I was in Wal-Mart a few weeks ago with my wife picking up a few things.  I do have to say the price difference at Wal-Mart for household cleaning products is amazing compared to other retails stores that carry them and even supermarkets. Now I understand why there is such a big P&G contingent in Arkansas but I digress.
I was sent to get a bag of Cascade dishwasher detergent pouches. When I got to that section I noticed there were two boxes that looked very similar but had different names. Taking a closer look they are the same product. Electrasol the leading brand of dishwasher detergent in the US is rebranding as Finish.
This is the first time I can ever recall both the before and after brand being on the shelf at the same time.� Many do as they have done on the box to the left, have the old name and tell us that it is now� but to have both I thought was interesting and should ensure you don’t confuse either the aware or the unaware.
Electrasol & Finish Brands
It gets more interesting when you look at the number of the boxes remaining on the self of each.
I guess people have not really made the connection yet since the box with the old brand seems to be selling more than the one with the new name. I suspect as coupons come out and the brand advertising kicks in they can swap them out.
So why the rebranding anyway? Unlike most of the major product rebranding activities happening lately could not find any articles about the activity.
If I had to guess -Â I would assume they are trying to merge the Finish brand that is popular outside the US, with the Electrasol brand which is very popular here.
Having the same brand around the world saves a lot on production, marketing and packaging. Most of the large global brands have done this and just produce boxes that are in multiple languages.
BTW, I have used Electrasol before and went back to Cascade. We received samples with our new dishwasher. When you take it out of the box you have to open the plastic wrapper that the product is in and then put it into your dishwasher. Since it is chemicals you obviously have to wash your hands after. With Cascade, I just pull out a pouch and drop it into the machine and it is ready to go.
Update: I continued to be curious about this rebranding and I kept searching and found a post from Stuart Elliott from the New York Times that referenced it. Stuart’s article references an email from James Watson, the Marketing Director for Finish that confirms my thinking. They are doing the rebranding to consolidate the various names of products into individual global brand entities.
Update 2: They appear to also be running new positioning commercials around Finish being the preferred brand of the major dishwasher manufacturers. They have some play around ” diamonds” and on the Website they go way overboard with the diamond metaphor – worse than what students in branding 101 would come up with.
