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Swiffer Helps With 'Bite-Sized' Cleaning

Sometimes, when you hit early adulthood, your perspective on the world and how it works changes.  

As the brand turns 18, Procter & Gamble’s Swiffer recognizes that adult consumers would rather their lives didn’t revolve around cleaning (though they still want to live in a clean home). In a new marketing campaign, the brand notes that you don’t always have to be cleaning to have a life.

“We found that modern consumers are cleaning more frequently than years ago, but the majority of this cleaning is being done in ‘bite-sized chunks’ — a quick sweep while the coffee is brewing, squeezing it in before taking the kids, to soccer. We call this maintenance or in-between cleaning,” Kevin Wenzel, associate brand director for North American surface care at Procter & Gamble, tells Marketing Daily. “We want consumers to take away that with Swiffer, you can get the clean you want in the time you have.”

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Two new television commercials — built around the theme, “If you’ve got a life, you gotta Swiffer” — depict these every day messes through the use of relatable stories and familiar music. In one spot, set to Blondie’s “One Way Or Another,” a girl dressed as a princess chases a frog through her house tracking direct everywhere. The message: “If you’ve got a princess, you gotta Swiffer.” A second spot shows a boy cutting the hair of many of his stuffed animals (and sister), leaving the hair all over the floors. (“If you’ve got a stylist, you’ve gotta Swiffer,” reads the onscreen text.)

In previous campaigns, the brand surprised families with a box of Swiffer products to show how easy it was to use them to keep clean. While this new effort continues the idea that Swiffer products are easy to use, they’re being positioned more as a “maintenance” product, rather than one that can replace traditional deep cleaning tools, Wenzel says. 

“While Swiffer can deliver a deep clean, we’ve learned that families today are doing more maintenance cleaning, which allows them to spend less time when they go to do their deep clean or enables them to put off their deep cleaning longer,” he says. 

The new effort will run nationally in the U.S. on television. The brand will also celebrate its 18th birthday with a birthday party later this month and continued messaging about Swiffer can make life in the adult world easier.

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