American Standard — Flushing Away the Competition

Here’s a challenge for you — how do you differentiate a toilet?

American Standard had been tormented by its arch-enemy, Kohler, for many years. Kohler had aggressively positioned its plumbing fixtures with the famous ad campaign “The Bold Look of Kohler.” This brilliantly positioned Kohler as a fashion brand in an otherwise highly functional category.

But hold your horses. Our ethnographic research uncovered a strategic opening for American Standard. It turns out that people (especially moms) were less concerned about toilet design and more about toilet performance.“I don’t give a damn how nice it looks when it's flooding my bathroom” said one frustrated mother of three.

Enter the American Standard Champion toilet — engineered to be the world’s best-flushing toilet. We rolled up our sleeves and put this bad boy through its paces at the American Standard engineering lab. It flushed ping pong balls with ease and sponge toys with aplomb. But we needed a “Wow Factor” to really show off the power of the new flushing system. Out came a radical idea: “let’s try to flush golf balls!”

We started with a sleeve of three golf balls (Titleists, as I recall). Gone, no problem. We moved up to half a dozen, no problem. One dozen, no problem. This was getting crazy. We got all the way to 29 golf balls before flushing failure, and a breakthrough new campaign was born: “Can your toilet flush 29 golf balls?”

This campaign shook the toilet world to its very core. Buckets of golf balls stood proudly next to the Champion Toilet displays on the shelves in home improvement stores. In certain select markets, you could even pour 29 golf balls into a flushing demonstration tank in the aisles of Home Depot.

The results were mind-boggling. It was the most successful product launch in the 132-year history of the company and the Champion became its best-selling toilet in the world — at three times the price of its previous best-selling model. The golf ball campaign won an international Gold Effie for proven campaign effectiveness. To this day, many years later, people still ask for the toilet that can flush 29 golf balls.

Let’s talk about how Cult Marketing can help flush away your competition.