Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

by Sean Ellis

Procter & Gamble’s Febreze, for example, was an honest-to-goodness breakthrough product: a chemical mixture that truly eliminates odors rather than just masking them with a pleasant scent. So when P&G launched it, they understandably touted this unique feature in their messaging, with the line “Febreze cleans bad smells out of fabrics for good.”8 Yet sales remained sluggish until P&G realized, through market research that included videotaping how avid buyers use the product, that the better positioning was as another product to use as part of your regular cleaning routine, in part to fill a freshly cleaned room with a pleasing scent.9 So P&G added scent and then repositioned the product in a major ad campaign showing women loving the way it smelled, and using language such as “for freshness that surrounds you like never before.”