If you’re anything like us – aka, obsessed with brand marketing strategy – you may have noticed that Cascade’s dish detergent ads look a little different in the last few years.
Instead of this:
Tagline: “Choose the detergent that lets your dishwasher do the dishes.”
Cascade has been running ads like this:
Tagline: “The surprising way to save water.”
So why has Cascade stopped targeting lower-quality dish detergent brands – and started telling us to run the dishwasher more often?
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1. Cascade doesn’t have a lot of room to grow in their market.
Cascade brings in $900M in annual sales and controls ⅔ of the U.S. dishwasher detergent market. That’s not much room to expand, and it’s hard to steal market share from low-cost brands like Kirkland and Great Value.
Plus, as Scott Galloway has pointed out, differentiation is difficult as an everyday CPG brand. Consumers are most influenced by price, not brand – meaning you’ll switch from Colgate to Crest if it’s on sale.
“The entire CPG industry is struggling with this, because all of their products are relevant. We all need to wash our clothes, brush our teeth, and use mouthwash. But [brands in those categories] have trouble convincing you that they’re different.” - Prof. Scott Galloway
2. But they do have an unexpected competitor: the sink.
30% of people use their dishwashers once (or less) a week, and 17 million households don’t use their dishwashers at all.
(To those people, we say: What are you doing?!)
Instead of trying to claw back that ⅓ market share from a sea of competitors, Cascade decided to tackle the bigger problem: people doing the dishes by hand.
Starting in 2000, they’ve run “save water” commercials, which ramped up in 2020 with the release of the “Do It Every Night” campaign (seen above).
“We call it waking up sleepy dishwashers.” - Marchoe Northern, P&G’s North America home care unit.
3. Cascade tackled negative associations with dishwashing to drive up usage.
So how do you get people to use the dishwasher if they’re used to doing dishes by hand?
The first way: Tackle the negative associations with the category
First, Cascade tackled the myth that using the dishwasher frequently uses a lot of water (and therefore a lot of money).
P&G scientist Morgan Eberhard told Bloomberg that many Americans don’t understand their dishwashers because “they’re a black box.” Many people think the dishwasher fills with water while it runs like a washing machine does.
Cascade’s message: Dishwashers DON’T waste water. They use 10% of the water that handwashing does.
The second way: Appeal to people’s identities as environmental stewards
Concerns about water scarcity are high, with 70% citing it as a major environmental concern.
Cascade’s campaign makes sure to note that running the dishwasher isn’t about saving money – it’s about saving the environment. This appeals to consumers’ identities as environmental stewards and gives them a virtuous reason to run the dishwasher over doing the dishes by hand.
“We used to feel guilty about running the dishwasher before it was full, so we’d end up washing dishes by hand, waiting for the dishwasher to fill up. Now that we know that we can save up to 100 gallons of water a week by skipping the sink and running our dishwasher at the end of the day, we’re doing it more often to help save water.” - Sarah Michelle Geller, Cascade spokesperson
The result: The brand has reported a 25%+ increase in weekly dishwasher loads since the 2020 campaign.
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