Something will be missing when 82-year-old suburban Chicago water treatment company Culligan runs its first national TV commercial in decades during Sunday’s Golden Globes telecast on NBC.
Looking to broaden and modernize its appeal to millennial consumers, Culligan is dropping “man” from its 60-year-old “Hey, Culligan Man!” slogan.
“Whether they’ve seen it recently or not, a lot of consumers remember ‘Hey, Culligan Man!’ fondly,” said Larry Holzman, senior vice president for Culligan, who oversees the company’s North American dealer network. “But the ‘man’ part of it in today’s environment doesn’t necessarily relate real well to a younger consumer.”
The new commercial, created by Minneapolis ad agency Fallon, features actor Cary Elwes referencing his role from “The Princess Bride” and repeating his famous “as you wish” line while demonstrating the many applications of Culligan treated water — from bathing to cooking and drinking.
It also introduces a new brand name, Culligan Water, to make it clearer to younger consumers exactly what the company does, Holzman said.
Culligan’s longtime slogan is never uttered, but it shows up at the end of the ad to steer viewers to the company’s HeyCulligan.com website.
The national campaign is backed by $20 million in funding from Culligan and its dealer network, nearly doubling the company’s annual advertising expenditure to about $50 million for 2018.
The private company, which moved its headquarters from Northbrook to Rosemont in 2007, has 620 dealers in the U.S. and Canada that sell water softeners, filtration products, whole-house systems, and bottled water for homes and offices. Culligan had international sales of about $600 million last year.
But its core water softening business is flat, and the company has foundered at times in recent years, changing hands frequently, falling into bankruptcy and trying to branch out into the more lucrative drinking water purification business.
Founded in Northbrook in 1936 by Emmett Culligan, the family-owned water softening business grew to national prominence on the backs of a widespread dealer network and an ad campaign that first aired on a Los Angeles radio station in 1958 and proved hard to ignore.
The ad ended with a woman misinterpreting instructions to call the company and instead yelling “Hey, Culligan Man!” It caught on and was picked up by Culligan nationally, including in a cartoon TV commercial that ran in various incarnations through the 1970s.
The family sold the business in 1978 to Beatrice Foods, and it went through several ownership changes before landing in bankruptcy in 1992. Culligan emerged under the control of famed investors Carl Icahn and Leon Black.
A series of ownership changes followed, including a 2012 purchase by New York private equity firm Centerbridge Partners in a restructuring deal that avoided another bankruptcy. Advent International, a Boston-based private equity firm, bought Culligan for a reported $915 million in December 2016, a figure the company declined to confirm.
Culligan remains profitable and is seeing double-digit year-over-year revenue growth, with water softening representing about two-thirds of that revenue, Holzman said.
The new ad campaign reflects Advent’s investment in a new strategy for growing the company: tapping into millennials’ thirst for purified drinking water, he said.
Industry trends support the strategy. Freedonia Group, a Cleveland-based research company, projects the U.S. consumer water treatment market to grow by 4.4 percent a year to $1.6 billion by 2021, driven in part by growing concern about drinking water quality.
“The media coverage of water quality issues throughout the U.S. has really opened people’s eyes,” said Dan Debelius, an industry analyst with Freedonia, who cited the 2014 lead contamination in Flint, Mich., as a turning point. “People are becoming more aware and more willing to see what they can do about getting cleaner water in their home.”
Debelius said water purification represented nearly 80 percent of the industry’s $1.3 billion in residential revenues in 2016, with water softening accounting for the rest. He said he thinks Culligan can make significant inroads against other water purification companies, such as Brita, Pur and GE Appliances.
“Culligan is well-established in water softening,” Debelius said. “There’s a lot more competitive opportunities in some of the purification segments, especially with their brand name.”
Walking away from at least a part of that brand equity by dropping the “man” from “Hey, Culligan Man!” was “scary” at first for Holzman and the company, but extensive research said the shortened slogan, and its relatively low profile, should do the trick for older consumers.
Meanwhile, by evoking “The Princess Bride,” an empowering 1987 romantic comedy that fueled many millennial childhood dreams, Culligan is hoping to make a splash with a new target customer.
“When you put it in front of a younger female consumer, who’s obviously a prime target for us, they don’t want to just yell for help or be a damsel in distress,” Holzman said. “So ‘Hey Culligan’ seems to be much more relatable to that audience.”
Twitter @RobertChannick
