Stanley Steemer International, Inc.

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Stanley Steemer International, Inc.

5500 Stanley Steemer Parkway
Dublin, Ohio 43016
USA
Telephone: (614) 764-2007
Fax: (614) 764-1506
Web site: www.stanleysteemer.com

LIVING BRINGS IT IN. WE TAKE IT OUT. CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

Stanley Steemer International, Inc., a carpet-cleaning service with franchises across the United States, began seeing sales declines in 2002. Wanting to change its marketing profile to address these declines as well as to integrate messages about new services beyond its carpet-cleaning business, the company asked agencies to submit pitches for a new campaign. Young & Laramore, based in Indianapolis, won the account with a proposal to move Stanley Steemer away from its previous positioning as a service to be used only when carpet was visibly stained. The resulting campaign, "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out," aimed to stimulate more frequent use of professional carpet-cleaning services.

With an estimated $20 million budget in its first year, the "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out" campaign targeted working women who were homeowners and parents and encouraged them to think about the overwhelming amount of hidden dirt in their homes. Television spots and print ads used humor and imagery that suggested the innocent ways in which adults, their children, and their pets routinely brought dirt from the outside world into their homes. Copy read by voice-over in the TV spots and appearing on the page in the print ads suggested, "Maybe cleaning your carpets once a year isn't enough." The campaign's tagline likewise underscored the ideas of blameless accumulation of dirt and the corresponding need for professional service.

Stanley Steemer not only reversed its sales decline during the first 16 months of the campaign but also saw an 11 percent increase, which many observers attributed to the repositioning accomplished by "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out." The campaign won a Gold EFFIE and was extended and adapted to additional Stanley Steemer service offerings in subsequent years.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Founded in 1947, Stanley Steemer grew consistently throughout the second half of the twentieth century to become America's leading professional carpet-cleaning service, with 270 franchises across the country and the best-established brand name in its business category. In 2002, while experiencing some of the first sales declines in its history, Stanley Steemer bolstered its core carpet-cleaning business with new services that included duct cleaning, tile and grout cleaning, and water removal. In July of that year, with an eye toward reviving sales and incorporating these new capabilities into its brand image, Stanley Steemer formally initiated a review of its advertising account. The company invited new agencies as well as its current national and franchise agencies to submit creative and strategic marketing ideas.

Stanley Steemer's advertising at both the national and the franchise levels, using the long-running tagline "Tough on dirt, gentle on carpet," had traditionally focused on images of dramatic stains and their removal. At the time of the account review, for instance, a national TV spot featured a young boy jumping on a plastic bottle of chocolate syrup atop a white carpet. Though images of Stanley Steemer employees and equipment easily vanquishing such stains positioned the company as an effective cleaning service, these images also gave the impression that such cleaning was only occasionally and in extreme circumstances truly necessary. The Indianapolis agency Young & Laramore won the Stanley Steemer account in August 2002 thanks to a strategy that effectively challenged this stain-based model for driving business.

TARGET MARKET

Stanley Steemer had long understood that its most consistent customers were women aged 35 to 65 who were married, owned their own homes, and were parents as well as pet owners. In crafting the new campaign, "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out," Young & Laramore used this target market as the starting point, but the agency found in its research that an overlapping group of women served as the most likely pool for generating new and consistent Stanley Steemer business. This group consisted of working women between the ages of 25 and 49 who were homeowners and parents.

These women were extremely busy, Young & Laramore observed, but cared deeply about keeping their homes clean for their families. They had become accustomed, however, perhaps partly because of the carpet-cleaning industry's reliance on stain-based advertising, to presume that they did not need to have their carpets professionally cleaned more than once a year or when there were visible stains. Young & Laramore thus set out to convince these women that their carpets needed regular cleaning, rather than only sporadic cleaning to remove stains. Young & Laramore found that, while 33 percent of its target claimed they had their carpets professionally cleaned once a year, the true figure was actually closer to 9 percent. This figure of 9 percent, however, well eclipsed the percentage of people in the population at large who were conscious of carpet cleaning.

COMPETITION

Among Stanley Steemer's national rivals during this time were ServiceMaster Clean and Chem-Dry. These companies operated with the same franchise-based model as Stanley Steemer, but unlike Stanley Steemer they typically advertised primarily on the local and regional levels. Stanley Steemer's national marketing profile, as engineered by its corporate office, was unique in the industry.

ServiceMaster Clean was part of a larger ServiceMaster family of brands that included Terminix, Merry Maids, TruGreen ChemLawn, and a range of other residential and commercial services. The parent company, ServiceMaster, had helped create the practice of outsourcing, the contracting out of labor-intensive services by companies and institutions, when it began partnering with health care and educational facilities to perform janitorial duties in the 1960s. ServiceMaster Clean offered commercial janitorial as well as commercial and residential carpet-cleaning and disaster-recovery services. Though it did not match Stanley Steemer's carpet-cleaning sales volume, it was a larger entity overall, operating a worldwide network of more than 4,500 franchises. While not typically an advertiser on national television, ServiceMaster Clean provided franchisees with already developed ad content ready for placement in local media or for use in a wide range of promotional contexts.

Chem-Dry Cleaning was founded in the 1970s on the strength of a new carbonated solution that allowed carpet to be cleaned by using significantly less water than steam-based systems like those employed by Stanley Steemer and ServiceMaster. The Chem-Dry slogan, "Drier. Cleaner. Healthier," made direct, comparative reference to its competitors, as did virtually all of the company's promotional materials.

MARKETING STRATEGY

"Living Brings It In. We Take It Out" was a national television campaign initially consisting of three spots, and there were supporting print, direct-mail, and promotional components. The estimated first-year budget of $20 million represented no significant increase over Stanley Steemer's spending on advertising in a typical year.

In an attempt to motivate more frequent use of the service, however, the new campaign, unlike typical Stanley Steemer advertising, moved away from a stain-centered pitch. Young & Laramore thus sought to convince people that the everyday accumulation of dirt was reason enough to have carpets professionally cleaned and that keeping carpets clean required more than the once-a-year treatment that had been traditionally recommended. As the campaign's creative director, Carolyn Hadlock, told Shoot, "It's really not about seeing dirt on the carpet … It's more the Hitchcock approach of letting somebody imagine what's there." While trying to persuade consumers that their homes were dirtier than popularly acknowledged, Young & Laramore wanted to avoid turning its Stanley Steemer pitch into a guilt trip. It was necessary therefore to introduce humor and sympathy into the individual ads of the campaign and to make the central issue one of raising awareness rather than suggesting that the target market's cleaning practices were deficient. Though the pitch did not specify reasons for choosing Stanley Steemer over its competitors, Young & Laramore was counting on the logic that, as the market leader, Stanley Steemer would be the principal beneficiary of an industry-wide increase in sales volume.

The TV spots thus used everyday scenarios that humorously emphasized the impossibility of living without accumulating unseen dirt in a home. In one spot, for instance, a woman speed walking in a normal suburban neighborhood was shown to be unconsciously traversing a veritable obstacle course of filth; she traveled through water, packed dirt, and a steaming construction area and along a trash-strewn commercial strip before entering her otherwise well-maintained house without wiping her feet. In another spot a young boy was shown pulling his backpack through a milk-splattered school cafeteria and across long stretches of puddle-dotted asphalt and billowing dirt and then using the bag as a footstool to help him reach a drinking fountain before casually dragging it into his house and up the carpeted stairs to his room. The third spot in the first year of the campaign compressed a small house dog's daily routine into 30 seconds, showing its numerous and varied missions outdoors from a vantage point at eye level with the home's dog door. The action in each spot ran against a sound track of light-hearted, propulsive music, with the only commentary coming at the end when a gentle female voice-over suggested, "Maybe having your carpet cleaned once a year isn't enough." The voice-over then intoned the tagline, "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out," which also appeared as text on the screen.

The direct-mail and newspaper components of the "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out" campaign, which appeared in all Stanley Steemer markets in 2003, typically included coupons for special rates on multiple room cleanings. Print ads in targeted consumer magazines conformed to the message and imagery of the TV spots. The "Dog Door" spot, for example, had a print companion that showed a still of the terrier's head poking through the dog door to inspect a soiled toy, with the text spelling out the message that had been dramatized in real time on television: "1 terrier. 37 daily round trips. 2 dozen 'gifts.' Maybe having your carpet cleaned once a year isn't enough." Another print ad consisted of a cropped photo of a woman's legs as she stood on the wet pavement of a service station while filling her car with gas. The copy read, "1/2 gallon of gas. 44 ounces of slurpo. 3/4 quart of anti-freeze. Maybe having your carpet cleaned once a year isn't enough."

OUTCOME

Without increasing its advertising budget, Stanley Steemer saw an 11 percent increase in sales over the first 16 months of the "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out" campaign. Young & Laramore, as well as industry analysts, took this as clear evidence of the effectiveness of the strategy and the message of the advertising. In recognition of the campaign's perceived effect on sales, the New York American Marketing Association presented "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out" with a Gold EFFIE Award in 2005 in the Household Supplies and Services category.

STEAMER/STEEMER

The Stanley Steamer was a steam-powered automobile invented by Francis Edgar Stanley and variously called "the locomotive of the highway" and "the flying teapot." First manufactured in 1897, the Stanley Steamer was the fastest automobile of its time, setting a land speed record of 127.7 mph in 1906. Production boomed in the early 1900s, but as improvements in the design of the internal-combustion engine made it a far more practical machine, steam automobiles became obsolete, and the last Stanley Steamers were produced in the mid-1920s. When, in 1947, Jack Bates, the founder of Stanley Steemer International, Inc., began using steam-powered vacuums to clean carpets, he was reminded of the Stanley Steamer automobile. He liked the name and made it his company's own with a strange, albeit slight, alteration in spelling.

The success of the campaign during its first year translated into an extension of the tagline and theme in 2004, as print ads continued to push the notion that daily life itself was enough to warrant the intervention of cleaning professionals. For instance, one ad showing a young girl with dirty bare feet on a park swing featured copy that read, "1 certified tomboy, 10 little piggies, 93 days of summer," along with the tagline and the exhortation to more frequent carpet cleaning: "Maybe having your carpet cleaned once a year isn't enough." Another ad showed a foot-level, under-the-table view of two parents' shoes amid the food-strewn tile floor below an infant's high chair. Pitching one of the new Stanley Steemer services that the company had begun introducing in 2002, the copy read, "Life goes on. Most days it goes on your tile and grout," while also including the "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out" tagline. Meanwhile, television spots in 2004 applied the campaign's theme to the company's Emergency Water Damage Service. Among the most popular spots that year was "Dishwasher," which followed the second-by-second progress of an overflowing dishwasher and of the water inching its way toward the carpet in an adjacent room. Text reading "Not all floods make the national news" appeared on the screen, followed by the "Living Brings It In. We Take It Out" tagline.

The Stanley Steemer campaign was credited with hastening the death of stain-based advertising in the carpet-cleaning industry and for thereby altering the playing field within the business category as a whole. The strategy of encouraging target consumers to think of Stanley Steemer as part of a regular household cleaning routine remained in place in subsequent advertising.