By early 2015, the leadership of Finish in the UK dishwashing detergent category was slipping. A long-term decline in brand equity combined with a promotional push from competitors had put years of growth into reverse.

W+K were given the task of finding a new communications approach that would restore the brand’s performance credentials, and put it back into growth.

The problem

Historically, Finish and its competitors had argued their superiority through persuasion. Claim-by-claim, innovation-by-innovation, their advertising explained to consumers what it was about their tablets that made them better than the others.

The problem was that dishwashing is a low-interest sector, with high levels of satisfaction. There is little room in the category for innovations, and little interest amongst consumers in hearing about them. Knowledge is low, and the desire to knowing more even lower. News about claims and innovations were falling on deaf ears.

Our task

What people wanted from the category wasn’t in doubt: performance was still king.

But to get back in growth, Finish needed a different, more compelling way of communicating it.

A better way of saying, “we’re the best”, built on something more powerful than claims alone.

Superiority you can’t argue with

We started off our search for the answer with a visit to the Finish technical lab in the town of Mannheim, Germany. It was an unusual place. From the tea-drinking machine turning out stained mugs for testing, to the meeting-room tables made from old dishwashers, this was a temple to dishwashing perfection.

The memory of the lab stayed with us. The single-minded, myopic, obsessive purpose of the place was hard to shake. For us, this was far more compelling evidence of Finish’s superiority than a claim could ever be. If we could expose it to our audience through our advertising, it would convince them of Finish's superiority, just as it had done for us.

The work

We created work that brought this myopic obsessive attitude to life by developing a unique perspective for the brand

The concept was simple. Almost everything in life, from the mundane to the extraordinary, generates dishes. This is something that can be easy to forget; our attention is generally elsewhere. Not Finish. Finish’s attention is only ever on the dishes that these events generate, and that it has been put on this earth to deal with. We shorthanded it “You see life, we see the Dishes”, and executed it through two TV spots, digital and instore.

The results

For the first time in years, Finish brand equity and sales turned a corner.

Improvements were seen on the vital tracking measures of “is high quality” and “brand for me”. Despite pricing, distribution and media spend remaining static, the decline in sales was arrested, with the brand registering an increase in in-market value sales of over £3,000,000 YOY in 2015.

We’d discovered a new voice for the brand – a voice that, for the first time, delivered superiority you couldn’t argue with.