What started as reading an article on Advertising to being sickened by the fact that this “expert” thinks he has us all figured out. Tide Basic? Seriously. Peep the whole article @ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/business/media/08adco.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
“And Procter is testing, in three Southern states, a version of Tide called Tide Basic, that costs about 20 percent less than the mainstay versions. The new campaign is meant to stimulate demand for full-priced Tide rather than the budget variety.
“These are tough times,” said Suzanne Watson, North American Tide associate marketing director at Procter in Cincinnati. “Making your current clothes look newer longer, cleaner longer, fresher longer, is important.”
The goal is “having a sense of pride and dignity when you walk out the door that what you wear is clean,” Ms. Watson said, so the campaign seeks to persuade consumers they “don’t have to go out and buy a new white T-shirt when there’s one detergent that’s going to keep it really clean day after day.”
At Procter, Ms. Watson acknowledged, “we here analyze, and overanalyze, the importance of whiteness, brightness, stain removal” when it comes to consumers choosing among detergents, but they “don’t think about it in those terms.”
So “rather than saying, ‘This is dirty; now it’s clean,’ ” Ms. Watson said, the new campaign “is expressing it in a different way: ‘You rock what you love to wear. We’ll be behind the scenes keeping it clean.’ ”
Eight agencies are working on the campaign, among them Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe, for the advertising.
Research among consumers to determine the direction of the campaign was initiated “at the beginning of when the economy started going bad,” said Wanda Pogue, senior vice president and global planning director at Saatchi & Saatchi, and those interviewed spoke of how they had “stopped eating out and buying new clothes.” ‘
