Tide: Strategy, Media, Creative and Go to Market

Problem: Tide Washing Machine Cleaner had been in the market previously, but sales hadn’t been as strong as expected. Bray & Co was approached to re-launch the product into the US market, and grow the category at the same time.

Our Strategic Insight: People don’t think of washing machines as “machines” that need maintenance, unlike other machines they own like cars.

Creative Solution: We knew that if we were going to grow the category of washing machine cleaners, leveraging the Tide brand which would ensure market share, we needed to ensure that they were thought of machines, therefore requiring maintenance. The best way to do this was to present facts about washing machines that people would associate with other machines they own - without this logical step, consumers were not going to take the next step of cleaning them. So we needed to build a story centered around facts and figures to create the association.

Phase 2 of creative, once we had established the cleaning need, was to create an “enemy” that needed cleaning. A word for the gunk that lives inside your washing machine didn’t exist . . . so we created one to ensure it was ownable. Hence “scrud” was born, the gross stuff that Tide Washing Machine Cleaner was made to remove.

Media Solution: As always, we want to Storybuild where the audience is. In this case, we started by using 3rd party data to find Tide loyalists that owned their own homes, then pushed messaging out to them in Google Paid, Bing, Facebook, YouTube, Broadcast TV, Programmatic Media, Connected TV, Instagram and TikTok. We also supported in-store sales through the creation of bespoke assets. Importantly, we sequenced the variety of “facts” about scrud so that consumers were always presented with the creative that would position washing machines as machines first, then we would talk about scrud, never vice versa.

Results: Sales in the first 12 months greatly exceeded expectations by over 20%, with total category volume also increasing.