Let’s be honest: kitchen roll doesn’t get many people’s hearts racing. And in an already functional category, the cost of living crisis was making consumers think about value in even more rational ways. Meaning they were increasingly defaulting to cheaper, generic private labels over Plenty.

To help keep love strong and purchase consideration for Plenty higher - particularly among younger pre-family consumers, we had to reinject meaning into cleaning and emotional value into Plenty. And do it in a way that would be surprising enough to powerfully help shake perceptions.

As Plenty’s brand purpose is to enable better relationships to mess to enable better relationships to each other, what if we concretely helped couples keep relationships strong in the face of mess?

According to a Harvard study, 1/4 of divorces are now due to “disagreements over housework”. Plenty wanted to help by offering a tangible way for couples to maintain a healthy, happy, durable relationship.

So we launched Vow To Clean. An activation that asked real couples to change their wedding vows and commit to cleaning for their partner at the altar.

From promising to scoop hair gunk from the shower drain, to wiping the cat’s anus and cleaning up vomit, the idea turned 1,000 years of traditional wedding vows on their head. Reframing cleaning as a true act of love that’s more romantic than flowers, chocolates and candle baths combined.

In exchange, the couples won an all-expenses paid wedding at world-famous Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, London, attended by their family and friends.

You can’t get much more functional than the kitchen towels category. Superficial insights, claims escalations, price cuts as if no emotional relevance was needed, let alone possible.

Yet through bespoke quant research, we found that cleaning is at the heart of relationships: When our loved ones make a mess or don’t clean after themselves, it can really p*ss us off. But when they do clean for us, it can be a love language. Even weirdly romantic. No roses or foot rubs beat cleaning the hair in the shower drain or wiping up pet poop around the house so your partner doesn’t have to - as we found in our survey. In fact, 3 in 4 suddenly saw cleaning as key to a happy relationship.

So, we would reposition cleaning from the usual boring chore to an act of love, able to help relationships and make Plenty worth its price again.

The activation launched on Valentine’s Day, where a teaser film on social and Plenty website takeover offered couples the chance to win an all-expenses paid wedding if they included a commitment to cleaning up mess as part of their wedding vows.

After interviewing dozens of couples, we selected three for the big day. They exchanged their own, personalised cleaning vows at real weddings attended by friends and family at world-famous Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, London, in March.

The weddings and subsequent receptions were filmed and became a series of digital and social videos, all showcasing the role cleaning plays in a happy and healthy relationship and the importance of committing to clean for your partner in order to keep your love strong. Post-event, vows and commitments could be sent by the wider public to their own partners to emphasise the importance of cleaning in their own relationships.

After 1,000 years of the same traditional wedding vows, Plenty’s Vow to Clean activation gave the commitments at the altar a much-needed reality check, and started changing perceptions of romance and cleaning powerfully.

Whether promising to clean ‘bin juice’, pets accidents, or just to love and honour each other ‘in cleanliness and mess’, 65% agreed that a vow to clean should be added to standard wedding vows after seeing our activation (75% among our younger consumers <35yo) and 7/10 would do so if getting married.

It wasn’t just dated marital institutions we reframed: 81% of people felt positively about our brand and 95% said they would consider buying Plenty after seeing this activation.

We also boosted our owned social channels, with +41.4% in reach and +56.3% in engagement.

Love is messy, but by committing to clean for each other, we can keep love strong, with Plenty