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The product that worked and didn't sell

Why customers who don't feel a problem won't buy the cure, and how Febreze found the moment they did · 14 min

A tidy house outside Phoenix, nine cats, and a woman who cannot smell them. Procter & Gamble had a spray that killed any smell, and nobody bought it. What the team found in strangers' living rooms, a stove trial in India that went the other way, and one test to run on five customers before Friday.

Takeaways

  • By the account of the reporter Charles Duhigg, who interviewed the team, Febreze flopped in its test cities in the mid-nineteen nineties because people with bad smells in their homes could no longer smell them. It began to sell when Procter and Gamble moved it to a moment people did feel: the end of cleaning. The flop and the home visits rest on Duhigg's reporting alone.
  • In a randomised trial with about two thousand six hundred households in rural Odisha, India, a lab-proven cleaner cooking stove, almost free, was used for fewer meals each year and brought no measurable health gain over four years. Households did not feel the problem the stove solved.
  • Something to try: the moment test. Before Friday, ask five possible customers when they last noticed the problem you solve, and what they did right then.

Chapters

  1. The house with nine cats0:18
  2. Sell the problem harder1:43
  3. The woman who sprayed the bed3:11
  4. Felt problems and technical problems5:05
  5. Same product, different moment8:07
  6. The moment test10:18
  7. The answer12:00

References

  1. Duhigg, C. (The New York Times Magazine; text as reproduced on the blog 'Interesting Texts Preserved For Posterity') — How Companies Learn Your Secrets(2012)
  2. Duhigg, C. (author's site) — The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
  3. NPR, Morning Edition (R. Montagne with C. Duhigg) — How You Can Harness 'The Power Of Habit'(2012)
  4. Isegoria (blog quoting The Power of Habit) — No one craves scentlessness(2021)
  5. Marketing Week — P&G tests 'fabric refresher' in UK(1997)
  6. Global Cosmetic Industry (GCI Magazine) — P&G's Febreze Celebrates 10 Years(2008)
  7. Baker, R. (Marketing Week) — P&G adds Febreze to $1bn brand portfolio(2011)
  8. Babin, J. (Marketplace) — Procter & Gamble's Febreze has smell of success(2011)
  9. Hanna, R., Duflo, E. & Greenstone, M. (NBER Working Paper 18033) — Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves(2012)
  10. Hanna, R., Duflo, E. & Greenstone, M. (American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 8(1); DSpace@MIT record) — Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves(2016)
  11. Duflo, E., Greenstone, M., Hanna, R. & Walsh, C. (VoxDev) — Improved cooking stoves in India: Evaluating long-run impacts(2019)
  12. Dupas, P. (Econometrica 82(1), pp. 197–228) — Short-Run Subsidies and Long-Run Adoption of New Health Products: Evidence From a Field Experiment(2014)
  13. J-PAL (evaluation summary of Dupas's Kenya bed-net experiment) — The Role of Exposure, Social Networks and Marketing Messages in Households' Willingness to Pay for Malaria Prevention in Kenya