花王 | 洗濯愛してる会 | 2019
The Day a Laundry Detergent Ad Became a Mood-Lifter / Kao Attack ZERO "The Laundry-Loving Club"
In January 2020, right at the start of the new year, I got hit with a shock strong enough to make me want to restart this blog. Five of the hottest actors around — Matsuzaka Tori, Suda Masaki, Kaku Kento, Mamiya Shotaro, and Sugino Yosuke — talking about laundry with total seriousness for 60 seconds. It felt like I'd just watched two whole dramas.
The problem
Kao's Attack had held the top spot in the laundry detergent market for 30 years, but it had one big weakness: low consumer engagement. Most people just kept using whatever brand they'd always used, without actively seeking out information. Even though Attack was the top seller, it reportedly had the lowest engagement of any Kao product. In April 2019, Kao made the bold decision to consolidate its lineup into a single brand, Attack ZERO, built around "Bio IOS," the world's first sustainable new detergent base developed over about ten years. That left Kao facing a tough question: how do you get consumers to notice something this innovative?
The insight
The answer to that tough question was something no laundry detergent commercial had done before: line up five of the hottest actors around. Kao's brand manager put it plainly: "If people are talking about good-looking guys, things get exciting." There was a reason for choosing five, too — each actor was assigned one of Attack ZERO's five selling points (fighting stains, odor, residue, one-hand push dispensing, and drum-type washers). And above all, the team reportedly listed every phrase ever used in past laundry detergent commercials and thoroughly avoided all of them. Pitching whiteness or stain removal directly risked getting lost among all the existing ads out there. My take: the terrible, everyday grind of life doesn't fundamentally change, and yet we still have to keep living it day after day. The core of this campaign was shifting laundry, within that everyday grind, away from being "a chore you have to do" and toward being "a little treat, like eating something delicious" — a mood-lifter.
The idea
Kao created a fictional group for working adults called "The Laundry-Loving Club," giving each of the five actors a distinct character — Matsuzaka as the leader type, Kaku as an experiment-loving chemistry nerd, Sugino as a pure-hearted boy, and so on. The story has them each showing off their own "love of laundry," almost like a competition. When the team researched the typical imagery in laundry detergent commercials, it was, without exception, "a mother spreading out white laundry under a blue sky with a snap." So they went in the opposite direction: five good-looking guys doing laundry, almost entirely indoors. On March 26, 2019, a teaser ad showing only the silhouettes of the five actors appeared at SHIBUYA109, a spot packed with young people. Twitter lit up with guesses about who was behind each silhouette. On the product's launch day, April 1, the new commercial's unveiling event was live-streamed on Twitter and watched by about 100,000 people. The signage at SHIBUYA109 switched to show the five actors' faces, and the campaign pulled off a full "Shibuya takeover," running the commercial on the big screens at the scramble crossing.
What happened
Within the first week of launch, Twitter mentions passed 100,000, and in late April the commercial ranked first in ad likeability out of 2,164 brands surveyed. Sales in April 2019 reportedly came in at about twice what they'd been for the previous Attack Neo series. It wasn't just that people liked the five actors — apparently women also responded to how the ad made household chores look appealing, even making them want to do laundry. The series kept getting updated, and the 60-second "Five Guys' Everyday Life" installment, released in January 2020, showed each of the five actors going about their daily routines, with laundry woven into a quiet, gentle stretch of time. It was a perfect embodiment of laundry as a "mood-lifter."
Afterthought
Everyone — and society as a whole — is living through days that make you want to say, "there's just a lot going on." So what should a detergent say in moments like that? The best answer for January 2020 was clearly sitting right here. As both art and business, I found this far more exciting than the Santaro campaign, and I still do. Shifting laundry into "a little treat, like eating something delicious" — I absolutely love this light, playful shift in thinking.
