单选题 Laundry is, after all, just laundry. Except when it's not. And Procter & Gamble Co. recently realized that Tide, its segment-dominating cash cow, despite adding three share points in the past year for a total 42% of the category, was in jeopardy of slipping into mere commodity status. That's when consumers buy on price and habit, which can spell the end of brand growth.
The problem. Tide for the past four years had only advertised mundane stain-fighting messages. Such creative indifference hardly did justice to an iconic brand so cool that Kevin Roberts, CEO of Tide agency Saatchi & Saatchi, wrote in his book, Love marks. The Future Beyond Brands. "I saw Neil Young in a recording studio wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with a Tide logo, and it just screamed possibilities."
So, in an attempt to cultivate Tide's inner "love mark," new ads now dismiss the notion that laundry detergent is a mere commodity. Instead, they reflect P&G's conviction that the " relationship" women—they're not bothering with men—have with their laundry goes well beyond cleaning grass-stained T-shirts.
Indeed, the effort is part of a company wide strategy to reestablish bonds between customers and all of its brands,no matter how mature or mundane Lynne Boyles, P&G global vice-president for advertising, says the company is on a mission to unearth and cultivate the deep connections people have with its products.
"We are striving for that with all of our brands."
The P&G team concluded that it needed more than Marketing 101 ads. One TV commercial depicts a pregnant woman spilling ice cream on the last shirt that fits. Another shows a mother in white pants rushing from her office today care and then with her daughter to a park. The message: Tide lets women focus on the important things. The new slogan says little about cleaning. Instead, "Tide knows fabric best" is meant to encompass the broader range of Tide products on the shelf today.
The Tide ads reflect the mandate of P&G marketing chief James Stengel that brands must speak to consumers eye-to-eye rather than relentlessly driving product benefits. Behind the strategy lies the cold truth that product benefits are quickly copied, whether it's cleaning power or diaper absorbency. So P&G is putting more capital into how a consumer feels toward a brand, a value harder to replicate. As the market leader, P&G's best course is to "stake out the emotional high ground," says Graham Woodall, executive creative director at ad agency JWT Worldwide.