Pop quiz: If you make cat litter, what's the one thing, the single quality you need to be known for above all others?
That's right, odor control! OK, but small problem…every other litter brand in the market passed that pop quiz, too.
In the world of cat litter, everyone is striving toward the same goal. To raise the bar on the most important equity measure there is: odor control perception. The problem is, the mission to "out-claim" the competition has resulted in a sea of marketing "sameness" across the category.
Our objective was simple, it was time for Tidy Cats to disrupt the category, change the conversation and make tangible progress in the epic quest to conquer that key "odor control perception" measure. A measure where a gain of even a half point is considered monumental.
Oh, and, of course, drive consideration in the process.
While the competition continued to focus on product claims, Tidy Cats wanted to take a more disruptive approach. To put a literal face on what controlling odor, or more accurately, what not controlling odor really looks like.
Here's what we knew: Our target's biggest concern is nose blindness—the syndrome where you become so accustomed to a smell that you become completely desensitized to it. She lives in fear of someone coming into her home and discovering that it smells like cat you know what. A situation she would consider a complete and utter "fall from grace."
Enter "Stank Face"—an idea born of an internet meme and crafted into a campaign that focused on her worst fears: Seeing someone suffer the involuntary physical response when something just doesn't smell right.
A disruptive idea needed a disruptive distribution, and Stank Face was perfectly primed to be a campaign to break traditional paid rules. So we took an idea that was born on the internet in all its co-creation glory and fed it back to its place of origin.
With a tiny budget compared with traditional advertising, we used influencers and their built-in audiences to create strong engagement and extend organic reach. We crafted a mix of influencers with the right balance of reach and brand relevance, so we knew the people tuning in would be interested in our core message. This allowed our media spend to add fuel to the fire that was already raging.
Using seven key influencers of varying degrees of reach and engagement across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, we created a two-phase campaign: Part 1 would be unbranded content designed to trend the concept of Stank Face and reintroduce it into the digital lexicon. Part 2 would introduce Tidy Cats as the true solution to the Stank Face plague.
The Stank Face influencer campaign was very successful, advancing the core objective around the odor control equity measure while also driving best-in-class performance on consideration and recall. In addition, it blew away CPG benchmarks in action rates and driving to the landing page.
- The core campaign KPI, the on-site action rate on StopStankFace.com, was 120% above benchmark and three times higher for visits coming from influencer videos compared with visits from social or display advertising
- 11.9 million views, (organic: 10.3 million; paid 1.6 million)
- 6-point lift in the equity measure of odor control
- The ONLY cat litter brand in the market to show significant growth YOY in the odor control measure
- Additionally, Tidy Cats demonstrated significant growth in 12 imagery categories (out of 20) compared to all other brands that improved on 4 at most (nearly all brands moved the needle on 2 or fewer)
- 16% lift in consideration, a Google best-in-class performance
- 28.5% lift in recall, also best in class
- Surpassed CPG benchmarks for view-through rate
