At one of our recent Shelf Impact! Package Design Workshops, I had a conversation with a design manager for a well-known marketer of consumer products.
Her company has engaged in lively internal discussions about toning down the "noise" in today's crowded retail stores and wondered whether other companies were tackling this very topic.
She has plenty of company in this thinking.
Recently, a few marketers have begun to realize that they will lose the consumer's attention if they continue attempts to "shout" over competing brands. Today's consumers are savvier than ever. They can see right through yesterday's marketing keywords such as "new" and "improved," and they are searching for meaningful brand connections.
These observations bring me to a presentation at the FUSE conference that I recently attended. Eric Reynolds, Director of Marketing for Household Cleaning Products at Clorox Co., made the point that "the home-cleaning aisle in the grocery store is an unbelievable zoo, a complete and utter train wreck." It's a $7 billion category—with marketers at 480 consumer product companies pushing 7,200 home-cleaning products in all.
"Home-cleaning is one of the most anti-consumer places you'll find in the store," Reynolds continued. "We have all this hyperbolic language in our category. We're power and more power."
Clorox worked past this single-minded thinking by revisiting the notion that a brand is an idea and not just a functional product. As Reynolds said, "We have volumes of consumer data, but no wisdom." So the company watched its consumers clean, noting both what they said and did during the process, to understand their motivation for cleaning. Then Clorox interpreted that motivation.
The results, reflected in both packaging and at www.clorox.com, celebrate the Clorox consumer's "cleaner home, healthier lives." "She's germ-minded and thinks more broadly about family health," Reynolds says. "She is all about life's possibilities."
Packaging helps transform the Clorox consumer's cleaning mind-set from drudgery to happiness. The result? Clorox has added two points of market share with this new approach, Reynolds noted.
The takeaway here for brand owners is that all too often they find themselves in a shouting match with competitors simply because that's what they've always done. Be alert to such marketing traps and circumvent them by talking respectfully, rather than shouting, to your brand's consumers.
By Jim George, Editor
