Dryel takes new tact in
advertising
The latest print advertisements for the
home drycleaning kit Dryel are part of a kinder, gentler ad
campaign by Proctor & Gamble.
Since its inception in 1999, Dryel has
faced a rocky road in its advertising efforts, trying to find a
profitable niche in the consumer market while being mired in
controversy for its ad campaigns.
One early ad featured a slogan that
claimed “Suddenly Dryclean Only…
Isn’t.” The International Fabricare Institute
immediately protested, believing that the ads erroneously
implied that “Dryclean Only” labels were in danger
of being repealed. They filed a complaint with the Federal
Trade Commission and the National Advertising Council of Better
Business Bureaus and launched a counter punch campaign with
hanger tags and ad slicks that unfavorably compared
Dryel’s performance to professional drycleaning.
P&G remained determined to focus on
its target demographic, working women between 20 and 50, and
continued to run ads depicting women who were frustrated by
trying to find time to go to the cleaners. In its first five
months, Dryel had earned about $45. million in sales and looked
well on its way to a first-year pace of $100 million.
Toward the end of the year 2000, however,
sales slipped considerably and P&G opted to try a different
marketing approach featuring magazine and newspaper ads with
business-dressed women working physically laborious jobs.
In one ad, a nicely dressed woman was
shown attempting to cut down a tree. The copy below her read:
“Lumber Jackie. If a man’s jaw drops in the middle
of the forest, does it make a sound? Jackie always wears what
she wants, buys what she wants, and always looks hot to chop.
Timber.” A similar ad displayed a woman in an evening
dress milking a cow on a farm.
The consumer group Media Watch, which was
founded in 1984 to combat stereotypical images in the media,
aggressively protested the ads, citing that they portrayed
women as foolish because they wore work attire inappropriate
for their jobs.
The group went so far as to launch a
boycott against P&G on its web site at www.mediawatch.com/boycottdryel.html.
Toward the end of last year, Dryel
continued to struggle when P&G announced that they would
drop it out of store shelves in the European market because the
product failed to meet expectations. P&G’s initial
market projections of $300 million in domestic annual sales
proved to be too high. In fact, the combined sales total of all
four home drycleaning kits on the U.S. market — Dryel,
Clorox FreshCare, Custom Cleaner and Dry Cleaner’s Secret
— earned only $77 million for the second market year of
home drycleaning kits.
After cutting off the overseas markets,
P&G promised to focus its marketing attention toward the
U.S. market and hinted that another print ad campaign would be
launched late in 2001 in magazines such as People.
The new campaign
The most recent magazine ads for Dryel
show a new zippered fabric bag under the text: “Finally.
A cute bag to go with your favorite dry clean only
outfit.”
Underneath the picture, more text states:
“A new, uniquely shaped bag. A new Dryel cloth. Discover
new, improved Dryel, and keep your clothes fresh and clean with
steam.” The advertisement is somewhat unclear on the new
and improved abilities of the product, but it does claim that
the new cleansing cloth “goes to work, releasing steam
that gently cleans, freshens and removes odors.” The ad
also notes that garments are protected inside the bag so there
are “no problems with shrinking and fading.” So
far, the ad campaign has yet to stimulate any negative
responses from any drycleaning associations or consumer groups,
but it remains to be seen if the new marketing direction will
stimulate more sales for the shrinking home drycleaning market.
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