Coming clean

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Sometimes an idea appears in the most unexpected place – and, sometimes, marketers can become so ensconced in their brands that they lose sight of the role those brands have in real people’s lives. For the consumer market insights (CMI) team working on Reckitt Benckiser’s flagship autodishwashing (ADW) brand Finish, the revelation was acknowledging that, perhaps, Joe Public didn’t think – or care – about their dishwashers as much the team did.

Marc Edwards, senior consumer and market insights manager for Finish, describes the light-bulb moment. “We had this realisation that we’ve spent the past 10 years or so trying to turn ADW and dishwashing into a high-engagement process, and the reality is that it isn’t. Consumers do not think of dishwashing as much as we would like them to.”

The change in mindset was brought about by a change in communications agency. When the team at ad agency Wieden+Kennedy was pitching for the Finish creative account, Reckitt Benckiser presented it with a business challenge: while Finish had grown rapidly to become one of the strongest brands on the ADW market, the landscape of the market had changed as a result of challenging competition and a consumer base “trained to shop on promotion”.

Low motivation

Wieden+Kennedy realised that consumers had absorbed the message about Finish being a functionally superior product, but that they underestimated the role that dishwashers – and clean dishes – play in their lives. This meant they had limited motivation to choose the gold-standard product in the ADW category.

“What really brought it home to us was a montage of all the advertising that had been done – not just on Finish, but on Fairy and Cascade, and on Sun in France and Somat in Germany – and they were, effectively, the same advert,” says Edwards. “For all our desire to be different and distinctive, frankly, all the brands were doing more or less the same thing.”

Rather than try to elevate dishwashing to being a high-engagement category, the team realised it should focus on promoting the importance of dishes, and the fact that it’s difficult to do anything in life without generating dirty crockery and cutlery.

Edwards’ colleague Chris Lindsley, CMI manager for ADW in Europe and North America, explains how important this central insight of disengagement was to shaping the direction the team took. “The big difference with this approach is making it real to people, rather than making it around a benefit or a product,” he says.

Artificial engagement

“Generally speaking, the level of dishwashing is fairly high, but the real genius of this approach is tapping into a consumer insight that people can really relate to,” says Lindsley. “Moving away from something very rational is important here. If we can remind people of the role that dishwashing plays in their lives, that leads onto the idea that they should give that role to Finish, because Finish is the best for the job.”

Having established the basis of the message, the next stage in the research process had two aims: to confirm that the underlying insight assumption held true in both developed and developing markets; and to elicit further insight around the idea to develop the creative approach. However, Reckitt Benckiser knew that it wouldn’t be as straightforward as simply asking people about their habits.

“The moment you say to someone, ‘We’re going to have a conversation about dishwashing’, their level of engagement becomes a bit artificial,” says Edwards. “They’re going to think about something that they are inherently not wanting to have a conversation about. There are far more important things in their lives than washing the dishes. “So we needed to find an approach that enabled us to check these insights – to build on this hypothesis we had – without alerting them that this was what we were looking to do.”

Reckitt Benckiser commissioned ethnography agency BAMM to test this thinking through a series of extended ethnography sessions. BAMM filmed, observed and interviewed 14 households over four weeks to observe the “pre, during and post-dishwashing drama” in the kitchen. This was done in the UK, US and Turkey, because these markets represent three distinct examples of the degree of prevalence of dishwashers within the home and how established dishwashers are (longest in US, more recent in Turkey).

Anthony Martin, director and co-founder of BAMM, explains that – for the first half of the five-hour session – the researchers didn’t ask any direct questions. “We joined them [the participants] at a meal, sometimes at the beginning, sometimes midway through, and just observed,” he says. “We didn’t really explain what we were going to be doing.”

The results, Martin says, highlighted a number of characteristics around the dishwasher, namely its centrality to people’s increasingly ‘revolving-door’ existence, and its role as “witness and social turntable to our busy lives”. With this as its central message, the subsequent TV ad, Dishes, illustrates how almost every event in life – whether significant or everyday – results in dirty dishes, and that Finish has it covered.

However, Edwards is keen to point out that the success of the project was not only down to the ethnographic approach employed; the way the story was packaged by BAMM ensured that the insights were brought to life for his team. “It’s one thing to spend five hours filming consumers,” he says. “The challenge is then the synthesis of that into a coherent narrative that a business and marketing organisation can use and look forward with.”

Ways of working

“It’s not about having all the data to make the decision, but about having the right amount of data to make the decision,” explains Nathalie Menard, senior CMI manager for ADW Europe and North America. “We are still focused on having the right methodology; however, it’s not about taking a long time to validate everything, but, instead, about making sure – when we have the sense that we can make the decision – that we make the decision. Even though we’ve got a lot of data, we do not have data paralysis, because we make decisions. CMI is a fundamental part of that.”

Nevertheless, the Finish ethnography work helped the CMI team to realise that it needed to start doing things in a different way, particularly in relation to big challenges around innovation and communications. This meant looking at how these types of projects could be managed, making use of the CDO and IMEX capabilities.

The starting point has been to work with Wieden+Kennedy to challenge itself in different ways. This included ethnography as a new approach to validating and refining insights during the creative process. “Typically, we probably have a rather short-term view of communications, so any analysis and evaluation we do tends to look at success in the short term,” says Edwards. “One of the key challenges that was put down to us was how we would show that this would drive short-term sales and contribute to a longer-term growth of brand equity.”

Looking long term

Menard adds that the team has had to look at the methodologies it uses in its analysis, to ensure it is focusing on the right things. “Until now, we have been a very functional company, and we know, if we want to gain market share – which is one of our critical objectives – we need to change something. We need to bring a bit more long-term equity into our pipeline. We need to keep our short-term success – because it is driving Reckitt Benckiser today – but we also need to change the way we are analysing results.”

Lindsley explains that this long-term view is tied to focusing on implicit messages: trying to understand what people are taking away at a higher level and not just rationally. This means that – in addition to the standard Millward Brown Link copy-testing work that it has relied on for some time – the team is using more ancillary measures to ensure that these implicit reactions are captured.

“The reason that’s important,” says Edwards, “is because typically, in the past, the message would be that Finish delivers great shine, and it would be very attribute-specific – we’d say ‘shine, shine, shine, Finish is shine’. In the new campaign, there’s no specific benefit that we’re calling out. The point is that this has got as much of a long-term brand-building role as it has a sales and unit-shifting role.”

Initial signs are that the new approach is working. “It’s big news that a company like Reckitt Benckiser has adopted a new way to develop its creative work,” adds BAMM’s Martin. “Arguably, such a radical execution would have been watered down or rejected by consumers in the usual Link test process because it’s unfamiliar. But the initial post-launch validation data is the best ever for the brand.”

The full version of this article first appeared in the July 2015 issue of Impact.