Washing Clothes Can Save You Money
Looks like Tide laundry detergent is marketing a new product called Tide Coldwater which promotes saving money and energy by enabling you to wash clothes in cold water. (Yeah, a quick look in treehugger shows this product’s been around for at least a couple of months, but this is the first time I’ve seen the commercial on TV seeing as I’ve been in Europe the last several months.)
As the FAQ asks:
What spurred P&G to launch this product now?
The answer:
There has been an increase in the consumer usage of cold water for washing in recent years. The incidence of these cycles has reached a point where a consumer need and business opportunity presented itself.
So what is Tide doing? They’re marketing their detergent around energy efficiency and financial savings.
Reduce Your Warm Water Costs
Every time you turn the water temperature dial on your washing machine to “warm,” you might as well start writing a check to the energy company. Did you know 80-85% of the energy used to wash clothes comes from heating the water?
When you wash in cold water with Tide Coldwater, you can actually save up to $63 a year.2 That’s equivalent to an average cell phone monthly price plan3 or your bread supply for nine months.
And just think how good you’ll feel knowing you’ve done your part to save precious energy!
And of course using cold water helps your clothes last longer.
Now, what’s interesting to me is not the specific ecological qualities per se, especially considering it’s still a detergent that’s not ecologically friendly (unlike Seventh Generation products, for example). Rather, the interesting part is the branding strategy.
They can’t talk about the ecological benefits of their detergent directly, not considering the ingredients used in their entire line of products, but they can talk about other issues that people care about, such as energy savings and money. (They’re actually running a sweepstakes right now which promises a year’s supply of their detergent and $1,500 towards your utility bill.) For example, Tide says that their Coldwater detergent saves you money because:
The product will not require warm/hot water which needs to be heated by a home hot water heater.
Does this mean, then, that customers are more concerned at this point about energy savings and money than they are about the chemical composition of the products they’re using? In some ways, this makes sense, because people can directly translate saving energy into money savings. But how can you translate the chemical composition of a detergent into meaningful or relatable terms? Is this purely an issue of science education? Or is there some way to make this information accessible to others?