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Italians "are not ready for convenience in the way Americans are"
Mama mia! On average, Italian women spend 21 hours on household chores other than cooking. 80% iron the entire laundry! There's a young women who spends $50 on cleaning supplies every month. For an apartment.
Wow. My mind has officially been blown.
Wow. My mind has officially been blown.
Women in Italy Like
To Clean but Shun
The Quick and Easy
Convenience Doesn't Sell
When Bathrooms Average
Four Scrubbings a Week
By DEBORAH BALL
April 25, 2006; Page A1
MILAN -- Italian women keep some of the cleanest homes around.
They spend, on average, 21 hours a week on household chores other than cooking -- compared with just four hours for Americans, according to Procter & Gamble Co. research. Italians wash kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week, Americans just once. Italians typically iron nearly all their wash, even socks and sheets. And they buy more cleaning supplies than women elsewhere do.
[Mop Flop]
All that should make them the perfect customers for the manufacturers of cleaning products.
But when Unilever launched an all-purpose spray cleaner about six years ago, the product flopped. And when Procter & Gamble tested its top-selling Swiffer Wet mop, which eliminates the need for a clunky bucket of water, the product bombed so badly in Italy that P&G took it off the market.
What the world's biggest consumer-products companies failed to realize is that what sells products elsewhere -- labor-saving convenience -- is a big turnoff here. Italian women want products that are tough cleaners, not timesavers.
The Italians "are not ready for convenience in the way Americans are," says Elio Leoni Sceti, chief marketing officer at Reckitt Benckiser PLC, maker of Lysol cleaner and Woolite laundry detergent. "It's perceived as a step back."
So, for companies like P&G, Unilever and appliance makers like Whirlpool Corp., that means turning their products and marketing inside out to try to win over Italy.
After its Cif brand spray cleaner flopped, Unilever researchers polled consumers and discovered that Italian women needed to be convinced that a spray could be strong enough, especially on kitchen grease. So, the company spent 18 months reformulating the product and testing how thoroughly it wiped away grease. Because Italian women believe they need different cleaners for different tasks, it also came up with several varieties, including one for removing limescale from bathroom fixtures. Unilever made the bottles 50% bigger because Italians clean so frequently.
It also changed Cif television ads to tout the cleaner's strength, scrapping initial ads that portrayed it as convenient.
[Alessandra Bellini]
"It was a real shift of mind-set on how to market products like these," says Alessandra Bellini, head of marketing for Unilever's Italian home and personal-care products. "If you present a product as quick and easy, women may feel like a cheat....It took us a while to understand that Italians don't want that." Now, the products are selling well, the company says.
P&G also went back to the Swiffer drawing board after its Wet mop flop. The company realized that Italian women were skeptical it could work on their dirty floor but had been using it to polish after mopping. So P&G came up with a Swiffer with beeswax, which it sells only in Italy.
P&G also introduced the Swiffer duster, which is available in many countries but has proved to be an Italian best-seller. It sold five million boxes in the first eight months, twice the company's forecasts, the company says. Italy is now the biggest European market for Swiffer products.
Indeed, Italians pay up for premium brands, and about 72% of Italians own more than eight cleaning products, according to Unilever research.
In Rome, Lavinia Sansoni cleans the bathroom in her apartment every day. On weekends, the 26-year-old office worker also dusts shelves and paintings and above the doors. She tried 20 different cleaners until she found a specialty cleaner made by appliance company Miele that satisfactorily cleaned food stains off her stove top. She can spend as much as $50 a month on cleaning supplies.
"I like my house really, really clean," Ms. Sansoni says. "Everything has to absolutely shine."
After World War II, Italy remained a poor country until well into the 1960s, so labor-saving devices like washing machines that had become popular in wealthy countries arrived late. And Italian women have joined the work force much later and in smaller numbers. Even today, as younger women increasingly work outside the home, they still spend nearly as much time as their mothers did on housework, the companies say.
More and more career women, particularly in the north, employ housekeepers -- and ride herd on them. Laura Maresti, a 42-year-old photo editor, has taught her cleaning lady exactly how she likes her towels ironed: pressed with a fold so they hang just so on the bathroom rack. The cleaning lady also irons sheets, underwear and T-shirts. "This is the way my mother did things," Ms. Maresti says.
Paolo Follador, owner of a Milan cleaning service company, gives his new workers 20 hours of training before sending them into Italian homes. Even so, Italian women closely follow his workers to ensure they do a good enough job. Recently, his workers spent hours cleaning each crystal pendant of a chandelier in one Italian home. The owner wasn't satisfied, however, and made them redo it three more times. Another woman asked his workers to use lemon to clean her shower stall. In that case, Mr. Follador refused. "If we did everything they asked us to do, we'd never get the job done," he says. "They check everything."
Even basic product updates haven't caught on. Only about 30% of Italian households have dishwashers because many women don't trust machines to get dishes as clean as they can get them by hand, manufacturers say. Many of those who have machines tend to thoroughly rinse the dishes before loading them in the machine.
"They say they don't want a dishwasher because it'll be twice as much work," says Mario Franzino, head of Bosch und Siemens Hausgerate GmbH, a joint venture between Robert Bosch GmbH and Siemens AG, based in Munich. It makes the Bosch brand of home appliances.
So in an attempt to convince them otherwise, machine and soap makers including Bosch, Whirlpool, Electrolux AB, and Reckitt have come up with joint marketing campaigns plugging away at the claim that machines get dishes as clean as hand-washing does. A new radio ad set for later this spring will explain that a dishwasher uses much higher water temperatures than hand washing.
Washing-machine makers are still working at persuading the Italians, famously fastidious dressers, to entrust their clothes to their machines. Italians worry that machines will ruin the fabric. The companies' solution: models with slow spin cycles as low as 400 spins per minute, compared with 1,200 to 1,600 common in machines in the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe.
The Bosch brand introduced a new European model this month with three separate cycles for wool, silk and synthetic fabrics. The machine, Maxx 6, even has a special gentle cycle for jeans because Italians consider them delicate and worry that they will lose their color or shape in a regular cycle. Consumers can also create and save their own cycles by choosing exact combinations of temperature and spin speed.
Says Holger Freytag, head of marketing for Bosch washing machines in Italy: Italians "always want to be able to control the process themselves."
To Clean but Shun
The Quick and Easy
Convenience Doesn't Sell
When Bathrooms Average
Four Scrubbings a Week
By DEBORAH BALL
April 25, 2006; Page A1
MILAN -- Italian women keep some of the cleanest homes around.
They spend, on average, 21 hours a week on household chores other than cooking -- compared with just four hours for Americans, according to Procter & Gamble Co. research. Italians wash kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week, Americans just once. Italians typically iron nearly all their wash, even socks and sheets. And they buy more cleaning supplies than women elsewhere do.
[Mop Flop]
All that should make them the perfect customers for the manufacturers of cleaning products.
But when Unilever launched an all-purpose spray cleaner about six years ago, the product flopped. And when Procter & Gamble tested its top-selling Swiffer Wet mop, which eliminates the need for a clunky bucket of water, the product bombed so badly in Italy that P&G took it off the market.
What the world's biggest consumer-products companies failed to realize is that what sells products elsewhere -- labor-saving convenience -- is a big turnoff here. Italian women want products that are tough cleaners, not timesavers.
The Italians "are not ready for convenience in the way Americans are," says Elio Leoni Sceti, chief marketing officer at Reckitt Benckiser PLC, maker of Lysol cleaner and Woolite laundry detergent. "It's perceived as a step back."
So, for companies like P&G, Unilever and appliance makers like Whirlpool Corp., that means turning their products and marketing inside out to try to win over Italy.
After its Cif brand spray cleaner flopped, Unilever researchers polled consumers and discovered that Italian women needed to be convinced that a spray could be strong enough, especially on kitchen grease. So, the company spent 18 months reformulating the product and testing how thoroughly it wiped away grease. Because Italian women believe they need different cleaners for different tasks, it also came up with several varieties, including one for removing limescale from bathroom fixtures. Unilever made the bottles 50% bigger because Italians clean so frequently.
It also changed Cif television ads to tout the cleaner's strength, scrapping initial ads that portrayed it as convenient.
[Alessandra Bellini]
"It was a real shift of mind-set on how to market products like these," says Alessandra Bellini, head of marketing for Unilever's Italian home and personal-care products. "If you present a product as quick and easy, women may feel like a cheat....It took us a while to understand that Italians don't want that." Now, the products are selling well, the company says.
P&G also went back to the Swiffer drawing board after its Wet mop flop. The company realized that Italian women were skeptical it could work on their dirty floor but had been using it to polish after mopping. So P&G came up with a Swiffer with beeswax, which it sells only in Italy.
P&G also introduced the Swiffer duster, which is available in many countries but has proved to be an Italian best-seller. It sold five million boxes in the first eight months, twice the company's forecasts, the company says. Italy is now the biggest European market for Swiffer products.
Indeed, Italians pay up for premium brands, and about 72% of Italians own more than eight cleaning products, according to Unilever research.
In Rome, Lavinia Sansoni cleans the bathroom in her apartment every day. On weekends, the 26-year-old office worker also dusts shelves and paintings and above the doors. She tried 20 different cleaners until she found a specialty cleaner made by appliance company Miele that satisfactorily cleaned food stains off her stove top. She can spend as much as $50 a month on cleaning supplies.
"I like my house really, really clean," Ms. Sansoni says. "Everything has to absolutely shine."
After World War II, Italy remained a poor country until well into the 1960s, so labor-saving devices like washing machines that had become popular in wealthy countries arrived late. And Italian women have joined the work force much later and in smaller numbers. Even today, as younger women increasingly work outside the home, they still spend nearly as much time as their mothers did on housework, the companies say.
More and more career women, particularly in the north, employ housekeepers -- and ride herd on them. Laura Maresti, a 42-year-old photo editor, has taught her cleaning lady exactly how she likes her towels ironed: pressed with a fold so they hang just so on the bathroom rack. The cleaning lady also irons sheets, underwear and T-shirts. "This is the way my mother did things," Ms. Maresti says.
Paolo Follador, owner of a Milan cleaning service company, gives his new workers 20 hours of training before sending them into Italian homes. Even so, Italian women closely follow his workers to ensure they do a good enough job. Recently, his workers spent hours cleaning each crystal pendant of a chandelier in one Italian home. The owner wasn't satisfied, however, and made them redo it three more times. Another woman asked his workers to use lemon to clean her shower stall. In that case, Mr. Follador refused. "If we did everything they asked us to do, we'd never get the job done," he says. "They check everything."
Even basic product updates haven't caught on. Only about 30% of Italian households have dishwashers because many women don't trust machines to get dishes as clean as they can get them by hand, manufacturers say. Many of those who have machines tend to thoroughly rinse the dishes before loading them in the machine.
"They say they don't want a dishwasher because it'll be twice as much work," says Mario Franzino, head of Bosch und Siemens Hausgerate GmbH, a joint venture between Robert Bosch GmbH and Siemens AG, based in Munich. It makes the Bosch brand of home appliances.
So in an attempt to convince them otherwise, machine and soap makers including Bosch, Whirlpool, Electrolux AB, and Reckitt have come up with joint marketing campaigns plugging away at the claim that machines get dishes as clean as hand-washing does. A new radio ad set for later this spring will explain that a dishwasher uses much higher water temperatures than hand washing.
Washing-machine makers are still working at persuading the Italians, famously fastidious dressers, to entrust their clothes to their machines. Italians worry that machines will ruin the fabric. The companies' solution: models with slow spin cycles as low as 400 spins per minute, compared with 1,200 to 1,600 common in machines in the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe.
The Bosch brand introduced a new European model this month with three separate cycles for wool, silk and synthetic fabrics. The machine, Maxx 6, even has a special gentle cycle for jeans because Italians consider them delicate and worry that they will lose their color or shape in a regular cycle. Consumers can also create and save their own cycles by choosing exact combinations of temperature and spin speed.
Says Holger Freytag, head of marketing for Bosch washing machines in Italy: Italians "always want to be able to control the process themselves."
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. We are run by big corporations. A far worse prospect.
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