Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

If you think about it, moist bathroom wipes are a really good idea.

But most people still don't use them. Kimberly-Clark developed Fresh Rollwipes in 2001 and tried to get us all to use it. In typical, large company fashion, their approach was a $40 million marketing campaign.

The marketing campaign involved a lot of TV commercials with a bear and a duck. ("Wet!" says the duck. "But just barely," bellows the bear.) The ads were deliberately low-key, a company rep said, "since there's only so much people want to hear about a product like this." Ogilvy & Mather, one of the vaunted ad firms of the world, developed the spots. Print campaigns and even a customized "freshness museum" truck were also featured in the campaign. Kimberly-Clark pulled out all the stops for this launch.

The campaign failed miserably.

From an article by Copernicus Marketing, "A year and a half after Kimberly-Clark's big announcement, Fresh Rollwipes were in one regional market and executives said sales are so weak they are not financially material."

I could have made that launch a success, for a fraction of the cost of their failed, traditional, overblown and simultaneously underdone campaign.

What Would I Have Done?

Realizing that this product can't really be addressed directly in an ad on TV, they should have stayed away from TV ads altogether. Instead, I would have focused on getting the product 'out there' -- installed in fashionable restaurants and malls. Signed contracts with custodial companies and business parks. A soft launch would have allowed other people to talk about the product.

Kimberly Clark couldn't go on TV and talk about how gross it would be to wipe off muddy hands with a paper towel and then sit down for dinner. But many other people could have.

Was Seinfeld still around in 2001? Talk about an ideal venue for product placement. A clean-freak who stars in a show about the idiosynchrocies of pop culture. It wouldn't even have looked like product placement, and they could have practically read the script of a radio ad for the thing. "It's cleaner!"

Just one person using the product on a Reality TV show like Big Brother, and millions of people would have been exposed to a frank discussion of the benefits. A columnist who encountered the product in an airport could have written a piece for the Washington Post Society section. One comedian making a joke about it would have opened discussions that -- well, that a $40 million daytime TV ad campaign couldn't.

The power of TV advertising is enormous. But for a product where even in the early stages of marketing, people are urging subtlety in the TV ads because the product is too delicate for polite discussion... They should have hired me as a consultant. They needed another channel of communication -- one that could more directly address the concerns and benefits and reasons for this product.

It's not too late! This is a product that the marketplace needs. We just need a company to market it right. A company that understands that marketing doesn't always mean driving a "freshness" truck around the country and producing a lot of TV commercials.