By Bob Barrett

It would have been easy to pull the plug. In early 2008, as The Dial Corporation was readying the launch of its Purex Complete® 3-in-1TM Laundry Sheets, a premium product, the economy was heading into a downward cycle, unemployment was high and climbing, and consumers had already become sensitive to pricing. Still, the company made a bold decision to move forward with the largest product launch in its history. “[The state of the economy] was one of the most definitive questions and concerns we had,” says Brad Casper, president and CEO of the Scottsdale, Ariz., maker of a wide range of well-known consumer products. “As the recession started to take grip last year and we knew that things were heading south, we wondered ourselves whether or not this initiative would be as robust in a downturn as it was when things were going well.”

Today, the answer is clear: Dial’s $2 million investment in Purex 3-in-1 Complete Laundry Sheets resulted in $100 million in sales, surpassing expectations by 70 percent, according to the company. That’s the kind of ROI that puts a smile on CEO Casper’s face, elevates his already-high appreciation for the role of marketing in driving growth, and renews his contention that “You can make $1 look like $10 if you are creative and think about your target audience and how you want to meet them,” as he stated in April at the ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference.

Seven months later, Casper once again addressed ANA members, as he took to the stage on the final day of the Masters of Marketing Conference. Casper shared more on the success of the Purex 3-in-1 campaign in a recent interview, when he was joined by Greg Tipsord, senior vice president for Dial’s laundry care business.

An Integrated Mix of Old and New

Tipsord describes an integrated, 360-degree campaign that included a mix of traditional tactics (TV spots that scored higher than anything the company had ever produced, aggressive public relations that netted coverage in women’s publications and business-oriented media such as FOX News and The Wall Street Journal, and innovative in-store marketing) and non-traditional strategies (social media to drive word of mouth, brand endorsers called Purex Insiders, “coming soon” messages on the caps of Purex-branded products, and cause marketing). With the TV spots as the centerpiece, Tipsord says the campaign elements were carefully integrated to “communicate and educate consumers what this product truly was and did, because it represents such a change in how they use and interact with laundry detergent.”

Casper took it a step further. “As good as several other Dial programs and campaigns have been in the last three to four years,” says Casper, who was a brand manager at Procter & Gamble 20 years ago and became CEO of Dial in 2005, “this had more touch points, more dollars, and more creativity in reaching our target audience than anything I’ve been affiliated with.”

When Benefit Outweighs Cost

There are many lessons to be learned from the Purex 3-in-1 launch, but Casper says perhaps the most valuable is that consumers, like corporations, will look beyond price alone and consider cost-benefit scenarios when making purchases that deliver value. “At times we convinced ourselves that Purex, as a value detergent, has to be at a certain cost per ounce or cost per load,” he says. “And what this product was consistently telling us is that we had more elasticity than maybe what we gave our brand credit for and that how value is defined is not limited to the cost per ounce but to the benefit received.” With that in mind, Casper, Tipsord, and others at Dial looked beyond price and focused on the product’s ability to simplify the chore of doing laundry. Each sheet provides a load’s worth of detergent, softener, and anti-static — all in one powerful, scented sheet that is easily transferred with clothes from the washer to the dryer.

“The whole idea of simplification is hard for people to see in terms of how much it is worth, but they saw it in this sheet,” says Casper, carefully relaying a scenario that has a mother balancing a baby on her hip and a phone underneath her neck but still not struggling to put the clothing in the machine. There’s no “hoisting a heavy jug of detergent and filling the cap according to a line that she may or may not be able to see,” he points out. “That simplification of the task was worth more than the price we were asking them to pay.”

Stretching the Dollar

With that kind of insight, Dial has been able to keep pace with competitors that have significantly larger marketing budgets, including Procter & Gamble. The company, which is a subsidiary of Germany-based Henkel AG & Co., is succeeding through a value play of it own when it comes to marketing. As an example, Casper cites the company’s strategy of recruiting and enlisting 200 Purex Insiders as a central component of a broader social media strategy. “That was new for us, and it’s the best case of where $1 starts to look like $10,” Casper says, noting that the insiders became mavens, advocates, and bloggers who were tremendously effective in spreading the word and putting forth the perspective of a Purex user. “If you get a committed advocate, like a Purex Insider, they really can move people and they speak the language of our target audience because they were moms with cleaning challenges and laundry challenges.”

Tipsord adds that Dial continues to glean key insights from Purex Insiders. “We have gone back to those consumers and continued to talk to them about the brand, give them other ideas in terms of how this brand can make their life simpler and better, and we continue to see benefits from that,” he says.

The company also took a partnership approach when it came to collaborating with retailers, according to Tipsord, including in-store marketing. “Part of the success with our selling and the in-store support that happened so early was that we partnered with our retailers early on in the process,” he says. “We were sharing this product with them for a couple years back. As we got more to where we knew we would be able to commercialize it and launch it, we had a timeline set up, we were able to really dig in, understand their key ways of merchandising, and gain their buy-in up front. That really allowed us to make this an A-class launch across a multitude of retailers.”

Ready, Set…Disaster Check…Launch

As careful as they were in orchestrating this launch, and as confident as they had become based on extensive testing, Casper and Tipsord both admit that the economy threatened to delay the proceedings. After completing what Casper calls a “disaster check” early in 2008, the company went ahead and did another as it prepared to move forward. The conclusion? “Confirmation from the consumer that we had a really distinct product,” recalls Casper. “I think it speaks volumes about the power of innovation, the power of design. At the end of the day, whether consumers are paying 12 cents a load or 25 cents a load, it’s a fraction of what they pay for a cup of coffee at McDonald's or Starbucks.”

Tipsord took comfort in the extensive consumer testing, all of which returned “extremely high value readings,” mostly attributable to simplification and the fact that the product was a single replacement for three others. “Purex 3-in-1 really provided a way to simplify the laundry process,” Tipsord says. “The key consumer insight here was that the laundry process had become more complex than it ever had been before, and there were just so many choices of so many different products out there. This made it just simpler and easier for consumers to get the laundry done. And that was the inherent and very large benefit and driver of value.”

Tipsord also recalls that consumers were savvy enough to recognize that they didn’t need to buy three different products at the store, lugging them home in heavy bottles. “So there was a process improvement there and, at the same time, there actually was a cost savings when you look at the cost of using three separate products compared to one sheet. So there are inherent value benefits throughout this product in terms of price, in terms of process improvement, and in terms of just overall simplification. And we came to see that in every single consumer test we did.”

Casper called the launch a team effort, with marketing playing a key role — as it should, he says, in driving growth for a company, especially in recessionary times. “I do expect marketing to be the lead dog in this fight but it won’t go into the fight by itself and can’t achieve success unless it gets great support from three primary functions — sales, supply chain, and R&D.” The Purex 3-in-1 launch, in particular, best exemplifies what you can achieve when all team members work together, according to Casper. “Never had we had so much synchronization with the same simple messaging about our three benefits in one,” he says. “That’s when you get synergy upon synergy upon synergy and $1 looks like $10 and $10 looks like $100. That’s what really accounted for one of the fastest starts and build ups of a new product in this category that we’ve seen in this decade.”

Bob Barrett is a former editor of ANA Magazine.