Interview with Jeff Hollender

Our biggest-selling product has been the biggest-selling product probably for most of our whole time in business, and that is bathroom tissue.

Bathroom tissue is probably the biggest-selling product for two reasons. One is the category is a gigantic category -- billions and billions of dollars are sold of bathroom tissue every year, and secondly, the proposition which is driven by the fact that the product is made from recycled paper, high-post consumer content, not bleached by chlorine. But primarily the recycled content proposition is probably one of the better understood propositions that we make to consumers.

It's interesting that we focus on high-post consumer content and not bleached with chlorine. Those issues while are very important to the environment are not well understood at all by consumers. When we started out, we were using what I call traditional, sort of external environmental issues as benefits and motivators -- save trees, save water, create less air pollution, make the planet a safer, healthier place.

What we've learned over time through trial and error as well as a substantial amount of research is the health-related motivators are much more powerful than the exclusively environmental motivators. So if you're selling a cleaning product, and you can talk about the reduction of indoor air pollution, that is of much greater concern to these consumers than the fact that we're using a vegetable rather than a petroleum-based surfactant. And, of course, the vegetable-based surfactant uses renewable resources, where a traditional cleaning product using a petroleum-based surfactant uses nonrenewable resources.

While those issues are important, they are very secondary in terms of the driver and the benefit that the consumer really is interested in. One of the indications of that is we used to have a tag line called "Products for a Healthy Planet." About three years ago we changed that to "Safer for You and the Environment."

Now of course all of these issues are interrelated. If you're polluting the air in your own home, you're using chemicals that are bad for the environment, but the consumer doesn't necessarily make all those links.