Many brands never make it to 100 years old. Kleenex did last year, and John Starkey, a relative newcomer who became president of North America Family Care at Kimberly-Clark in May, got to oversee a brand redesign and campaign behind the anniversary.
Podcast: Marketer's Brief
Behind Kleenex’s new brand identity
Kimberly-Clark executive on modernizing the 100-year-old brand without straying too far from its roots
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John Starkey, president of North America Family Care at Kimberly-Clark Corp.
Credit:
Kimberly-Clark
In this week’s Marketer’s Brief Podcast, Starkey talks about the strategy behind the branding and modernizing a 100-year-old brand without straying from what it’s about. It seems to be working. Kantar Group’s measurement firm Numerator recently listed Kleenex seventh among last year’s fastest-growing big brands. And Morning Consult tracking survey data shows it ahead of its nearest rival, Procter & Gamble Co.’s Puffs, in purchase consideration by a nearly two-to-one margin (64.6% to 34.6%) as of Jan. 21.
The new brand identity doesn’t stray far from the old one—using a font that’s long been used with the Kleenex word mark but in an arc within a crown. “The curves of the script and the font are pretty much the same,” Starkey said. “But we brought in a crown that reinforces Kleenex’s leadership status. And we also wanted to unify our color palette overall by elevating the Kleenex blue as the anchor.”
The advertising sticks with tradition too—a tradition of tear-jerking ads. A cornerstone of the campaign from FCB is an ad showing a mom having a tearful moment sending her son off for the first day of school, so she needs a Kleenex naturally.
“Consumers obviously use Kleenex for cold and flu or allergy season, but we know people are actually grabbing boxes of Kleenex when they laugh, when they cry, and for so much more,” Starkey said. And the ads capture the same feelings he and his wife had sending their own kids off to school for the first time.
That Kleenex is about more than cold or flu season means two things. One, the brand is trying to be in front of consumers year-round (iSpot.tv data show the brand running TV spots at a consistent pace for the past 52 weeks, for example.) It also means Starkey doesn’t have to feel guilty rooting for a bad cold and flu season, because he doesn’t.
“I don't wish a bad cold or flu on anyone,” Starkey said. “But what I am proud of is the fact that many, many years ago, Kimberly-Clark invented this product that has been an indispensable aid to consumers, to give them relief and comfort, to help them go through these situations.”
