In his book “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg recounts a fascinating zero-to-hero story…
When Procter & Gamble released Febreze in 1993, their execs were dreaming of how they would spend their bonuses – exotic sports cars, private jet charters, beachfront homes.
They spent millions of dollars and years of research creating a product that eliminated odors – genius!
Then the sales numbers came in, and brought with it a sad reality.
Febreze fell flat on its face.
No one bought it.
Huh??
A product that actually works, fills a real need, sold through thousands of distribution channels, and it BOMBED??
Yup.
After they licked their wounds, the P&G team took a look at what went wrong.
The people that DID buy it loved it and said that it worked, so the product wasn’t the problem.
If that was the case, then it must have been the way they were selling it.
The initial marketing campaign for Febreze touted it as an odor eliminator, a solution for an acute household problem.
But after more research, they realized that the customers who loved it didn’t use it for that purpose.
Instead, they used it as a way to “finish” their current cleaning routines.
That is, they were already in the habit of cleaning, but just sprayed the Febreze as a way to mark for themselves “this room is done”.
So P&G rolled out a new campaign.
Rather than showing it as a way to remove odors, essentially trying to teach consumers to do something new (eliminate odors with our product), they instead showed Febreze as a way to complete a routine they were ALREADY doing.
The result?
Sales doubled within two months.
Today, along with several spinoff products, the Febreze brand rakes in over $1 billion annually.
And all this success comes not because they had a superior product…
…but because they focused on a smart marketing apprach: piggyback off of what your customer is already doing rather than forcing a new behavior.
That’s one of the reasons I am a fanatic about email marketing.
Some mock and say it’s “soo 2001″, abandoning it for sexy, social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest (yup, another one).
“I’m gonna get my customers to follow me on Facebook!”
Look, I’ve got nothing against tweeting and liking and posting – I do my fair share.
But here’s the thing… there are 1900 times more email accounts as Facebook and Twitter accounts combined.
And daily post totals on Facebook and Twitter add up to only 0.2% of the messages sent and shared via email – a whopping 294 billion, which DOES NOT include spam.
So I’m just following the data and piggybacking on email’s coattails.
If you want to learn to do the same, tune in for my upcoming free training on email marketing.
I’ll have the date squared away shortly, so keep an eye out for the announcement.
And if you’ve got a burning question you’d like me to address on the training, simply go to the survey link below and submit it there.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MC7Y6B6
Cheers to your success!
Philipp
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