After nearly 100 years, bleach sales were fading as its traditional consumers aged. To reverse decreased sales bleach had to be relevant to a new, younger audience – today’s parents. Ketchum helped Clorox do this through Bleach It Away, a frank and funny program highlighting life’s bleachable moments – you know, those OMG EWW moments every parent has but only bleach can help erase – was born. We knew parents were sharing messy moments online, but most of the time did not mention how they conquered them. The hero was missing. This was Clorox’s chance to rescript #OMG fails into funny success stories, with bleach as the solution. We tapped a range of digital influencers and social platforms to show new parents how bleach could add a happy ending to their messy moment stories. Soon thousands of these online stories had bleach incorporated as a solution. More importantly bleach sales grew, showing that bleach was again becoming a real-life hero. Our goal was to drive bleach sales, and this program contributed to the best period of volume growth for Clorox liquid-bleach in more than two years. After recognizing that traditional bleach users were aging, we focused on today’s parents who were not using bleach as much. We got to know this audience well, and learned that most of them are between 25 and 35 and Gen X/Y. They often turn to social media to commiserate, get advice and share stories – including the messy ones, but don’t often discuss solutions. Based on this we saw an opportunity to transform funny online fail stories into success stories, positioning bleach as the hero. We started big by searching social platforms where parents talked about messes to identify the most influential pee, poop and puke story tellers online. The lucky 11 were dubbed the Bleach It Away Bandits, made-up of parenting, fashion/DIY, pet and food bloggers. We also engaged new mom and author Bethenny Frankel to talk about messy moments in an online video series where conversations about breast milk mishaps and bathtub poop were not off-limits! Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel brought a consumer-submitted, bleach-friendly mess to life on live TV and online, helping us reach Gen X/Y parents in a hilarious way. The program successfully shifted the conversation. Social media activities led to a 38% increase in volume of Clorox Bleach online conversation, a 131% increase in Clorox Bleach/mess online correlations and nearly 13 million social media impressions. During the 13-week program Clorox saw a significant sales increase among new users including Gen X/Y users.
http://bleachitaway.clorox.com
