How to Become the Dominant Brand in Your Market Using Psychology

In the early 2000s, Procter & Gamble, a titan in the consumer goods industry, recognized the need for better products in the cleaning aisle.

As a long-time holding company for brands in the consumer goods space, they already understood that traditional cleaning tools (like mops and brooms) were not meeting the evolving needs of consumers and wanted to bring something entirely new to the market.

But Procter & Gamble had a problem...they couldn't go to market with just any new cleaning product. It had to be something that would stand out from every other cleaning product in the aisle -- otherwise it wouldn't stick.

To tackle this challenge, Procter & Gamble enlisted the expertise of a design and innovation consultancy called Continuum. Continuum conducted some simple behavior research for P&G, and found a pretty massive (and completely overlooked) insight that changed the entire cleaning industry almost overnight.

What did Continuum find that helped Procter & Gamble dominate the cleaning aisle?

Let's get into it...

Discovering the Source Problem

From its humble beginnings as a solution to a (very strange) problem, Swiffer has totally changed how we deal with household cleaning.

What started as a simple concept – a wet towel on a stick – has exploded into a massive cultural phenomenon, fundamentally reshaping the way we perceive one of the worst cleaning tasks on our list:

Mopping.

Most brands, regardless of wither they're DTC or retail, spend an inordinate amount of time meticulously researching their customer's problems.

Thousands of hours are spent running surveys, capturing customer feedback, downloading comments, analyzing conversations, and compiling data.

It's a bit bonkers considering 100% of the data we're looking at is past-tense...😬

(Note: I'm not saying we should ditch data entirely, it's a valuable resource for gaining insights we might not otherwise have access to. But I'm beginning to doubt how much of our massive amount of data is actually viable, let alone useful...)

Now back to Swiffer...

The cleaning product market was already saturated with practical, budget-friendly mops, yet not one had honed in on a glaringly obvious issue that was happening after the product was used.

During their research, Continuum spent a good amount of time watching how their customers used their mops.

In one session, the team noticed that people were spending as much time cleaning their cleaning tools as they were cleaning their floors.

No other brand had noticed this behavior take place...because they never stopped to look for it.

This one simple revelation underscored a significant gap in the market – the need for a faster, more convenient cleaning solution:

“Continuum had created a new problem: how to provide a better cleaning tool than a mop, with less time spent cleaning. The team used that knowledge to design a new cleaning tool: essentially a wet towel on a stick that could be thrown away once it was soiled.” - Barkus, 99u.​

Procter & Gamble took what Continuum found and went on to produce a full line of highly successful products under the new name "Swiffer".

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Becoming the Dominant Brand

Fast forward 24 years and Swiffer is still one of the biggest brands in the cleaning aisle and has started to dominate other spaces within its industry.

But here's the thing: Swiffer's success isn't just luck...

DTC, B2B, and SaaS brands can easily replicate what Continuum did for P&G, and it's not even hard. Whether you're a founder, a media buyer, a creative strategist, or a marketer, you can uncover hidden opportunities, just like Continuum did.

All you gotta do is watch.

How to Become the Dominant Brand in Your Market:

To help discover untapped opportunities, we have to do something that may feel a bit foreign to us: we need to go beyond the first problem we find.

Had Continuum chosen the first problem they encountered with P&G's customer base (i.e.: "My floors are dirty and I need them clean.") they might have suggested P&G produce yet another super fancy mop.

But that's not what the customer needed.

To figure out which problems were most important, Continuum started with a simple hypothesis and two simple questions:

1. How are our customers currently using products in the market?
2. What issues are they facing with their current favorite products?

These two questions might seem obvious to you, but most markers will miss the mark entirely when trying to answer them.

Traditional marketers always look for un-obvious answers to their customer's problems, but the best opportunities are usually the ones sitting in plain sight.

To become the dominate brand within your own market, you need to find the problems that are obvious - problems that are:

• Simple
• Consistently frustrating
• And clear

Then answer them.

This applies to everything: building ads, creating new products, upgrading your website...everything. Because there's no better way to blow past your competitors than becoming the brand who sees what their customers are experiencing and fixes it.

To start:

1. Book a call with a customer. Even if you have to bribe them with free product, you can't replicate the benefits of speaking to a real-live human with an online form. Get them on the phone, and be prepared to listen, not sell.
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2. Don't ask them what their biggest problem is -- ask them how they use the product. We all want to jump straight to the point, but there's strategy in starting slow. Ask your customers how they use the product. Get them to tell you the entire story: where did they buy it? How did they bring it home? Where did they put it after that? Where does it get stored? When does it get used? Who do they use it with? What happens next? Give them space to answer each question for as long as they want.

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