When you think of Halloween, you probably aren’t thinking of laundry detergent. Tide is innovatively trying to change this perception by incorporating the spooky tradition into their brand. On their website, Tide has provided a list of common Halloween candy stains and directions on how to get them out of clothing. Tide even suggests several Halloween costumes that can be put together last minute. Furthermore, Tide has included a special tip list for making Halloween fun and stress-free. By the end of reading all of these posts, what you wouldn’t have originally paired together (Tide and Halloween) makes total sense.
Hoping to capitalize on Halloween even further, in mid-October, Tide posted a video to their Vine page to begin their “Scared Stainless” campaign.
Vine, created in late January 2013, is an app that allows users to create short, looping videos. In line with other social media frameworks, users can “like” others’ posts and can follow other users. Sporting a 400% growth rate between the first and third quarters of 2013, Vine is the fastest growing social media outlet in the world.
Tide jumped on the Vine bandwagon this year, posting their first video in August. Focusing in on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, their Vine featured an animated drawing of a shark jumping out of water, biting a piece out of the Tide logo and showing the copy “we get out blood, too”. This fun video caused a buzz in social media news, and left many wondering if Tide would be a future leader in the Vine world.
Until the end of Halloween, Tide will be posting scary movie themed Halloween videos, all featuring the Tide bottle. So far, only four Vines have appeared showing the Tide bottle in the scene of the movie Carrie, the mother in psycho, and a replication of the popular scene of the Poltergeist.
Click here to watch a Scared Stainless Vine by Tide
However, since their first post the company has neglected to keep the creative and fun videos coming. As of October 27th, the Tide Vine only has 2430 followers and only five total posts.
Laundry detergent is predominately targeted at women because they are estimated to control around 80% of household decisions. Tide strives to have middle-class women between the ages of 18-54 act as the purchasers and users of their variety of washing powder products. By expanding campaigning practices to Vine for six quick seconds, is Tide really reaching the target market that they would like to impact? It is no surprise that the higher in age, the lower the chance of a woman using Vine throughout her day to discover these snippets Tide has placed online for the season. This short-lived effort may very well be a wasted attempt at reaching the targeted consumers of their products.
An underwhelming response from the company leaves us asking: Is it effective for companies to have a social media account just to say they have one even if they fail to utilize it? With Halloween only four days away and barely any notoriety, was the campaign even worth it?
–Meghan Carey, Morgan Jones, Jade Lester, Caroline Robinson, Savannah Valade
IMC Hawks Blog 