SITUATION

The Laundry Sanitiser segment in New Zealand is worth almost $2 million and there are only two players:

• Dettol Laundry Sanitiser

• Canesten Hygiene

Dettol is the main brand within this market and had a small but loyal user base. However, the category had not seen much growth in a number of years.

BRIEF

People don’t understand how dirty their clothes are. And with New Zealand being a cold wash country, their clothes are even dirtier. Dettol Laundry Sanitiser removes 99.9% of bacteria from your wash. So we therefore needed to raise awareness of just how dirty Kiwi’s clothes are and present Dettol Laundry Sanitiser as the solution – making it a part of their regular washing routine.

OBJECTIVES

• Raise awareness of Dettol Laundry Sanitiser

• Category Growth – wider usage occasion of Dettol Laundry Sanitiser

• Obtain greater market share

Through qualitative research, we discovered that the most compelling message was the statistic of how many fecal bacteria were still on your clothes after washing with standard products (like Persil) alone. Especially with new mums. We undertook our own research with AUT to evaluate New Zealanders ‘clean’ clothes. The results were astounding: 98% of the samples had live microorganisms, while 78% had live fecal-associated bacteria.

This led to our idea of Fecal Fashion: to create a kids clothing label inspired by—you guessed it—poo.

We undertook qualitative research to understand washing behaviour. We found that most people are set in their ways, and the opportunity to disrupt it was when a life moment occurred most commonly that was having a baby. Therefore we identified that targeting New Zealand mums (women aged 25+) was a key segment in driving growth and penetrations within the category.

We needed our mums to reappraise clean.

To reach our mums, we utilised social and influencer marketing – as we knew that this medium was a key source for mums to connect with like-minded individuals and a true source of hacks and information. To be true to the platform, we implemented a hook, reveal and maintain phase to allow us to reap the benefits of organic marketing and prompt chatter within the ‘hook’ phase before we began to present the brand.

We partnered with influencer-mums to introduce and promote a new fashion label called fe-Cál Kids. We even created a website and social presence for our brand to make it seem as authentic as possible. This ‘hook’ phase lasted five days.

Once enough of a conversation had built up, we got our mummy-influencers to reveal our dirty secret. Every design was created using magnified E.Coli that was already on their kids’ freshly-washed clothing. This ‘reveal’ phase lasted two weeks.

We targeted everyone that interacted with our campaign and provided them with the solution. Dettol Laundry Sanitiser, which removes 99.9% of bacteria from the wash, preventing kids from ever having to wear fe-Cál ever again.

• REACH

Our reveal video reached 64% of households with kids, and was watched 1 and a half million times.

Overall, we achieved a total of 8,709,617 total impressions served across all media.

• ENGAGEMENT

1,499,171 completed video views.

7,791 click throughs.

• SALES

It led to a 33% increase in sales in the first week – the best Dettol has ever seen anywhere in the world. And, thanks to our campaign, Dettol Laundry Sanitiser has remained the category leader to this day.

• Achievement against business targets

The campaign drove awareness of Dettol Laundry Sanitiser by ~300%.

Based on sales results, we saw overall category growth and Dettol’s percentage of market share peaked at 70.3%