• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, April 14, 2011

Maytag is introducing a new brand campaign that it hopes will warm up its old-reliable image, while at the same time building on its never-breaks-down brand equity. The famed Maytag Repairman gets a cameo in the TV spots, but the focus is now on contents of the machine, themed "What's Inside Matters."

Ads show a family quilt getting dragged from picnic to campout to station wagon to laundry room, or a rag doll getting roughed up at a tea party. "We wanted to shift the focus to the mundane urgencies that people connect with dependability," Jim Paul, VP/creative director for Arc Worldwide, the Leo Burnett agency that created the campaign for Maytag, tells Marketing Daily. "The ads emphasize not only the dependable parts Maytag puts in its machines, but the importance of the things people put inside as well."

The brand, which is more than 100 years old, built its reputation on that dependability, he says, long characterized by its lonely repairman. "We felt it was time to expand on the parts and pieces story, which is essentially very male, and warm it up, to put a more relevant, human spin on that dependability. It's been a masculine brand in a feminine category. And while we're not running away from the testosterone that comes from focusing on the reliability of the machine and its parts, we wanted to broaden it."