01
Context
BIG BUSINESS WITH A BIG PIVOT
For billion-dollar brands like Tide, Febreze, and Dawn, innovations are exclusively decade-long initiatives driven by peak performance and universality. But recently, consumer needs have begun networking outward in all directions and smaller brands with a focus on values-based benefits began popping up. P&G needed to compete with its own fresh, new brand focused on natural ingredients, ethical packaging, safety benefits, and design-forward branding. It needed innovation fast. So 3 cross-functional team members from different brands and backgrounds began to steel away from the big-brand initiatives to build safer, more sustainable and natural cleaning brand for people around the country. In 10 weeks.
02
Problem
“NATURAL” CLEANING IS MESSY
The first problem to solve was to determine...whose problem we were to solve. Research was conducted through extensive consumer interviews, market analysis, and expert consultation. Through understanding the natural cleaning category- an entirely new beast from traditional cleaning the team was familiar with- consumer tensions began to emerge.
a desire to do right by the environment but not wanting to sacrifice performance
an understanding that natural products offer premium benefits, but cleaning products don’t justify splurging
an expectation that our purchases reflect our values but brand either seem too big to care about me or too small to make a real difference.
We found that a majority of American consumers related to the tensions and interest in the natural cleaning category.
03
Two Tests
ONE LEAN LEARNING EXPERIMENT
The team determined that providing a solution for “natural cleaning” was more complex than a single brand could meaningfully provide. The new base plan became to launch TWO brands with different benefits, business models, and target consumers. With a lean mindset, the objective was to test, learn, and iterate on these brands in-market.
FIRST, the Home Made Simple laundry + cleaning line was launched nationally March 2019 at Walmart, CVS, Home Depot, and Amazon as an expansion of the existing Emmy Award winning TV show on the OWN network.
04
Viral News
AKA WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS GETTING FIRED
The SECOND brand was a larger risk that jumped headfirst into the digital culture of point-of-market-entry millennial/gen z consumers.
In order to develop a brand story that consumers could connect to their attitudes and values, the team of two left to develop this experiment chose to explore acronyms like NBD, FML, and WTF to communicate the apathy of young, single, apartment renting cleaners. As is protocol with any new initiative, our small corner of the company trademarked possible names and marketing materials. In this case, those trademarks were newsworthy.
04
Brand New
LEARNING & PIVOTING. NBD.
The feedback from the business world was a mix of surprise and excitement. The feedback from young people was as passionate and diverging as any subreddit you could find. I saw this intense conversation as a sign that “hip lingo” was not going to feel authentic. A real, human story was the key to making the brand feel real. So I posed a question to Leadership; What if the brand was developed exclusively by the people that were going to buy it? Not our team of cleaning experts. Young people on Instagram. Moderated and guided by a real employee that looks and talks and thinks like them. Me. Stripping back the curtain to bring the humanity to P&G and the control to the millions of consumers that support us.
06
Launch
HITTING THE TARGET
With much strategy and discussion, it was decided that the NBD Clean lineup would be fast-tracked to launch nationally early 2020 at Target. Its recyclable packaging, innovative eco-box detergents, plant-based formula, and naturally-derived scents were developed from inspiration and feedback gathered from instagram followers of the NBD Clean account.