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mommy blogger

Less Than Impressed: Cottonelle

“The Name Generator”

Goal: Encourage consumers to use Cottonelle Ultra Comfort Care* Bathroom Tissue and Cottonelle Fresh Care* Flushable Wipes, as part of a personal hygiene routine, which supposedly needs a cheeky name.

How It Works:

To enter contest, entrants submit name suggestions for the routine. The names are then voted on and the highest voted names are added to “The Book of Names.” How unncessary clever.

Otherwise uninspired entrants can develop an idea using 1 of 3 tools in the Cottonelle Facebook app:

The Randomizer: Simply click to get a name instantly

The Personalizer: Answer a few questions for a personalized name

The Customizer: Create a name to add to our Book of Names and enter for a chance to win a year’s supply of Cottonelle products.

 

How It Fails To Impress:

– Supplies and information provided to mommy bloggers to create sponsored posts led to bland content.

– The white text on the aqua blue background is unclear, while the rest of the site is nothing special.

– The commercial (where I first learned about it) is super cheesy. How many families discuss toilet paper while standing in the kitchen? Yuck. It really irks me when people don’t think of social context.

Personally, I’m still amazed that Secret has acquired over a million Facebook fans. As an example of Cottonelle trying to compete with other personal hygiene brands for online engagement, let’s hope they spend more time at the drawing board for their next campaign.

Cottonelle’s Name Generator app is one of the cheesiest advertising ideas I’ve seen in a long time. Personal purchases aside, I prefer toilet paper commercials featuring cuddly bears and cozy robes.

Consider this for a mini competitive analysis:

Charmin promoted another routine by featuring the Old Spice guy, and their video received close to 2 million views.

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June 1, 2012 by

Does Dressing Up Require Social Commentary?

I don’t usually like when people expect listeners to pay attention to their every word as they read aloud long passages of text, but on Monday afternoon, I was captivated by a TA who shared a newsworthy blog post circa November 2010.

Two days after Halloween, Trick or Treating may still be trending on Twitter, but most people are more concerned about finding discounts on candy and the latest gossip about the Kardashians than discussing who cross-dressed over the weekend.

Nevertheless, when a 5 year old boy begged his mom to order a costume resembling Daphne from Scooby Doo for him two years ago, this caused a huge commotion. Uptight mothers in their community were outraged, even though their children seemed unfazed by his costume choice.

                             

The bottom line is that costume choices shouldn’t be a big issue at all, unless of course they are outright offensive or obscene. The boy didn’t dress up as a Disney Princess anxiously awaiting Prince Charming’s arrival at his doorstep; he dressed up as one of his favourite animated TV characters – so what?

In her blog post, the mother (who coincidentally is another Sarah) mentions that her son’s “best friend is a little girl.” When it comes to trick or treating, those kids will remember spending the night or school festivities with their best friend. Early childhood friendships don’t always extend into adulthood or even the teenage years, but if the friends lose touch, they’ll remember who it was running up neighbours’ front steps beside them to collect candy. That’s the memory for him to cherish – friendship and fun, not that a Halloween costume he wanted to wear sparked an online debate about gender and sexuality.

It is one thing to document your children’s funny musings or share advice about parenting, but it is quite another to turn an innocent child’s desire to have fun dressing up into a rant about attitudes towards gender norms. Sometimes I think that moms should just take photos to capture their kids growing up and leave it at that. After all, “it’s just a costume.”

Surely there is a better way to become famous than starring in a controversial blog post.

November 2, 2011 by