How PurposeBuilt Brands plans to battle bigger rivals
Company that put purpose in its name enlists new agency Hanson Dodge to unleash Green Gobbler.
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Purpose has gotten plenty of attention from marketers for over a decade, but one household products marketer has gone so far as to put purpose in its name.
PurposeBuilt Brands is a 60-year-old company formerly known as Weiman Co. after its largest brand. Then, in 2020, the company acquired the Green Gobbler brand and stepped up its emphasis on eco-friendly products at the encouragement of its former majority owner, the private-equity firm Carlyle Group. The same year the company, which also markets Goo Gone, Gonzo Natural Magic and Biokleen, changed its name.
PurposeBuilt also recently brought on its first creative agency, Milwaukee-based Hanson Dodge, to focus initially on Green Gobbler. And the brand, which surprisingly muscles out big competitors such as Clorox Co.’s Liquid-Plumr and SC Johnson’s Drano as a top seller on Amazon, is pushing deeper into brick-and-mortar retail as well.
PurposeBuilt has changed plenty of late. It filed for an initial public offering in 2021, then withdrew those plans last October. Carlyle sold its majority stake in 2022, and the company is now majority owned by private equity firms and management.
But the purpose remains in PurposeBuilt. Jon Ballante, PurposeBuilt's VP of marketing, discusses his focus on purpose and how he’s been navigating plenty of change both for the company and in the marketplace on the latest edition of Ad Age's Marketer’s Brief podcast.
‘Surgical choices’
Ballante describes it this way: “It’s really around this being an opportunity to reflect our values of building innovative brands and products as well as that commitment to sustainability.” That commitment, he said, encompasses products, employees and communities where PurposeBuilt operates.
Part of what lets Green Gobbler, in particular, compete with much bigger players in the crowded green cleaning space is focusing on sub-segments—particularly drain care—that haven’t gotten much attention from others. It’s a category where people want more eco-friendly, less harsh-smelling products, he said, but also one where the products “absolutely need to work.”
A smaller company could also be buffeted much more than even its bigger peers by steep double-digit cost increases in materials that need to be passed along through pricing, Ballante said. But PurposeBuilt is faring well through a strategy of raising prices on more premium products where consumers are less price sensitive and holding the line more on value brands.
“We really make surgical choices,” he said, “to make sure we’re continuing to meet the needs of our consumers.”
