• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, April 13, 2010

People with cats and dogs spend much of their lives removing hair from furniture and clothing -- and for some who have discovered Pledge Fabric Sweeper for Pet Hair, launched last year, they thought they landed in hair-removal heaven.

Brand evangelists, right? Except that many of these fans were stunned that S.C. Johnson, a company that has made a big deal of its efforts to improve its environmental profile, would make the product disposable, not reusable. And many other consumers -- the ones with the hairiest pets, we're guessing -- were shocked that the Racine, Wis.-based company expected them to shell out so much (around $5) for so little de-furring.

Quickly, these fans/malcontents wrote product reviews and Web postings with detailed ideas of how to reuse the product, anyway. (At instructables.com, shoppers can even find a detailed photo illustration.)

"Um, WHAT?," complains one Amazon reviewer. "Are the people at Pledge that far out of sync with the state of affairs in the world today???" Groused another: "In my house, it lasted about 2 minutes and would end up costing us a fortune. I very carefully popped off one end of one of the rollers. We cut a U-shaped slit in the top of the clear plastic area and can open and close it to empty it and re-use."

For smart companies, user comments like these can work "as one big focus group," says Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message. "This kind of feedback tells a company that if they want to focus on being more green, they could be more aligned with their customers, and take these ideas back to the design team."

And in fact, that's what S.C. Johnson says it's doing. A spokesperson tells Marketing Daily that it has posted this statement in a Q&A section on its Web site: "Like you, we are committed to making good choices and looking for ways to reduce the environmental footprint of our products, including the Pledge Fabric Sweeper for Pets.

"In fact, future generations of this product may be re-usable -- and we'll take your feedback to the teams working on finding a solution. You might be interested to know that the Pledge Fabric Sweeper for Pets is made from recycled materials and picks up as much pet hair as 145 paper sheets of lint roller."

This certainly isn't the first time that crafty environmentalists have fought back, even in this product category: Treehugger.com, an influential environmental blog, ran a post back in 2007 called "How to hack your Swiffer," which gives directions for knitting your own replacement pads for the popular Procter & Gamble product; in 2008, the Consumerist ran a post called "13 Ways to Make Your Own Swiffer Pads."

But companies are taking a big chance when they ignore these responses, says Huba, who is also a principal at Ant's Eye View, an Austin, Tex.-based consulting company, and decide to dismiss such comments as a cranky fringe.

"We call them the 1 percenters. But these 1% who are creating this kind of content about your product have worldwide distribution, and what they think is very spreadable -- by video, by tweet. Look at how quickly people rallied to object to those Motrin mom ads back in 2008."

Ultimately, Huba says, consumers will forgive companies if they believe they are truly working to improve products and transparency. "And of course," she adds, "the real enemy of all marketing is obscurity. At least people are talking about the product, and using it."