Disrupting Toilet Paper With Tushy | 10X Marketing Teardown

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Full Transcription

There’s a product out there that everybody’s used but might be slightly embarrassed to talk about; toilet paper. The company Tushy is looking to disrupt this industry. So, let’s see how well their position to do that.

This is Clay from Map & Fire and this is another 10x Teardown. This is where we look at how products and services are positioned and marketed to get customers to switch over to using them.

If a new solution isn’t 10x or 10 times better than the existing one, it’s going to be hard to convert over new customers. And the goal of these reviews is to provide tools that you can use to assess the value of your own offerings and then figure out the best way to market them.

About Tushy

Today, we’re going to talk about to Tushy which is a company that makes a bidet for your home. Now if you’re not familiar with bidets, it’s essentially just a little nozzle that sits inside your toilet bowl and it sprays your butt with water to help you get cleaned up after you’ve gone to the bathroom.

In their marketing Tushy talks about several different features and benefits of this. It helps you get cleaned up more easily, it’s good for your health, the health of your butt, and it’s also much better for the environment.

So we’re going to look at all of those aspects and see how well they’re delivering on them.

Elements of Value

So to look at the different ways that Tushy’s delivering value to its customers, we’re going to use a tool called the elements of value. If you’re not familiar with the elements of value, you can read more about it on the Map & Fire website. But it’s sort of like the Periodic Table of things that customers care about when they’re buying a product or service.

The way it’s broken down is that it’s got these three different tiers.  At the bottom, we have very functional elements. In the middle, we have emotional elements. And at the top we have aspirational elements.

We’re going to look at how Tushy is delivering on each of those three tiers.

Reduces Effort

The first element we’re going to hit on is down in that functional tier and that’s reduces effort.

I think this is a big part of the value that Tushy, because as embarrassing as it might be to talk about, there’s nothing worse than having to wipe yourself off a bunch of times after going to the bathroom. A nice burst of water is just better suited for that job. It’s easier. It’s faster. It’s more thorough. It just reduces the effort.

Now, it’s not completely perfect. You still do need some toilet paper, or Tushy says you can use a towel to kind of dry yourself off afterwards. So it’s not a full 10x better, but it’s at least a 9x.

Wellness

The next element we’ll talk about is in that middle emotional tier and that’s Wellness.

Tushy talks about this quite a bit on their site and I think it’s also pretty intuitive that, your butt is just a sensitive part of your body. Rubbing it over and over again with dry, abrasive toilet paper isn’t good for the health of your skin.

Water is just a gentler way to get you cleaned off. It’s less likely to cause irritation or other problems. From that perspective, the Tushy is definitely a 10X value over to the paper.

Self-Transcendence

The last element we’ll talk about is in that aspirational tier and that’s self-transcendence.

This is a very powerful element because it gets customers thinking outside of themselves. If a product or service can help support the greater good then customers are way more likely to be attracted to it.

The way Tushy does this is by helping you reduce waste by reducing the amount of toilet paper you’re using or or even worse maybe wet wipes. You’re really helping to serve the environment.

And then Tushy also has a program where they donate money to developing countries to provide access to clean bathrooms for people. So you’re really hitting it on two different levels.

This is something again that toilet paper isn’t providing at all, so it’s definitely a 10X.

Final Score

When we look at all those together we end up with about a 9.7X which we can round up to a 10X. This is a great product that’s providing a ton of value.

I think their main challenges are just around awareness and getting people familiar with the idea of using a bidet and then probably on some level just the embarrassment of people not wanting to talk about going to the bathroom and their butts.

Opportunities To Improve

It’s clear that I think Tushy’s doing a great job. They provide a ton of value for their customers. The product is excellent. Our family’s been using Tushy for over a year and we’re super happy with it.

I also think they’re doing some really smart things with their marketing. They use humor really effectively. They also tend to use very extreme language at times which I think can help make an uncomfortable topic more comfortable for people.

When you see Tushy pushing the boundaries out here, it might make you feel more comfortable down around here.

The one area where I think they could still stand to improve is with their messaging.

Right now, it still leans a little functional and descriptive. The headline on the site is “Stop wiping your butt, start washing it with Tushy”. While that might help describe the product, it doesn’t hit on any of the benefits that we just talked about. It doesn’t talk about how it reduces effort, how it makes you healthier, how it helps the environment.

It might be fun to see them experiment with something along the lines of “Happy butt, Happy Planet” or “Healthy butt, Healthy Planet”.

An angle like that could get people a little bit more excited about a new way to clean their butt.

That’s it for another 10X Teardown. I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, please like the video leave a comment, or subscribe to the channel.

If you want some more resources around branding, marketing, and strategy. You can go to mapandfire.com. We’ve got all kinds of free worksheets and blog articles there. So check it out and I will see you next time.