Battling Boring: How Challengers in the CPG category are rejecting their 'low-interest' label
by Susie Milburn
To say it’s a tricky time as a CPG brand is an understatement, and if you’re in the US justifying a price premium (and fighting off private label brands), everything has been cranked up a notch with tariffs thrown into the mix.
But the thing that caught my attention most in the last few weeks was the comment P&G CEO Jon Moeller made in an interview – consumers aren’t just trading down, they’re reconsidering their behaviour: they’re doing fewer laundry loads in a week in an effort to use less detergent.
In this context, if you’re a household care brand then the battle for consumer attention and wallet just got tougher, and the cost of being dull got even greater. So fighting on the basis of efficacy claims or incremental innovation, like the rest of category, might in fact be a risky thing to do.
But how do you fight for attention in a category where the bar for interesting brands has perhaps been remarkably low?
Being dull doesn’t have to be the default. If you look at those challenging the status quo in this category, they are far from boring. At eatbigfish, we’ve been researching The Extraordinary Cost of Dull since 2023 and identified 5 strategy questions you can ask yourself to ensure you fight dull. This article brings you 5 Challengers that exemplify the 5 ways to fight dull, even in the most sanitized of categories…
1. Setting the bar right – how Touchland raised their ambition, setting their sights on a whole new category
Competing by the rules set by the category is largely a race to the bottom, especially when private or own label brands enter the field. For cleaning / personal care, this is typically some combination of efficacy + kindness (to you and increasingly the planet).
Hand sanitizer is a textbook example – effective without leaving your hands dry, tends to be status quo.
But do consumers really care about (or know) the difference between killing 99.999% of germs and killing 99.998% of germs? And at some point, that criteria of choice has to change – there are only so many decimal places you can fit on a billboard after all.
Challengers set unreasonable ambitions that mean these category rules just don’t cut it anymore – and these ambitions require them to change the criteria of choice.
And that’s what Touchland, the fastest growing hand sanitizer brand in the US, did.
According to their founder and CEO, Andrea Lisbona, they set out to be the first hand sanitizer sold in premium beauty stores. They raised the bar to compete with perfume and beauty products, leaving the rest of the sanitizer market to continue battling it out over infinite decimal points.
According to their website, “Touchland was born from a bold vision: to reinvent overlooked daily essentials into extraordinary moments of delight. We believe every aspect of our everyday essentials should be exciting; little bursts of joy that can delight our senses and remind us of the magic in the mundane.”
Setting the bar here required them to overcommit on scent, format and sensory experience – hiring a parfumier not just a lab technician to develop their products and obsessing over design (citing Apple as an influence) to earn the coveted handbag essentials status.
Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t kill germs, (their sanitizers contain 70% ethyl alcohol on average, as do the US market leader Purell’s), but it’s much more interesting (and strategically fruitful) to ask: who (or what) are your competitors really in the eyes of your consumers? And use that to set a much higher bar.
And it’s certainly more interesting to consumers, who are willing to pay $10-$20 for one of these products, and to Church and Dwight who just last month agreed to acquire them for $700m with the brand valued at $880m.
2. Denying assumptions – how Clorox challenged the assumption that cleaning is a chore
One of the best ways to get attention is to challenge the assumptions that people already have about your brand or your category. And the most effective way of doing this is through surprise. As Doug Martin, CMO of General Mills said, “we are always using our brains to follow ahead and fill in the next blank that we think is coming. And it’s only when you surprise people that you can get them to step out of that.” Because after all, something unexpected or surprising is far more memorable and distinctive – and in a category that is as reliant on price as CPG is, we have to find some different levers to pull.
Challengers deny the assumptions their audience have of their brand or category, surprising consumers with something unexpected that sticks.
Clorox’s recent campaign does just this – denying an inbuilt assumption that cleaning is a chore – literally, something that most brands try and counter by demonstrating their products get better results in less time.
Instead, Clorox surprised consumers with research proving that cleaning is in fact more enjoyable than a whole host of other activities. They’ve created a “Feel Good Index”, showing that petting a puppy, or even having a massage, doesn’t compete with the feeling of cleaning (yup, even toilets). Now, we’re not under the illusion that Clorox have found the secret to happiness, but this is a bold and surprising move for the market leader to suggest cleaning is more enjoyable than any of these things.
This use of surprise does make us challenge how we think about cleaning, and in turn what we might want from a cleaning brand. Further, it moves the product from a purely rational space to a more emotional one, something we know to be a powerful lever for brand growth in the long term.
3. Telling a dramatic story – how OMO (aka Persil, Skip or Surf Excel) have been telling a dramatic story for over 20 years
If emotion is one of the key tenets of storytelling, then interesting stories go a step further – they introduce tension, and through that, a sense of drama.
Now, this isn’t about being dramatic for the sake of it, but more fundamentally and strategically introducing a tension between what an audience wants, and what’s standing in the way of that.
Tension is central to a clear Challenger story and strategy – as the name suggests, Challengers challenge in the pursuit of overcoming what’s broken, so that they can drive progress for their category or consumers.
OMO have told a dramatic story about dirt consistently for over 20 years. While the rest of the category obsessed over whiter whites, their brand strategy creates a tension between a parent’s desire to protect and nurture their children, and the realization that overprotection might actually stand in the way of their child’s development. In world where everyone is obsessed with cleanliness, they believe that dirt is good for childhood development and happiness.
This tension remains at the heart of their brand, from the iconic statement that ‘children now spend less time outside than a prison inmate’ which kicked off a bold campaign in 2016, to their latest work in Istanbul which reframes billboards as playgrounds, everything they do is built around this dramatic and emotive story with a clear tension at its heart.
Since the strategy launched in 2004, the Dirt Is Good idea has led to growth from a €0.4 billion business to a €4 billion business today – and OMO is present in 500m households globally – a fitting example of how even the market leaders can continue to challenge the status quo.
4. Being distinctive – how Scrub Daddy uses character (and then some) to be anything but dull
It’s not just your marketing that consumers aren’t paying as much attention to as you might think or wish – it’s also your product. And anyone that’s walked down a supermarket aisle or digital equivalent will know that products quickly blend into their own ‘sea of sameness’.
For Challengers, product is as important as marketing – and brands like Vacation lead from the front with character and distinctiveness (you only need to google ‘Vacation Classic Whip’). And with innovation at the top of marketers’ lists as a lever for growth within household CPG, a more interesting product is as critical as a more interesting campaign.
Challengers amplify their product differences, overcommitting to the things that make them different, even if that’s at odds with the category status quo.
Scrub Daddy sponges are the gold standard here – sure, they’ve created a product that is effective (the science shows it works) – but for those outside the R&D department, it’s the playful colours and the iconic smiley face that really draw you in.
But it’s not just their eponymous sponge that stands out – they’ve turned their product into a bold, brash, cheeky character that makes them one of the most entertaining brands on TikTok. Now, CleanTok is well trodden ground for brands in this category – but Scrub Daddy do something very different – they entertain.
As Sylwia Jacob, their Head of Marketing for the EU and UK, said in an interview with AdWeek recently, “The naughtier and more absurd its humor, the more interaction and engagement we get from our audiences...It’s about pure entertainment. That’s what people want to see.” So much so, that the Scrub Daddy has evolved into a character, “living a life of its own.”
And again, this isn’t just interesting for interesting’s sake – Scrub Daddy command a premium at $4 per sponge vs. the market leader’s $1 equivalent, and sales wereprojectedto grow 40-50% to $350m last year.
5. Meeting them where they care – how Dude Wipes use toilet humour to connect with a male audience.
Everyone talks about being consumer centric - but often that means drowning in data (not insight) and no clear filters for decision making. At worst, this means talking to ourselves, validating our hypotheses (or at least the things we think consumers care about) to add greater confidence to the things that we do as a brand.
Challengers get confidence from a different place: they are unapologetically clear about who they are for, and who they are not for. And so, they are unafraid to divide the world, speaking to a mindset rather than a demographic.
Dude Wipes are clear on this – unlike the rest of the category, that cater to 80% of toilet paper buyers that are women, they cater to men (who represent 70% of their buyers). And for men (or most women for that matter) who don’t want to be coddled or spoken to by a bear or a puppy, they have a very different approach to meeting their audience where they care.
Sean Riley, one of their co-founders, talked about the origins of the brand in almost a conversational, social way, “We wanted to make people laugh and be authentic – and then we realized how disruptive that was.” But fast forward over 10 years, and this authentic connection is paying dividends.
Ultimately the brand was born out of a clear insight and a gap in the market that Riley noticed as a college student: “Why are guys using baby wipes and loving them? Why isn’t there anything else on the market? Why isn’t there something flushable with cool branding?”
Dude Wipes are unashamedly for the kind of person who likes a good laugh at a poo joke. And while toilet humour might not be everyone’s cup of tea, that’s OK – even more so, if you’re a Challenger. So, if you’re Dude Wipes, it’s a critical tool in connecting with your audience.
They describe their product as ‘extra-large flushable wipes, because nobody wants a little wipe after a big burrito.’ They overcommit to moments like going to college for the first time with their Mini Pooper car. They use entertaining TikTok videos, instead of product specs and ratings on their website. And they are deliberately unserious in a world that is overly so.
So there you have it – five antidotes to dull exemplified by five Challengers who answered the call to be less boring. But what can you do now? At eatbigfish we’ve developed a simple diagnostic tool called the Anti-Dull Dial which can help you to determine whether your next campaign, brand strategy or idea isn’t going to hit the mark. So next time you want to check in and make sure that the work you are doing is going to stand out from the sea of sameness in your category, ask yourself these five questions:
Rank yourself out of 10 on the Anti-Dull Dial
Are we using the real bar to judge what’s interesting?
Are we denying our audience’s assumptions and surprising them?
Are we using emotion, drama and storytelling?
Are we showing real distinctiveness and character?
Are we meeting them where they care and speaking in their language?