Mega Tare

The Tricky Business of Rolling Out a New Toilet Paper

By Tara Parker-Pope

01/12/1998

The Wall Street Journal

Page B1

(Copyright (c) 1998, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

Marketers of bathroom tissue have used everything from puffy clouds to cuddly babies to advertise their products. Now Kimberly-Clark wants to talk about the real reason people use toilet paper.

Testing the limits of how much consumers want to hear about what goes on in the bathroom, the maker of Kleenex Cottonelle is spending $100 million to promote the brand as the toilet paper that wipes better than regular tissue, thanks to a new "rippled texture." New ads begin today and ten million free samples will be hung on doorknobs in the eastern U.S., where the product will first appear.

The new texture is "designed to leave you feeling clean and fresh," promise the ads from WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather in Chicago. Another ad claims that "discriminating toilet paper users" prefer the tissue because it "left them feeling cleaner than the leading brand." The name, Kleenex Cottonelle, will remain the same, as will the price. The tagline: "Your fresh approach to toilet paper."

Talking about the way a toilet paper performs is a major departure for a category that for years has focused on squeezable softness, quilted softness and cottony softness. Are consumers who remember seeing Mr. Whipple squeeze the Charmin ready to hear even a hint of what he did with the product?

Kimberly-Clark is convinced that they are. And the ads call it by the name most consumers use: toilet paper. This is, after all, familiar territory for the maker of Kotex, the first feminine-care product ever advertised. The company also pushed the boundaries of personal-care advertising when in 1981 its Depends brand launched the first national-television advertising for an adult-incontinence product. More recently, the company has tacitly acknowledged the unpleasant task of cleaning baby bottoms as it boasts that its Huggies baby wipes...