVE EUROPEAN DETERGENT BRANDS

With its U.S. laundry-detergent market reaching saturation and sales leveling off, Procter & Gamble in 2003 announced plans to acquire Colgate-Palmolive's European detergent business. Included in the acquisition were Colgate's Axion and Gama, sold in France; Dynamo, sold in Denmark; Ajax, sold in Sweden; and Dinamo, sold in Italy. According to a report in Chemical Week, combined European sales of the Colgate-Palmolive products was $100 million. Prior to its acquisition of the Colgate-Palmolive detergent line, Procter & Gamble was the number-three detergent producer in the European market, falling in behind number one Unilever and number two Henkel.

Unilever's fading Wisk brand was best known to consumers for its 1960s advertising that portrayed an embarrassed housewife whose husband had "ring around the collar." The first stage of the 2004 campaign featured television spots with the theme "Go Ahead, Get Dirty." Subsequent ads appeared on billboards, and a website was created that allowed moms to chat online about dirt and getting it out with Wisk. Signed on as spokesperson was Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., famous for his get-dirty style of play.

MARKETING STRATEGY

When Leo Burnett Canada created the "Strange but True" campaign for Procter & Gamble's Gain laundry detergent, the challenge was to push a product identified with its fragrance to the forefront of a market crowded with laundry products that were promoted by their scents. According to the campaign summary that the agency submitted for the 2005 EFFIE Awards, its goal was to turn Gain's "generic scent into a unique brand experience." In developing television spots for the campaign, Leo Burnett used true stories about consumers' individual experiences with Gain detergent.

One spot that first aired in early 2004 told the true story of a 20-something man, Adam, whose girlfriend left one of her freshly laundered dresses at his apartment when she went on a two-week vacation. The woman's little white dress had been washed in Gain, and based on the young man's response to the garment, its smell was irresistible. Consoling himself in the absence of his love, Adam was shown talking to his girlfriend's little white dress, napping with it, and eating dinner with it. Eventually Adam put the dress on a life-size cardboard cutout of Sylvester Stallone in his Rocky persona. With the Patsy Cline song "Crazy" playing in the background, Adam took the Stallone cutout in his arms and danced around the living room. The spot ended with Adam's girlfriend returning home and seeing in the apartment window the silhouettes of her boyfriend and the cutout dancing. A voice-over stated: "Adam, yeah, I hope your relationship lasts as long as the fresh scent of Gain."

In a follow-up spot, a group of five guys were shown watching a sports event on television. The man hosting the get-together said in a voice-over, "Recently my wife started using Gain detergent. I really like the fresh scent, but I didn't believe her when she said even the guys would notice the difference." When the group's favored team scored, the guys jumped up, cheering, slapping high fives, and hugging each other. In an awkward moment, one of the guys clung to the host in a bear hug, burying his nose in his friend's Gain-fresh T-shirt. The voice-over said, "Now I believe her. Gain. Making believers out of everyone, even the guys." During the spot text appeared on the screen noting that the commercial was "based on an actual letter from a Gain lover."

Each of the campaign's spots ended with a shot of a bottle of liquid Gain and the tagline "The smell says clean." On-screen text also directed viewers to a website, www.ilovegain.com, that enabled consumers to post their own personal Gain-related "love stories" or to read stories posted by other Gain lovers. Those who posted personal stories on the site included one consumer who told of putting powdered Gain in the vacuum-cleaner bag so that the smell would fill the house. The author of the anecdote stated, "Now I love to do laundry and to vacuum." Another wrote, "Gain gets rid of any stink on my clothes, and it makes my bionic nose happy." One woman said that she was so entranced by the Gain smell that she no longer cuddled with her husband, preferring to hug his freshly laundered shirts. Kids were not excluded from the Gain lovefest. A youngster wrote that when his mom bought Gain, she worried about him because he disappeared for hours. But she worried needlessly, because the child was "in the laundry room smelling."

OUTCOME

Leo Burnett's "Strange but True" marketing effort for Gain detergent was a success on several levels. In the six months following its launch, the campaign resulted in a 10 percent growth in market share for Gain. Overall, Gain powder claimed a 14.9 percent market share, or $126.2 million in U.S. sales for the 52 weeks ending October 31, 2004. Gain liquid sales climbed 24.5 percent to $167.7 million for the same period. Consumers, driven to the ilovegain.com website by the campaign, logged on to read the stories of others who had shared their experiences with Gain detergent or to post their own Gain "love stories." The campaign earned praise from Adweek when its critic Barbara Lippert described one television spot as a "breakthrough" and "sophisticated." She wrote that the spot "motivates the viewer to buy the stuff, if only to figure out just how 'dirty' clean can get." Further recognition came when the campaign was honored with a 2005 Bronze EFFIE Award for surpassing the campaign's share-growth goals by 263 percent and for successfully encouraging consumers to take part in the brand experience.

TASTING IS BELIEVING CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

The 1998 advertising campaign for Fat-Free Pringles potato chips, involving an investment of $30 to $40 million in television, radio, print, and in-store promotions, was actually part of a much larger effort by Procter & Gamble (P&G) to market a fat substitute called Olean. The latter was its brand name for olestra, developed at a cost of some $500 million and 30 years of research, which promised fat-free eating without the fat-free taste. Fat-Free Pringles contained Olean; hence, the principal tag line of Pringles 1998 campaign, created by Grey Advertising in New York, was "Tasting Is Believing."

P&G also had an advertising campaign for Olean, handled by another agency, with the tag line "Fat-free Olean. A good place to start." In fact Olean, though not yet marketed directly to consumers (P&G certainly hoped to do so in the future), was a product unto itself and placed P&G in the unusual position of selling to a competitor. Thus Fat-Free Pringles in 1998 went up against a chip manufactured by competitor Frito-Lay, owned by PepsiCo, which also contained Olean.

The idea behind Olean was an intriguing one: a substitute that contained all the taste and richness of fat but that, because of its chemical makeup, would not be absorbed by the body. Instead, it would be expelled—and that fact created a problem, because many participants in Olean studies complained of diarrhea.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

If ever there was a company with the resources for the kind of extensive and in-depth research required to develop a product such as Olean, it was Procter & Gamble. Founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1837 by candle maker William Procter and soap maker James Gamble, the company's growth over the next 161 years had been explosive. By 1998 it had worldwide sales of $37.15 billion, with profits of $3.78 billion.

Equally impressive was the array of P&G products lining grocery store shelves: Crest toothpaste, Tide laundry detergent, Pampers disposable diapers, Scope mouth-wash, Cascade automatic dishwasher detergent, Charmin bathroom tissue, Clorox bleach, Head & Shoulders shampoo, NyQuil cough formula … the list went on and on and was not limited to nonedible consumables. Although P&G was not typically associated with food in the popular mindset, the consumer products giant manufactured a wide variety of foods and food-related items. Topping the list was Crisco shortening, which in 1911 became its first food-related product. The 1956 purchase of Duncan Hines greatly added to P&G's food offerings, and although the company sold Duncan Hines in 1998, its food lineup was impressive, including Folgers coffee, Jif peanut butter, Eagle Snacks, and Pringles.

Pringles, of course, were perhaps best known for their packaging, a cylindrical can about the same size as the ones in which tennis balls were sold. Pringles cans contained a neat stack of potato chips, seemingly so precise in their placement that it was almost as though the grooves of one chip fit neatly into those of the chip below it. For years P&G sold Pringles on the basis of taste; but with the advent of Olean, a new and intriguing idea presented itself: what if Pringles could offer the same flavor, without any of the fat? Hence Pringles ran an ad campaign, which ended in February 1998, whose tag line played on the famous Pringles packaging: "Can you get great taste in a fat-free chip? Yes, you can."

TARGET MARKET

In 1968, when P&G researchers began the experiments that would ultimately yield olestra and Olean, Americans—motivated both by concerns over appearance and health—were just beginning to turn to low-fat and fat-free products. Some of the first low-fat and fat-free products, of course, tasted awful by almost everyone's standards, but with time it appeared that consumers did not have to sacrifice taste for low calories. Yet for all the efforts of science to enhance the flavor of low-fat and no-fat foods, it was easy enough to taste the difference. A September 1997 report by Laurie Freeman in Advertising Age spoke volumes concerning feelings about fat and flavor. "It's not that Americans have lost their taste for no-fat, low-fat, reduced-fat foods," Freeman wrote. "After all, retail sales of reduced-fat foods in the U.S. totaled $23.8 billion in 1996, and will grow at a compounded annual rate of 5.8 percent through 2001, reports [consumer research firm] Find/SVP. What is emerging is a growing sense that consumers are beginning to balk at reduced-fat foods because of texture or the lack of flavor. Consumers may as well be saying: if the products don't taste like the real thing but still deliver high calories, then hand over the rich food."

It was up to P&G, then, to reinvigorate interest in fat-free eating. In a February 1998 press release announcing the rollout of fat-free snacks with Olean, the company noted that the average American ate 21 pounds of salted snacks, containing 6 pounds of fat and more than 22,800 calories, each year. "If only 10 percent of these people ate Olean snacks instead of full-fat snacks," the P&G press release went on, "Americans would avoid 77,400 tons of fat and more than 600 billion calories a year. If a person who eats one ounce of full-fat potato chips every day were to substitute chips fried with Olean, he or she would avoid eating eight pounds of fat a year."

COMPETITION

Those were some impressive ifs, but P&G faced some equally impressive challenges over Olean, challenges that threatened the success of Fat-Free Pringles. That threat did not come from traditional competitors, since in fact Pringles' fiercest competition bought its Olean from P&G. In mid-1998 Frito-Lay introduced olestra versions of its Doritos tortilla chips and Ruffles and Lays potato chips under the Wow! label. Frito-Lay projected $900 million in retail sales; thus, its management had every reason to wish for the success of Olean, if not the success of Fat-Free Pringles.

Instead, leading the charge against Olean was the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a Washington, D.C., advocacy group known by detractors as "the food police." In 1996 Dr. Michael Jackobson of the CSPI held a press conference to introduce a new anti-olestra commercial. The spot featured a close-up of a slowly revolving dog food can. "As the can rotated," wrote Alicia Mundy in Mediaweek, "it revealed the contents, including Olean, and the possible side-effects of that oil: loose stools, cramps. 'If this were a can of dog food, would you feed it to your dog?' queried a voice-over. 'Then why would you eat it yourself?' the voice asked."

Jacobson held another press conference in 1997, claiming that test-marketing of Olean in Columbus, Ohio, and other areas had caused massive outbreaks of diarrhea. Indeed, some 300 persons who tried Olean products filed complaints with the CSPI, which had in turn demanded that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) require P&G to add a stern warning on products—including Fat-Free Pringles—that contained Olean. The CSPI's recommended wording would have a notice that the product "may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools." According to Terry Kinney in Fort Worth Star-Telegram, P&G had "asked the FDA to rewrite the label, suggesting this phrase: 'Because it is not digested, olestra may cause discomfort or a laxative effect.' The FDA rejected the idea."

MARKETING STRATEGY

On the one hand P&G ran a standard promotional campaign for Fat-Free Pringles; on the other hand it also had to undertake a defensive campaign for Olean as olestra came under attack from the CSPI and others. This it did with the tag line "Fat-free Olean. A good place to start," created by Grey Advertising, and with commercials that aired on February 21, during the Winter Olympic Games.

SCARCE AS HENS' TEETH

Fortune had been good to Procter & Gamble. Indeed, in the Cincinnati-based consumer products giant's repertoire, failed products were scarce. On that short list was an item called Crush, a soft-drink line purchased by P&G in 1980 and sold nine years later after it had failed to perform. Of course P&G did not create Crush, but it did create some other questionable products, including Fit, a wash designed specifically for fruits and vegetables. As of mid-1998 the company was still trying to figure out how to market it.

A product of much earlier provenance was Radar, a men's hair dressing that included a plastic scalp stimulator. Then there was Abound, like Radar developed at some point in the past decades: the hair conditioner never caught on with women, perhaps because it was sold in the form of coated sheets to be rubbed on the hair, rather than in the usual liquid form. More notorious were Rely tampons, which P&G removed from store shelves in 1980 after researchers found that use of Rely was linked to toxic shock syndrome.

A key strategy in the Olean campaign was the identification of olestra with P&G's first food-related product, Crisco. In the words of Tara Parker-Pope in the Wall Street Journal, the Olean Winter Olympics commercial "shows wholesome scenes from an American farm to remind consumers that olestra is made with soybeans…. Amid scenes of golden fields, tractors, and a family gathering on the farm, a soybean farmer tells viewers that 'the folks who make Crisco' are now using soybeans to make a 'new kind of cooking oil.'" In P&G's February 10, 1998, press release announcing the introduction of fat-free snacks, chairman and CEO John E. Pepper stated that "At the start of this century, Crisco was a good idea for healthier eating. On the eve of the next century, a fat-free, calorie-free cooking oil from the makers of Crisco is an even better idea, and snacks are a great place to start."

The first thrust in the Fat-Free Pringles campaign came on the heels of its test marketing efforts and used many of the same methods—primarily distribution of free samples at lunch hour in many large cities. On February 2, Judann Pollack and Chuck Ross reported in Advertising Age that P&G expected to roll out the actual product nationally on October 1, but by late February stores in selected Ohio cities were already selling the new Pringles. P&G gave away some 3,000 samples of Pringles to lunch-time crowds in Cincinnati on February 27, a date Mayor Roxanne Qualls had proclaimed "Fat Free Pringles Day." It did the same in other Ohio cities. In early March P&G hung out a 100-by-32-foot banner, covering nine stories on one of the twin towers of its Cincinnati headquarters, to advertise Fat-Free Pringles.

Using the tag line "Yes I can!," P&G introduced Fat-Free Pringles nationally starting on June 15. TV spots showed adults in a variety of locations—a party, a sporting event, in their homes—holding cans of Fat Free Pringles in one hand and regular Pringles in the other. In addition, P&G ran commercials for Pringles featuring young adults and targeted to that market. New Pringles packaging proclaimed its "amazing taste," but also contained a warning concerning abdominal cramping.

Parker-Pope in the Wall Street Journal reported in June that lunchtime sampling, conducted in 20 major cities such as New York, Minneapolis, and Atlanta, was a major part of the new "Tasting Is Believing" campaign. New commercials, which began appearing in July, according to Parker-Pope, "Focus on the fact that consumers will be pleasantly surprised by the taste of Fat-Free Pringles. A second execution will target consumers who have stopped eating snacks to avoid fat." Pringles marketing manager Casey Keller told Parker-Pope that the latter ads would send the message that "You can have fun again, and you can get back into snacking."

OUTCOME

As the "Tasting Is Believing" campaign continued into the second half of 1998, so did advertising for Olean, this time featuring a young woman in jeans walking around what she claimed was the family farm and again referring to Olean as a product in the Crisco tradition. The commercial promised, "You know a good thing when you see it." By mid-1999, however, many industry observers had begun to have doubts concerning the success of olestra from a business standpoint. P&G had produced only 35 percent of the Olean it had projected to manufacture during the first fiscal year of the product's sale, and purchases were down accordingly.

In May 1999 Pamela Sherrid reported in U.S. News & World Report that "olestra is a long way from achieving mainstream status." Ironically, one of olestra's most impressive success stories was Pringles competitor Frito-Lay, which sold $350 million of Wow! brand snacks in its first year of sales. Sales for Pringles, by contrast, had not captured a great deal of attention. "But P&G has staying power," Sherrid observed. "It stuck with languishing Pringles for 20 years before the brand finally took off in the early 1990s." P&G and Pringles had enjoyed less than glowing results in one round of the olestra battle, but the fight was far from over.

WHEN YOU'RE STRONG, YOU SPARKLE CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Procter & Gamble's Secret deodorant had been a leading product among women consumers for nearly 50 years. Through years of improvements of the product and extensions of the brand, Secret had remained the number one deodorant for women. But by 2003 sales were slipping for all established brands in the antiperspirant and deodorant categories, including Secret. The only products experiencing growth were newcomers to the category. To reverse the negative trend, the company introduced its own new product, Secret Sparkle, a deodorant designed to appeal to women 16 to 24 years old, who had been abandoning the aging brand in large numbers.

To increase brand awareness among its target audience and to support the launch of Secret Sparkle deodorant in 2004, Procter & Gamble's Chicago-based ad agency, Leo Burnett USA, created a campaign themed "When You're Strong, You Sparkle." The campaign included animated television spots and print ads in national magazines typically read by girls in the target demographic. In addition, Procter & Gamble turned to the Internet for part of its marketing. A brand-themed website, SecretSparkle.com, was created by imc2, a Dallas-based interactive advertising agency. A test promotion on MySpace.com, a social-networking website heavily used by young women, ran for one month. In 2005 the company expanded Secret Sparkle to include a body spray for girls 7 to 12 years old. The marketing was expanded as well with the launch of an Internet blog site, SparkleBodySpray.com.

Following the campaign's launch, overall dollar and volume shares of the Secret brand increased 4 percent and 3 percent, respectively. Teen dollar shares jumped 40 percent. "When You're Strong, You Sparkle" also received a 2005 EFFIE Award for successfully turning around the Secret brand's business. The campaign experienced negative consequences, however, regarding the body-spray marketing that targeted girls under age 12. According to the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, the program violated CARU's guidelines, so Procter & Gamble agreed to cancel that portion of the campaign.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

When Procter & Gamble introduced Secret deodorant in 1956, the product was a cream that women applied with their fingertips. In 1958 Secret became available as a roll-on; the spray version was introduced in 1964, followed by the solid in 1978. Besides innovations in the product's, application methods, Secret was offered in a changing variety of scents that reflected women's lifestyles of the time, from Powder Fresh and Spring Breeze in the 1980s to Ambition, Genuine, and Optimism in 2001. The company was also working to improve its Secret deodorant formulas to provide better protection from perspiration and odor for longer periods of time. By 2002 the antiperspirant and deodorant category had become enormous, with some national retailers such as the Walgreen's drugstore chain offering a selection of as many as 300 varieties. According to the retail-business-tracking company Information Resources, in 2002 Americans spent more than $1 billion on antiperspirants and deodorants. Procter & Gamble's Secret brand held the number one spot that year, with sales of $389 million.

Despite holding the top position in its category, the Secret brand was aging along with its core consumers, women who had begun using the product in their late teens and early 20s and who were loyal to the brand. By the 2003–2004 fiscal year Procter & Gamble had reported three straight years of declining sales. To reverse the slip, it introduced several new products in the Secret line, including Secret Platinum in invisible solid and clear gel forms. In 2004 the company introduced Secret Sparkle, a new Secret deodorant line designed to appeal to young women. A marketing campaign themed "When You're Strong, You Sparkle" was created to support the launch of the new product.

TARGET MARKET

According to Procter & Gamble, 80 percent of its products were purchased by women, and based on that information the company's marketing for most of its products specifically targeted women. The age of the women targeted varied based on the item being promoted. When Procter & Gamble introduced its Secret Sparkle deodorant in 2004, the product and its marketing were designed to reach young women 16 to 24 years old. Dave Knox, Procter & Gamble assistant brand manager, explained during an interview with Advertising Age, "If you don't target the consumer during her formative years, you're not going to be relevant through the rest of her life." Knox further noted that girls were beginning to use deodorant products at a younger age than in the past. With that in mind, in 2005 Procter & Gamble expanded its Secret Sparkle line to include body sprays and increased its marketing to target girls 7 to 12 years old. Because the younger girls had experienced body sprays at chain stores such as Bath & Body Works, they were familiar with the products, making them the ideal target market for the new Secret body spray.

COMPETITION

Unilever, based in the Netherlands, offered a variety of personal-cleansing products under the Dove brand, including a beauty bar introduced in the 1950s. The brand was eventually expanded to include skin moisturizers and hair-care products such as shampoos and conditioners, and in 1999 Dove deodorant was added to the mix. In 2004 Unilever added Radiant Silk antiperspirant to the Dove deodorant line and became the first brand to combine underarm odor and wetness control with skin care. Dove deodorant's popularity with its target market, women aged 18 to 34, was evident in the sales numbers. Within four years of its introduction Dove deodorant had grown to the number five brand based on sales. From January 2003 to January 2004 Dove reported a sales gain of 11.9 percent, to $58.5 million. In October 2004 a new global branding campaign was launched with the theme "Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty." It included all products with the Dove label and was designed to broaden the definition of beauty beyond physical attractiveness. Print ads featured women who were not models and who ranged from a plus-sized woman to a 96-year-old proudly showing off her wrinkles.

Andrew Jergens Company's market share for all of its personal-care products was on a downward spiral in 2002. At the end of that year the company reported a 3.5 percent drop in retail sales of its products, to $102 million. The report did not include sales at retail giant Wal-Mart, which were expected to give the sales numbers a 20 percent boost. To help execute a business turnaround, in 2003 Jergens began updating its existing products and added several new items, including skin-care products specifically designed for African-American women. In addition, to support its product efforts the company boosted its advertising budget 20 percent for 2003. Among existing products getting an update was Ban deodorant. In 2000 Jergens acquired the 50-year-old Ban brand from Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Chattom, Inc., which produced over-the-counter medications and skin-care products. After three years of work by Jergens scientists to improve Ban's formula, the deodorant got new packaging with a more contemporary and feminine look. A marketing campaign to support the new and improved Ban was launched in 2004 with a target market of young women aged 17 to 24. The campaign's target market put Ban in direct competition with category leaders Dove and Secret. It had the tagline "We'll take care of sweat and odor. The rest is up to you."

MARKETING STRATEGY

In 2004 Procter & Gamble's Secret deodorant brand had been on a three-year decline, with most of the volume and dollar share losses reported in the teen and college-aged-women market. In an effort to generate renewed interest in the brand among younger consumers, the company introduced a new Secret line, the Secret Sparkle collection, which was geared toward teens and young women. To support the launch of the new product line, Procter & Gamble's longtime advertising agency, Leo Burnett USA, created the "When You're Strong, You Sparkle" campaign. It included national television spots aired during programming that attracted an audience of teens and young women, such as MTV's Laguna Beach and Fox network's The O.C. Print ads also appeared in magazines read by the teen-to-24-year-old demographic, including Teen People and Cosmo Girl.

Each print ad highlighted one of the new product's four fragrances: Pear Illusion, Peach Shimmer, Violet Dazzle, and Moonlit Rose. The tagline, "When you're strong, you sparkle," was printed across the top of the ads. The ads were heavily illustrated and featured a beautiful woman in the center of a fairy-tale setting with images of twinkling stars, birds in flight, unicorns, flowers, and sparkling gems. The print ads were so appealing to young women that many visited the brand's website, where copies of the ads could be downloaded and printed as posters. Television spots were animated and used a magical theme similar to that of the print ads.

NEW PROCTER & GAMBLE DEODORANT TARGETS YOUNG MEN

As the men's grooming category expanded to include body deodorant sprays similar to those used by teen and 20-something women, Procter & Gamble expanded its Old Spice brand in 2003 to appeal to younger men. The new product, Old Spice Red Zone, offered new fragrances (Glacial Falls and Aqua Reef), contemporary packaging, and a formula that was designed to stop odors before they started. Besides both invisible and soft solid deodorants, the line included a body spray and a body wash. Signed on as spokesman for the Red Zone line was Chicago Bears football linebacker Brian Urlacher.

Recognizing that its target audience typically spent as much time online as it did watching television or reading magazines, Procter & Gamble also pursued a new approach to market its Secret Sparkle brand by turning to the Internet. Besides launching a website for the brand, SecretSparkle.com, Procter & Gamble arranged a promotional deal with MySpace.com, a social-networking website favored by young women. The MySpace.com home page featured a profile of singer Hilary Duff and included logos for Secret Sparkle deodorant. Internet surfers who viewed the singer's profile could enter Secret's contest "Discover the Secret Strength of Today's Hottest Rising Music Stars." The MySpace.com promotion ran for the month of December 2004 and included ads for Sparkle as well as links to other musicians popular with the target age group, such as the Donnas and Bonnie McKee.

In 2005, when Secret Sparkle Body Spray was added to the Sparkle product line to appeal to an even younger group of girls, those aged 7 to 12, Procter & Gamble again turned to the Internet for its marketing. The company released its first Web log marketing program for the Secret brand: SparkleBodySpray.com. Set up to look like the Web logs (or blogs) of each of the Secret Sparkle Body Spray characters (such as Rose and Peach), the site was interactive, with games and downloads. Dallas-based interactive advertising agency imc2, which had created the SecretSparkle.com website, also developed the body spray's blog site. The new site was designed to appeal to preteen girls as well as to enhance the television and print campaign created by Leo Burnett.

OUTCOME

The campaign was well received by the teens and young women who composed its target audience. Following the launch of "When You're Strong, You Sparkle," Procter & Gamble reported that the Secret brand, overall, increased in both dollar and volume sales share. Increases were especially notable in the teen market, with dollar share growing 40 percent. The campaign also won a 2005 Silver EFFIE Award in the Beauty Aids category.

On a negative note, although the advertising was a success, in 2005 Procter & Gamble agreed to stop advertising its Secret Sparkle Body Spray to girls 12 years old and younger. According to a report in Advertising Age, a ruling by the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) stated that Procter & Gamble's marketing program violated the agency's guidelines. CARU, a division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, was the children's unit of the advertising industry's self-regulation program. Its guidelines read, "Products inappropriate for use by children should not be advertised directly to children." The Secret Sparkle Body Spray carried the warning "Keep Out of Reach of Children." After pulling the advertising, Procter & Gamble said that it believed the program had adhered to CARU's guidelines and noted that the company had not received any reports of misuse of the product by children.