Are You Happy with Your Wash?

Taking a product to market is enormously expensive, and four out of five attempts will end in failure. To launch a product takes time, much more than you might think. By the time we encounter it: through an ad campaign or PR piece, or even through word of mouth, there has been a huge investment in research and thinking.

The success of every business, product and brand is dependent on planning. Audiences and markets are sophisticated, it is no-longer possible to push a message or sell a product, what we need to do is make an emotional connection with them.

Are you happy with your wash?’ is a question famously used to literally open the door for salesmen of Proctor and Gamble’s Daz brand.

This opener formed the basis of its aggressive ‘Daz Doorstep Challenge’ series of commercials, which saw various celebrity salesmen – including Danny Baker, Shane Ritchie and Michael Barrymore surprising housewives (“Middle Rung Families”) at the doorstep and asking them to put Daz to the test against their usual, always unnamed, detergent. Unsurprisingly Daz always won although I’m fairly certain it lost quite a few as well, it’s just we only saw the instances that it won. The challenging question was a fairly common approach at the time. Leslie Crowther asked people (typically “Low Income Elderly”) whether they could tell the difference between Stork Margarine and Butter. Again we only saw footage of people who genuinely couldn’t tell the difference. Sadly for the makers of Stork, they invariably looked like people who also couldn’t tell the difference between days of the week.

In the Daz ads, the money shot consisted of the newly converted housewife being offered two giant size packs of her old brand – always unnamed remember- in return for just one pack of Daz, while she “Ooh, I don’t knowed” like an anorexic being offered with a Black Forest Gateau, clearly realizing that TV stardom relied upon a strong rebuttal. It was much harder to get on telly back then – if it helps, think of the Daz Doorstep Challenge as a proto Big Brother.

Whether you share their enthusiasm for Daz or not, I expect you probably demonstrate some kind of brand loyalty in this area. Are you a Fairy Man, part of a Persil Family, or half of an Arial Couple I wonder? Are you a powder or liquid user? Ball or inseminator? I also assume you’re an intelligent human being and so you will be able to rationalise this purchasing decision in some way – is your powder cheaper? Does it wash whiter than white? Maybe it’s kind to colours or greener?

Now here’s three points to consider.
1. Are your clothes actually any cleaner than your friends and colleagues?
2. Do you know what washing powder they use?
3. Can you tell what washing powder people use just by looking at their clean clothes?
Thought not.

The reason that we choose different boxes of essentially the same chemicals is down to the lifestyle choice we make. The question is not asking us “Are you happy with our wash?” but rather “Are you happy with your life?” The advertising invites its target audience - women with families - to compare themselves with the images promoted by the brand: clean, happy, loving, well-cared for families. By doing this the brand reaches out to a part of your life that is, beyond the range of humble of soap flakes and in doing so makes it make the emotional connection. Which brand you prefer is largely down to which connects best with your lifestyle – do you associate with the tired mum, or the busy housewife, or perhaps, the working mum – but it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the detergent.

We can work with you to provide the injection of strategic thinking your business needs to take it on to the next level. Our team can help you to formulate marketing, PR, new business and pitch strategies that will help your business emotionally connect with its target market.