Analysis of a marketing campaign for a meat substitute product
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How Clorox moved beyond data to a new human-centric brand focus
5 min read Geoffrey Precourt
Event Reports, ANA Masters of Marketing, October 2017
SUMMARY Clorox, the cleaning brand, found marketing success by combining a focus on data with tangible human insights.
Activating the brand purpose "Clorox Champions a Clean World Where People Can Thrive" ensured that it was truly focused on consumer needs.
Previous efforts to enhance the brand's position through prioritizing tech-driven solutions yielded strong sales performance but negatively impacted brand equity.
Through activating the insight that cleaning happens before minor and major events in life, Clorox was able to deepen its brand resonance.
In 2012, after a half-decade in various US marketing posts for the Clorox Co., Eric Reynolds moved to London to spend almost ten years as its corporate VP/GM for Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
“When I left, TV was still king,” he told the 2,600-plus delegates at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2017 Masters of Marketing Conference. And digital, at that time, was a not-very-important conversation.
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“But, you know what? TV worked.” The targeting wasn’t very precise, he allowed, and “at some point, someone got up out of the room and made a sandwich. So, we did have some problems with TV. But the fact was that if you spent enough money and if you spent more than your competitors … you could win.
“We know this story: If you spent enough, you could make just about anything work.”
And when Reynolds left Clorox’s Oakland headquarters for the UK, the primary product driver was simple and direct:
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7lp5/clorox-a-clear-choice
Watch this ad:
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“We really showed [OxiClean] and Church & Dwight,” he said, tongue firmly in cheek. “And we got sued. And we lost.
“But we kept doing it.
“And we got sued by Reckitt Benckiser, another competitor. And lost.”
But, in defense of the then state-of-the-art advertising, “It was the kind of stuff that permeated the category: Spray, spray, wipe, smile, perfect multicultural, ethnic mom in a perfect kitchen. Those were real toilets; not computer-generated graphics. This was amazing stuff.
“And it really, really worked, I guess because we spent lots of money on it.”
In early 2015, Reynolds was appointed as Clorox’s Chief Marketing Officer, requiring a return to the United States. “And I knew something was afoot.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0j2VgM9dTU
Watch this ad:
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In this new position, he took on global responsibility for all marketing functions, including brand strategy and management, personnel staffing and development, consumer insights, advanced analytics, agency management, consumer promotion, digital capabilities, media planning and buying, commercial production, and graphic design.
His conclusion: “Everything had changed.”
London, he reminded his audience, “wasn’t a backwater.” But he’d landed back in the Bay Area, and straight into “the zeitgeist of performance marketing.” And it was clear, he asserted, that the rules of marketing for consumer packaged goods (CPG) had changed: A sector that was not renowned for speed had to pick up the pace.
“Our industry used to be known for scale. If we spent enough on TV, we would win. But those days are over. The new [imperative] is speed and agility. If we want our brands to be relevant and exciting to people, what we better do is learn how to get fast.”
The lesson wasn’t just trickling up from the consumer; it was coming down from the top. Benno Dorer, who was named as Clorox’s CEO in late 2014, “was very clear with what he wanted … ‘There is an existential crisis in CPG,’ he said. ‘We are essentially moribund unless we radically change how we see, think, and work. We are going to transform Clorox.’”
After 100 years of looking East – specifically, to New York – as a center of advertising and media, Reynolds’ team would do an about-face and start looking West, to Silicon Valley, for inspiration.
The result: “Over the last three years, we've done almost everything to change everything.”
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Initially, the plan was to listen and learn. One West Coast marketer – from a tech company Reynolds declined to mention by name – described how it brought products to market: “We don’t have marketing run by marketers. We're engineers. And we work on growth. Branding is really that emotional drizzle that you guys put on top.”
“Emotional drizzle” was tough for Reynolds to swallow. “I know the TV ads weren’t great,” he confessed to his ANA marketing peers. “But ‘emotional drizzle’?”
The hard lesson for Clorox’s marketers: West Coast, tech-focused enterprises “were finding incredible ways to be creative with data and technology – to get down to that human level.”
And that was a powerful change for the Clorox cleaning brand: “We built on data science. We brought in new creative partners,” with FCB and mcgarrybowen coming on board. “Our agency partners, OMD and AKQA, ramped things up for us.
“We made new friends. We brought in capabilities. We were one of the first people to bring in the [Data Management Platform] ... We started to direct massive amounts of people, time, and energy into that existential crisis we felt like we were facing in CPG.”
But the rush to the new was not smooth: “We did a huge bid early on in programmatic media,” Reynolds admitted. “We bought trainloads of banner ads as a major commitment to try to get to that right person, the right time, very first, blah, blah, blah.”
Despite the problems that now seem so obvious, however, the Clorox CMO told the ANA audience in Orlando, “It absolutely worked marvelously. Between 2014 and 2015 – in that sleepy, old, boring cleaning category – we grew by double digits.”
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But as one set of numbers pointed towards success, another batch identified deeper problems. Although sales were growing, a report from brand consultancy Prophet identified another, and uglier, quantitative truth: Out of 400 brands, Clorox checked in the bottom third, occupying 278th place.
Said Reynolds, “It was really a wakeup call for us that said, ‘Okay, if we're being so successful, why is the brand deteriorating?’”
The answer: “A huge case of ‘short-termitis’.
“At a time when we could get down to a human level, an individual level, we were so fixated on the data and the technology that we lost the bigger picture.”
In more detail, Reynolds continued, “In our rush to get so focused and get so data-enabled, we realized we were filling those moments that matter with cheaply-produced, hollow, vacuous, brand moments.
“This was not storytelling.”
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The flat, digital messages were every bit as one-dimensional as the toilet-based comparisons from the previous decade. The human-centricity that the brand knew was part of its DNA was missing in the data.
Looking beyond the information in search of insight, the Clorox team realized, “We’d missed a really clear point with cleaning: Why, if everybody hates to clean, do billions of people around the world clean every day? Why? Because they have goals. They want to thrive.
“Cleaning happens before almost anything major, or minor, happens in life. It resets the stage for life's possibilities.
“That insight had been staring us at the face for years, yet we didn’t see it. We didn’t activate it.”
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And the complete transformation of the Clorox brand came when it moved beyond product shots and comparisons to focus on the lives of not just its existing customers, but the people who might come to the brand for the first time.
Explained Reynolds, “We decided to follow them on their journey – to celebrate the fact that, even though people hate cleaning, they love clean.
“We set out to tell that story through what we think is a human-centered and purpose-driven way. And we adopted a new brand purpose globally: ‘Clorox Champions a Clean World Where People Can Thrive.’”
Reynolds’ corresponding mission: “We were not going to just think, ‘We're the people that spray things on counters and wipe with a sponge.’ The question was, ‘How do we bring it to life?’
“This worked because it reflects the very best of the brand. It is chock-full of humanity. None of those folks are actors. We had film crews filming real people for days and weeks and days on end to capture those moments.
“But you know what? [This positioning] doesn’t just live in film; it can live in moments outside. We can be more purposeful, we can tell people, ‘Clean matters’ in things like outdoor media.”
Case in point: Valentine's Day is soon coming up. “And, empirically,” Reynolds reminded the ANA audience “a clean environment is much more productive to what we'll call, ‘A successful relationship.’”
Watch these ads:
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/IP72/clorox-disinfecting-wipes-clean-is-the-beginning
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wGg9/clorox-clean-matters
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About the author
Geoffrey Precourt US Editor, WARC geoffrey.precourt@warc.com (mailto:geoffrey.precourt@warc.com)
Geoffrey Precourt is WARC's US editor. He reports from key events across North America.
Prior to joining WARC in July 2008, Geoffrey held senior editorial roles at titles including Strategy + Business, Point, Smart Business and Fortune, and edited the book CMO Thought Leaders.
TOPICS EMOTION (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au//search/Emotion/Emotion) BRAND POSITIONING (http://www.warc.com.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au//search/Brand-positioning/Brand positioning)
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