Are you swimming in the wrong direction?
In Switzerland, in summer, some people don’t commute home by car or train.
They pack their clothes, phone, and laptop into a waterproof bag…
Then they jump into the river and let the current carry them home.
But this only works if home is with the flow.
If you live upstream, you’re in for the longest, most pointless swim of your life.
A lot of brands are essentially doing this, though.
They’ve ended up positioning their product and/or brand at the wrong audience.
Or they're talking about how they're solving problems nobody thinks they need solved.
So every bit of marketing and growth feels like they're swimming against the tide.
And the best example of a brand realising this is Febreze.
P&G launched it as an odour eliminator.
The pitch was: “Get rid of bad smells”.
They assumed the buyers would be people with smelly homes.
People with pets, people who smoke, etc.
But it flopped.
Badly.
So they did some proper customer research.
They went into the homes of people who were buying it.
And they went into homes of their target audience that weren’t.
They watched what people did.
And they found something crazy.
The people who needed it most often couldn’t smell their own house.
One example was a person with 9 cats.
The smell in the house was terrible.
But they thought it was fine.
Then the researchers identified the pattern.
The people who loved Febreze weren’t using it to fix a smell problem.
They used it after they’d cleaned.
Like the final step.
A little cherry on top.
P&G quickly pivoted their positioning and leaned into the “finishing-touch moment”.
They even tweaked the formula to add more fragrance.
They stopped selling “emergency odour control”.
And started selling “your room is finally finished”.
Sales doubled within two months.
They stopped swimming upstream… and went with the current.
Yesterday, I sent you a resource to help you identify your customers’ intent when shopping on your site.
And a Senior eCommerce Manager at a very big brand gave it a go and loved the insights.
Caption:
If you missed it, here it is again 👉 Customer Intent Mapping GPT
Chat soon,
Peter
