Clorox Aims to Show that 'Green Works'

Can a major consumer packaged
goods company with a name indelibly associated with household bleach
become a leading light in the green marketplace? That’s the hope of
Clorox, the Oakland-based company, which this week is launching its
first new brand in twenty years: Green Works,
a line of cleaning products that are, in the company’s words, “at least
99 percent natural” — made from coconuts and lemon oil, formulated to
be biodegradable and non-allergenic, packaged in recyclable bottles,
and not tested on animals. The initial launch includes five products:
an all-purpose cleaner, a glass cleaner, a toilet bowl cleaner, a
dilutable cleaner, and a bathroom cleaner.

It’s an intriguing moment.
Green Works enters the marketplace with a near perfect storm of market
conditions: growing mainstream consumer demand for green products that
don’t require compromise or sacrifice; significant interest from
Wal-Mart and other big retailers in pushing greener products to the
masses; a product that seems competitive with the leading green brands;
and endorsement from Big Green.

That last item comes in the
form of an “alliance,” just announced, with the Sierra Club, which has
endorsed Green Works and whose logo will appear on Green Works labels
starting around Earth Day. Sierra Club will receive an unspecified
financial payment. Sierra Club doesn’t often endorse products,
especially ones from big companies. The last one I can recall was
Ford’s Mercury Mariner Hybrid SUV, back in 2005.

The idea of Clorox as a green
leader may strike some as odd. The company is known mostly for its
flagship product, Clorox Bleach, which is seen by some as a stain from
an environmental perspective, though the company says the product is
misunderstood and safe. (Green Works products do not contain bleach.)
Household bleach, it explains, is a water-based solution containing six
percent sodium hypochlorite,
whose chemical symbol, NaOCl, is essentially table salt (sodium
chloride, or NaCl) with a molecule of oxygen. That is, bleach comes
from, and degrades into, salt. (You wouldn’t want to drink it, but you
wouldn’t want to eat a cup of salt, either.) Moreover, the company
points out, bleach’s disinfectant properties are essential to public
health — endorsed by the World Health Organization and others.

Some environmentalists warn against using bleach, pointing out that it is toxic and corrosive and can create suspected carcinogens in the water supply. Suffice to say, Clorox refutes this. “The bleach cycle — from production to use to environmental fate — is simple and sustainable,” it maintains.

So, can The Clorox Company
become a green brand leader? I spent some time last summer talking with
the company about Green Works, part of a small consulting project. I
was asked to help Clorox think through how it was positioning both
Green Works and the company itself in advance of the product launch. I
met with the Green Works brand and marketing managers, as well as the
company’s corporate responsibility staff — a relatively new function
there.

What I found was that the company — whose brands
include Glad, Formula 409, Liquid-Plumr, S.O.S. Pads, Kingsford
charcoal, Ever Clean kitty litter, Brita water filters, Hidden Valley
salad dressings and, as of about ten weeks ago,
Burt’s Bees personal care products — had a relatively blank slate from
an environmental perspective. It did not have any significant 
skeletons. It enjoyed a solid compliance record, has joined several
voluntary programs to reduce waste and emissions, and has received modest recognition
for its performance. Except for concerns about bleach, it has been
largely off activists’ radar. From an environmental perspective, it was
neither a leader nor a laggard.

Under CEO Don Knauss, who
joined the company in 2006 from Coca-Cola, Clorox began to recognize
that environmental and social sustainability are of growing importance
for the company. By the time I showed up in July, Clorox had undertaken
efforts to reduce its packaging and had begun to inventory its carbon footprint
across its North America operations. (Among other things, the company
is working to make the Green Works manufacturing process carbon
neutral.)

Green Works seems to have
potential to be a breakthrough brand — a line of cleaners competitive,
environmentally speaking, with the leading green brands like Seventh Generation and Method,
effective enough to wear the Clorox label, priced less than other green
cleaners, and enjoying widespread distribution; Wal-Mart, for one, will
be featuring the products in its stores. If one of the goals of the
green consumer revolution is to get brand leaders to create greener
products at affordable prices, this seems a significant step in the
right direction.

Green Works’ roots go back
about three years, when a small group of individuals within the company
began investigating the green-cleaning market and conducted market
research. Through a market-segmentation exercise, they identified a
slice of the consumer market they dubbed “Chemical Avoiding
Naturalists,” consumers who wanted greener cleaners but felt the
incumbent products didn’t work well, came from brands they didn’t know
or trust, were too expensive, and weren’t always available where they
shopped. These are the folks who want strong, effective cleaners, but
worry about their health effects — the ones who say, “Let’s open the
windows and send the kids outside — we’re going to clean now!”

As the team developed and
tested products with real consumers, they recognized they had a
potential hit. “We were actually in a perfect position as a company,”
Jessica Buttimer, Green Works’ director of marketing, told me last
fall. “We have the Clorox brand. We have these distribution channels
and great relationship with Wal-Mart. We have the science to make an
efficacious product. And we have the scale to charge just a 20 percent
premium, not a 100 percent premium.” Moreover, Buttimer and her team
found that consumers trusted the Clorox brand and the fact that a
greener cleaner was coming from a company they’d known for years.

But the kicker was that the
product actually did what it was supposed to do. “We did blind testing
versus the market leaders,” says Buttimer. “We were at parity or better
in performance, which as a chemical company, you can imagine, was a
huge surprise — that these things, with 99% or more natural
ingredients, work as well as Lysol, 409, and Pine-Sol.”

Time will tell whether Green
Works will be a game-changer — whether it will make green cleaning
more affordable and accessible to the masses. But the potential is
there. Clorox doesn’t launch a new brand unless it sees a $100 million
or greater market opportunity.

But there’s a potentially
bigger story here. Clorox — a 95-year-old, relatively stodgy company
— seems to have discovered its green gene. CEO Knauss has identified
sustainability as one of three core consumer trends with which he wants
to align Clorox products. The combination of Green Works, Burt’s Bees,
and Brita give it a toehold in that market space, a foundation on which
it can build more offerings. Already, additions to the Green Works line
are being planned.

All of which has invigorated the company, says Buttimer, a thirtysomething mother of two who has become the corporate face of Green Works.
“I can’t keep my calendar clear of associate marketing managers, our
entry-level positioning and marketing people, asking, ‘How do I work on
this project?’ Or people coming to me and announcing, ‘My parents are
members of Sierra Club.’ Everyone wants to be involved.”

Moreover, she adds, “What’s
really exciting is that we’re building knowledge and confidence within
the rest of the company that we can do the same things with a lot of
our other product lines.”

A green Clorox? Anything’s possible.