GreenEarth Affiliate Targets Millennials
Tide Cleaners will roll out to 2,000 locations and target millennials and Gen Z’ers who don’t like doing laundry
Tide plans to double pickup locations to more than 2,000 nationally by next year after having run its wash-dry-and-fold service in recent years in Chicago, Washington, Nashville, Dallas, Philadelphia and Denver. The expansion will come unfold through adding new cities (including its hometown Cincinnati) and more drop-off locations in existing ones says Sundar Raman, vice president of P&G North American Fabric Care.
Drop-off locations include Tide Dry Cleaners stores, apartment buildings and lockers in retail stores and other locations. Tide Cleaners also encompasses Tide University operations on several U.S. campuses.
P&G first launched a test of the Tide Spin laundry service in Chicago in late 2015 with its own custom mobile app, then acquired rival Chicago-based service Pressbox last year. It now uses the latter’s app as the mobile backbone for Tide Cleaners.
Saatchi & Saatchi has created a video to back the national rollout with the tagline: “Life, Not Laundry.” But Tide Cleaners marketing will be a largely local, guerilla affair leaning heavily on direct mail, e-mail, digital, posters or showing up with drop lockers in grocery stores and other places to get the word out. The focus is on “performance marketing,” Raman says, since this gets Tide much deeper into a direct-to-consumer business.
“Now for the first time Tide will have a name and face for people interacting with the brand,” Raman says, “not just a bottle on the Walmart shelf.”
Digital automation—with bar-coded laundry bags and identifying chips in dry-clean-only garments, and an app that lets people track laundry throughout the process—is another hallmark of Tide Cleaners.
The national rollout marks a full embrace of a service model P&G has toyed with the whole millennium, starting with an Atlanta test of Juvian concierge laundry service in 2000. Many of Tide’s 140 dry cleaners (up more than fourfold in three years and from 100 just since October) offer wash-and-fold laundry service too.