Even though Tide’s been the leader of the laundry detergent category for over 75 years, its presence in today’s laundry room is far from guaranteed. Due to economic upheaval in the US, the brand’s under constant pressure to defend its position – and its price premium – by demonstrating its value to consumers. One of the most powerful ways Tide can do so is by talking about its sustainable benefits from superior performance, especially compared to the competition. Tide’s formula is so powerful that consumers can wash all their clothes using only cold water – leading to a massive reduction in energy consumption vs. washing them on hot.

The only issue? While we knew about this, our audience didn’t. So we set out on a mission to drive real behavior change and let America know they could turn to cold for the planet.

This challenge was no easy feat, as the above barriers were only the tip of the iceberg:

The environmental marketing space is already a crowded one.

Detergent is a low involvement category; people shop and clean on autopilot. They often tune out lookalike claims and buy what they know or what’s on sale.

It has been ingrained in people’s minds for years that washing on hot = clean. So not only did we have to communicate that washing in cold is good for the environment, but we had to go against one of the most long-standing behaviors in the category and prove Tide cleans great in cold.

And of course, we all know how hard it can be to change a habit.

To convince America, we knew we needed a compelling platform. Under the big umbrella, #TurntoCold, Tide brought together "cold" pop culture icons, wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and actor Ice-T, to make "cold calls" to convince celebrities like Vanilla Ice, Mr. T, Annie Murphy and Gordon Ramsay to #TurnToCold, ultimately educating everyone on the benefits of washing in cold in a sticky and memorable way. Then to prove Tide’s superior performance in cold water, we partnered with the NFL and convinced 15 teams — and all of their fans—to wash in cold. We didn’t just use the NFL to spread our message, we literally changed the way they did their laundry. To this day these NFL teams wash on cold for every practice and game continuing to make an impact.