Brand: Charmin
Execution: Online, iPhone Applicantion
Target: Mobile Bottoms
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
Following its longstanding theme of using experiential marketing to help people find good toilets, Procter & Gamble brand Charmin has introduced a website and iPhone application that allows users to locate a free toilet anywhere in the world using Google Maps.  The application is GPS-enabled on the iPhone 3G.

What Works:
A simple, brilliant application that may be the best brand-sponsored widget ever created.  Procter & Gamble solves a real-world problem by cataloging the world’s free toilets and connecting this information to Google Maps which is already the preferred location application on the iPhone.

What Doesn’t:
Reports have not yet come in to assess the accuracy of the Charmin toilet database.  If the information is not kept accurate and up-to-date this little iPhone application could become a big pain in P&G’s behind.

Branding Bottom Line:
Charmin mapping the world’s free toilets is probably more useful than NASA charting the lunar surface.

A few quick thoughts for those of you still looking for the silver lining in the cloud of gloom that surrounds us …

1. Find your core customer  – This is trickier that it sounds because your core customers may not be the biggest spenders.  They are the people who attract others to your business, who are the “acid test” for your brand and who represent your brand in the minds of other customers.
2. Become a direct marketer – Test everything before you commit large dollars.  Instead of running a huge promotion, try it on a small group of customers and see how it does.  Send out an e-mail to 1,000 prospects before you reach out to 100,000.
3. Add value instead of cutting price – If your price is grossly unrealistic, lower it.  But first consider bundling in extra value at current prices.  Add samples, extra services or custom consultations.  You’ll increase the value of your offerings but help maintain your price points, which are harder to raise than cut.
4. Narrow your brand positioning – A recession is a tempting time to try to be all things to all people just to maintain revenue.  But people are drawn to expertise more than ever in a recession and nothing shows expertise better than a narrow focus.  Even if you don’t cut products or services, make sure your communications focus on your core expertise.
5. Look for opportunities – Save marketing dollars to spend opportunistically.  Large competitors in particular tend to make marketing cuts in big chunks and implement them very quickly.  This can leave bargains in media or even PR.  Watch your competitors closely to find the best moment to spend instead of pre-planning all of your expenditures.  If your business is seasonal, save extra money to capitalize on unexpected media or PR opportunities during your high season.

You may know the details by now (and if not see Jackie Huba, Susan Gunelius or Stuart Elliott at the NY Times for excellent recaps), but Tropicana has suffered a new media thrashing at the hands of brand advocates unhappy with the new packaging by The Arnell Group.The enthusiasts are correct here, the packaging does indeed look more generic than the familiar packaging it replaces.  The brand name is recessive and the product shot of the glass of orange juice stretched over two panels of the carton makes the product look like private label.  The new packaging is also less functional, as it is harder to identify the form (with or without pulp, with added calcium, etc) as that information was banished from the main panel to the top flap only.  Finally, in spite of Peter Arnell’s elaborate doubletalk, showing the juice on the package rather than the orange was a huge mistake for a brand whose primary competitive claim is that it is squeezed fresh from oranges and not made from concentrate.

The two more interesting questions from our point of view are:

1. When should I spend the money to redesign packaging?
2. How can I avoid a Tropicana fiasco with my own re-branding campaign?

Here are a few thoughts:

1. Rebrand when you have news – a significant product innovation or dramatic improvement is a good reason to rebrand
2. Rebrand if your market position changes – if a competitor threatens your brand positioning and you need to focus, narrow or shift the position
3. Rebrand if you have new, innovative packaging – a packaging innovation is a good time to rebrand or just refresh the packaging look
4. Refresh if you want to update the brand image – if the brand is stale and needs an update, make evolutionary changes to modernize the packaging

The Arnell Group would have served Pepsi and the Tropicana better to focus on refreshing the packaging rather than entirely rebranding it.   The Pepsi logo rebrand was no less pointless than the Tropicana packaging overhaul, but it will be far less damaging because Arnell merely refreshed the logo by tilting it and adding a bulge.

Part of the lesson here is that if you don’t really understand what a creative guy is telling you, there’s probably a reason for that.