When Branding Brilliance Inspires Imitation

Every brand can cre­ate an inno­va­tion that also solves a prob­lem. Some­times, that prob­lem lies behind closed doors where ladies would rather leave the bath­room smelling like ros­es. Do you already have an idea of what prod­uct this is? It’s Poo-Pouri! A bril­liant, yet sim­ple solu­tion that allowed ladies to feel com­fort­able using the restroom (a scent saver dur­ing tum­my issues). Their brand­ing is what placed the prod­uct to the top charts — sell­ing over $4 mil­lion bot­tles short­ly after their launch.

Branding innovation at it’s best

What made Poo-Pouri so pop­u­lar? Aside from the fact it solved a pret­ty impor­tant issue and did it in a way that made it easy to talk about, it was their uber-clever mar­ket­ing that took this shin­ning star straight to the top. Bril­liant com­mer­cials using pot­ty humor and wit, along with fun visu­als helped women remove the embar­rass­ment of leav­ing a too-fra­grant bath­room behind them.

Every ele­ment to their brand con­spire to that end, suc­ceed­ing in mak­ing women feel they could be com­plete­ly relieved of embar­rass­ment in a mul­ti­tude of real life sit­u­a­tions, as you can see in their adver­tise­ment below.

You can’t deny that after see­ing that video, you too would be able to attend a fan­cy par­ty and leave no trail behind… in the bath­room. The voice, set­ting, and wardrobe as well as the word­ing of the script all sup­port the brand and it’s mes­sage. It’s hard to achieve, but they sure nailed it! No won­der it’s been viewed near­ly 40 mil­lion times on YouTube!

The Copycats Emerge

As soon as Poo-Pouri rose to the top, oth­ers start­ed to cre­ate their own ver­sions, from a make-your-own using essen­tial oils to one repli­ca that came a lit­tle too close to the whole brand expe­ri­ence. While it’s com­mon to see com­pet­ing brands emerge once a com­pa­ny is dom­i­nat­ing the mar­ket, usu­al­ly they try to put their own spin on a prod­uct, or take it to the next lev­el. How­ev­er, that’s not always the case. 

The set­ting tran­si­tions, pack­ag­ing, pot­ty-humor are so close to the orig­i­nal Poo-Pouri brand, that this emu­la­tion earned V.I.Poo (an Air Wick / Reckitt Benckiser com­pa­ny) a law­suit from the woman-owned Poo-Pouri business. 

“This is about pro­tect­ing the cre­ativ­i­ty we’ve used to build an icon­ic brand. It’s not fair for such a large com­pa­ny to come in and copy what we’ve done when they have the resources to cre­ate their own brand and own image,” said the founder and CEO of Poo-Pour­ri, Suzy Batiz.

It can be alarm­ing for an inno­va­tor to see com­peti­tors try to tap into their cre­ative niche, but it is the nature of the free mar­ket. How­ev­er, once a brand estab­lish­es cred­i­bil­i­ty as the orig­i­nal, cus­tomers usu­al­ly stay loy­al to that prod­uct. Espe­cial­ly when the price-point is a few cents less. A per­fect exam­ple of brand loy­al­ty towards the orig­i­nal is found on the Ama­zon reviews. Poo-Pouri has over 8,000 reviews and 4.8 out of 5 stars. While V.I. Poo has slight­ly over 300 and 4 stars. When it comes to sales, Reckitt Benckiser report­ed $13 bil­lion in glob­al sales for 2015 — out of that amount, it’s hard to tell what came from V.I.Poo. Poo-Pouri had close to $40 million.

When brand­ing stays authen­tic and true, the focus becomes on the cus­tomers, not a pure­ly sales-dri­ven approach.