Can you smell the Febreze? Don’t be fooled into thinking that’s a lovely bunch of flowers or the smell of freshly folded laundry that’s delighting your nostrils. That might seem to be the case, but what your nose is really detecting is the sweet smell of success.
The Febreze family of products contains air fresheners, fabric restorers, and more, all designed to make customer’s homes, workplaces, gym bags, and cars smell better than they did. The brand recently passed the billion dollar mark, great news for parent company Proctor and Gamble.
Many industry analysts consider Febreze a category creator: a uniquely profitable spot in the marketplace. The brand began with a humble fabric restorer product, designed to “freshen up” items that couldn’t be laundered. From there, Febreze’s growth has been exponential.
Brand Modeling as a Tool for Growth
Febreze has done an exceptional job of understanding their best customers—the highly profitable, extremely loyal and very vocal customers we call Brand Lovers. Dominant organizations win when they understand their Brand Lovers, especially the physical and psychological factors that motivate the customer to buy.
One of the reasons customers choose to make a purchase is to resolve internal tensions. Internal tensions arise when there’s a disconnect between the situation that is actually occurring in the customer’s life and what the customer would like to have happening in their life. In other words, customer tensions are really unresolved problems.
Identifying these unresolved problems is a critical aspect of the Brand Modeling process. Our goal is to understand not only the tensions our customer face, but the way they’d best like them solved. Febreze has done an exceptional job of identifying customer tensions: they have developed products for customers who have stinky new puppies, adorable but messy children, and kitchens ripe with odors that will put anyone off their feed.
Febreze’s latest marketing initiative is a bold experiment in demonstrating how Febreze’s Brand Lovers would like their smelliest problems solved. These commercials are a vast departure from the usual approach to marketing air fresheners, a route the NY Times describes thusly:
Typically, an actress realizes that her immaculate suburban home has been fouled by the smell of cooked fish, her husband’s cigars or her teenage son’s gym bag. After she sprays air freshener, however, odors disappear, as evidenced by her ecstatic inhalations and, occasionally, by her being instantly transported to a flower garden or orange grove.
In the new campaign, there are no immaculate settings. Blindfolded people are led into foul settings—nasty hotel rooms piled high with stinky clothes, broken down thrift shops with irrevocably soiled merchandise, restaurants piled high with fresh fish—and invited to sniff deeply, reporting what their “nose knows.”
Each of the scenes had been sprayed prodigiously with Febreze. The blindfolded people reported smelling nothing unpleasant—only the pleasant scents Febreze is known for. When the blindfolds are removed, the people are beyond shocked. They are obviously astonished at the disconnect between their olfactory perception and what they can see with their own eyes.
This is how Febreze’s Brand Lovers want their problems solved. Results that overcome the stinkiest reality are exactly what they’re searching for—despite the fact that few, if any, of Febreze’s Brand Lovers are likely to live in squalor themselves. Understanding customer tensions is what got Febreze to the top, and this campaign shows that the brand is using that knowledge to stay there.