Bounce Tries Building Buzz for Fabric Softener on Facebook

From Mashable:

Bounce, the fabric softener brand, suffers from the same problem a lot of brands in low-interest categories do: People don’t talk about it much.

In the social media age, that’s a problem, but the brand has a two-part solution. Phase one: Create a false controversy. Earlier this year, Bounce marketers began promoting the idea — among mommy bloggers — that you’re either a bar person or a sheet person.

Phase two is a lighthearted social media campaign seeking new uses for Bounce. The program will launch with a video that features two Bounce fanatics — one a sheet person, the other a bar fan — doing things like sticking a bar on someone’s back and persuading a cop to leave a bar instead of a parking ticket. This weekend, the Procter & Gamble brand will ask consumers to send in their ideas for new ways to use Bounce. The top ideas will be featured in a new video on the brand’s Facebook Page, though Bounce’s homepage already lists several.

Though social media marketing is a fairly new discipline, the first technique is becoming common. Earlier this year, Toyota got some mileage out of a campaign that mulled the plural of Prius and Kraft’s Miracle Whip pitted the brand’s lovers against its haters. As for new uses, the most prominent example is Diet Coke and Mentos’s geyser viral of 2006, which neither brand had originated.

Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president of emerging media and brand strategy at 360i, says that the latter campaign “might be taking what would be an interesting wall post on Facebook and turn it into a campaign idea — which is interesting.”

Hofstetter says with categories like fabric softeners, the trick is to piggyback on “borrowed relevance” from related issues. For instance, Procter & Gamble successfully reinvented its Old Spice brand last year with a campaign centered on feeling clean and sexy rather than on specific product attributes. P&G’s latest work for its Pepto Bismol brand is more about overindulgence than stomach pain.

On the other hand, Bounce sees itself as a brand that transcends a somewhat prosaic category. A Bounce rep says that Bounce T-shirts (or “B-Shirts”) that will be given out during the Facebook campaign have been coveted items in the past. “It’s fun brand,” she says.