Did you know that cleaning products act as restorers of youth, restitutors of moral, eliminators of guilt, mind organisers, thought purifiers, fighters of inadequacies, life harmonisers, outlets for wrath, fighters of degeneration, proofs of competence, tokens of intelligence, exterminators of nuisance, transformers and brighteners of life, triggers of creation, care signifiers, personal liberators, people connectors, faithful partners, sensual stimulators, and replacements of loved ones? This pioneering research cracks the code of buying behaviour related to cleaning products and puts forward a framework for shaping brand strategy and for growing revenue.

1. WHAT MAKES
CLEANING
PRODUCTS SELL

2. We do not just buy cleaning
products. By integrating intrinsic
functionality with predefined
meaning we create and express
the master narratives of our lives.

3. We derive the maximum value from
narratives that are automatically
identifiable and viscerally classifiable
as evolving parts of our human
experience

4. What deeply engages us always
fulfils some fundamental motive,
the evolutionarily-preserved
dispositions that have helped us
survive and grow

5. Concepts are neural
structures that allow us
to order and categorise
all stimuli around us

6. Our psyche consists of a code. We are an ordered pattern
of fundamental motives capable of generating life.

7. Successful brands
coherently express
the very patterns
of our psyche

8. Using, for the first time, a
multidisciplinary approach,
including brand communication
decoding, motivational research,
psychology, affective neuroscience,
cognitive linguistics, cultural
anthropology, sociology,
philosophy and their proprietary
tools, BRAND AVIATORS™ has
studied the motives underpinning
buying behaviour in over 70 global
categories of goods including
cleaning products

9. Beneath all the phantasmagoria of
global marketing communication,
lies order and rhythm, the source
code of our human behaviour

10. What follows is a brief analysis of the
deep motives for buying cleaning
products. The motives are presented in
order of increasing relative importance
in line with their power to influence our
buying decisions. The further we read,
the stronger the associations they build
in our mind, the more powerful their
influence on the sales and profit in the
cleaning products category.*
* A book will shortly be published, extensively
analysing the motives underpinning 33 categories of
everyday consumer goods and our fundamental
human motives. It puts forward the most integrated
platform for engaging people to date.

11. PLAYFULNESS: On an
initial level of
motivation, we use
cleaning products
because with them
work becomes akin to
play. Cleaning has
always been
associated with major
feasts and celebrations.
Cleaning products
promise and actually
literally manage to
brighten up our lives.

12. RELATEDNESS: More significantly, cleaning is driven by the need to
connect with others. Lack of cleanliness has always been connected in
our mind with the abandonment of society. Cleaning products
themselves act as our partners and allies in the everyday fight against
dirt, and promise to be friendly to the objects which they clean.

13. SENSUOUSNESS: Proceeding into
a deeper layer of motivation, we
buy cleaning products because
they promise and manage to
enhance the sensory pleasure of
cleaning. Cleaning involves the
sensuality of looking, smelling,
touching, and even hearing.
Smoothing out the creases of a
shirt often acts as a sensual
caress, a replacement of the
loved person who wears that
same shirt.

14. EXPRESSION: Getting into deeper
motivation, what makes cleaning
products sell is their promise to help us
individualise our environment, to
create and express. The act of cleaning
allows us to think freely, without
seeking to answer questions; it is often
in this way that ideas come to us. As
dust is the raw material of the
universe, manipulating it is not a
simple gesture but an act of cosmic
creation.

15. INTELLIGENCE: On a deeper level, cleaning
products help us clean with knowledge and
expertise rather than effort, smartness and
method rather than hard work. Employing a
nearly scientific approach, being over
meticulous and striving for perfection make
the cleaner feel like an expert. Having clean
ironed clothes and a clean home are a way of
feeling in harmony with oneself and the
environment.

16. LIBERATION: Moving to a more profound layer of
motivation, we buy cleaning products because
they promise to liberate both the body and the
spirit in a type of dance, a dance with space.
Cleaning products are so efficient that they free
up our time. Now that we are free to get dirty,
we can explore life free of dirt, as we meet our
nature once again.

17. CONTRARINESS: Even more significantly, embodying the eliminating
capacity of the cleaning products, some of the most successful brands
make us feel we are outsourcing our troubles, expelling angst,
destroying our worries. Through fighting dirt we’re fighting all sources
of dirt in an unsafe world. We unconsciously believe dust to be our
origin and our destination. Contradicting the largely imagined and
displaced fear of dirt is our primal wish to get dirty.

18. ORDER: Even more significantly, we buy
cleaning products because they help us
set the world “right”. Using them, we
feel that our thoughts and feelings fall
back into order, we feel that we control
life. Cleanliness has always been
connected to status. It connotes a
luxurious sentiment like that of securing
a clean bed sheet each time, as when we
are in a hotel. Deep down, by controlling
dust and dirt we fight decay and our
animality.

19. TRANSFORMATION: Cleaning
products are the wonder
products par excellence – they
do not just make dirt
disappear, but they ultimately
reconstruct the world and
even change us. The
alchemistic desire to wash the
interior of the substances
necessitates the use of magic
substances, formulas and
diluting chemicals with
versatile purposes to erase
spots of any chemical element.

20. ACCOMPLISHMENT: On a yet more
profound layer of motivation,
defining dirt as an intruding enemy
some of the most successful brands,
permit us to establish competence,
demonstrate capability to ourselves
and others and derive a sense of
achievement in fighting it. Nobody
has ever definitively won over dirt.
That is very reassuring since we will
continue to have an enemy to fight
and prove ourselves.

21. CARE: Moving a step closer to the
motives that govern the category,
cleaning products are successful
because they enable us to make
available to those we love
something we have made out of
our love for them. In our
imagination, we build the family
with our hands: With our care we
shape our family.

22. SECURITY: On the innermost layer of
human motivation cleaning products
enliven both objects and ourselves.
Without being aware, we are apt to
believe that they do not just clean: they
intrinsically help us renew, refresh.
Removing all traces of dirt, returning the
object to its original radiance, we search
for restoration of youthfulness, to deny
the mark and passage of time. What we
essentially wash out is impurities, our
desires, our angers, our illusions.

23. This map illustrates
the way some
major brands in
the global cleaning
products category
are positioned in
the consumers’
mind

24. Deep category understanding is
just the first step in creating
engaging narratives. To build a
proposition that is deeply
engaging, the brand must
germinate the bare motives that
drive the category in a unique
and profoundly human way.

25. Having captured, for the first time,
our fundamental human motives at
the deepest levels of their
deployment, all the way from:
• their biological value
• to the neurosystems they engage
• to the cognitive operations and
psychological states they activate
• to the major social reinforcers
they cause and
• to the rich hierarchy of inherent
concepts they infuse into our
everyday life,
BRAND AVIATORS™ helps
marketers develop Intrinsically
Engaging Narratives™

26. Based on in-depth research and practical implementation, BRAND
AVIATORS™ helps marketers develop brands with a solid inner
architecture deeply rooted in the fundamental human motives, using
a three-phase methodology

27. Phase 1: Map the territory
The first phase of the methodology deconstructs the fundamental
human motives driving the sales and profit of the category,
establishes the relevant psychographic territories and reveals the
way that the brands are mapped in people’s mind

28. Phase 2: Give soul
to your brand
To be authentic and
engaging, narratives must
always be sourced from
the core of the brand. The
second phase captures the
core of the brand, and
mobilises its genuine
codes in order to satisfy
our common motivations
relative to the category.

29. Phase 3: Enrich people’s
lives
Powerful strategies require effective
articulation. In this third phase, the
consumer proposition is translated
into ownable experiences written in
the language that uses our primary
emotions as structural elements.

30. Nothing fuels creativity more
than understanding and
mobilising our fundamental
motives and the rich hierarchy
of inherent concepts they
infuse into our everyday life

31. Following the pathways our
mind uses to create reality
and by leveraging the way
emotions arise, our concepts
become alive, they bear the
freshness of the source

32. The efficiency of communication budgets
is maximised when the authentic codes
of the brand match the deepest motives
which drive sales and profit in the
category. Nowadays, we have no
excuse for saying that “we waste half of
our advertising budget but we don’t
know which half”.

33. Above all, by founding brand
strategy on our fundamental
human motives, and by embedding
Intrinsically Engaging Narratives™
the brand becomes deeply
humanistic in that it offers holistic,
universal experiences that no
longer simply satisfy some
individual needs but the needs of
the species

34. What does your brand stand for?

35. We are trusted by some of the world’s leading companies:

36. To receive in-depth analyses of the
motives underpinning buying
behaviour relative to specific
categories of goods, click the button:
FREE
REPORTS