Drano is known for being the drain cleaner that unclogs your pipes guaranteed. So it’s no surprise that we have a commanding share lead in the drain category. When the bathroom sink fills with cloudy water or the bathtub is ankle deep after your shower, it’s safe to say Drano is the leading solution people trust.

Yet even though we’re category leaders, purchase frequency is low because people aren’t using us until the problem gets extreme.

They ignore the slow-forming puddle near their drains thinking it’s just a small issue. As it lingers, they go to home remedy solutions like bleach or plungers until the problem intensifies and they buy Drano to solve the problem.

Our opportunity to win wasn’t beating a competitor. The only way we’d drive growth for the business was by prompting people to tend to their drains more frequently to prevent major issues before they start.

We all know what lives in our pipes and it’s nothing short of horrifying. They’re creatures of our creation, monsters formed from our own procrastination, weeks or months of hair or grease accumulation. We can pretend they’re not there for days or weeks; but deep down we know these hair or grease monsters aren’t going anywhere without a fight. Unclogging your pipes can be downright haunting, but with Drano, the product that can unclog your pipes guaranteed, people don’t have to deal with these clogs anymore. To educate about the benefits of using Drano, we tapped into the horror genre revival and created “Tales from the Drain” - a series of entertaining horror stories that portray relatable everyday gross clogging scenarios with a daunting ending that could have been different if Drano would have been used.

To grow our business, we’d need to get consumers using us on more occasions than when they had an emergency clog.

By changing the story from problem-solving a drain clog to preventing the drain clog all together, we would be a part of their cleaning routine more often. We needed to remind people to use Drano more frequently through an unforgettable dramatization of the consequences of negligence. This allowed our messaging to depart from the category conventions of functional product claims and into a more enticing, entertaining space: horror stories. The perfect medium to talk about the horrific things in our drain.

The horror stories were the perfect trojan horse to being invited into our consumer’s minds with a new message: keep your drains clear of the monsters as the hair twists and tangles and the grease solidifies. Leaving what’s down there to us.

Though our audience most likely encountered Tales From the Drain outside of their homes, the user journey brought our stories right to their own pipes. Story-driven newspaper spreads, interactive cinemographs, audio teasers with interactive banners and bus shelters each directed viewers to our Spotify page. There they could listen to each story in its entirety and immerse themselves into the haunted universe of Tales from the Drain, haunted by the prospect of “Could this happen to me?” purchase our product to ensure they don’t become the next Tale From The Drain.

Through our captivating content, we were able to reach our audience in hyper-relevant contexts, opening peoples’ eyes to the everyday behaviors that cause drain clogs, and reminding them of the horrors of a clogged drain.

Since launch, we have reached over 800,000 people in the city of Chicago with our outdoor placements. Our bathroom installation saw over 15,000 engagements, leaving people spooked and wanting to hear more stories from Drano on our podcast. Our Spotify audio ads delivered 700K impressions and drove the audience to purchase Drano on Amazon.

All in all, we reached our objective of reinforcing to our audience how necessary it is to use Drano more frequently. The campaign is just gaining momentum, continuing to reach more people with our message, to ultimately grow household penetration.