A spray for fabrics, a test market and a made-up word.

Febreze began as a single product with a narrow job. English Wikipedia, citing Advertising Age of 9 May 1996, says Procter & Gamble first put the product into test markets in March 1996, and that the fabric refresher has been sold across the United States since 1998. Wikipedia describes Febreze as a portmanteau of the words “fabric” and “breeze”, a coined word that puts the material first and the fresh air second.

The parent company is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Febreze has been a P&G brand from its test-market start to today. Wikipedia says P&G patented the use of a sprayable cyclodextrin solution for this kind of product; the patent it cites was filed in 1994 and assigned in 1998, the year the spray reached shoppers nationwide.

The early story is also a story about how the product was sold. In a New York Times Magazine article of February 2012, the reporter Charles Duhigg described Febreze as a case study in how habits form. Wikipedia, summarising that article, says the spray was first marketed as a way to get rid of unpleasant smells and sold poorly, until P&G realised that people become used to the smells of their own homes and stop noticing them. The marketing then shifted towards linking the spray with pleasant smells and good cleaning habits, and only later, once the brand was established, returned to talking about odours as well.

Duhigg’s account made the brand a regular example in writing about habit and marketing: the product stayed the same while the reason given for using it changed.

From one spray to a household of formats, and a second name abroad.

From the fabric spray the brand spread across the house. Wikipedia lists the lines that followed: Air Effects room sprays, Noticeables plug-in scented oil, Scentstories scented discs, candles and car air fresheners, and today’s range adds bedroom mists, bedding sprays, small diffusers, wax melts and vent clips for the car. The brand’s own site groups many of these by room, with separate products for the bedroom, the car and fabrics.

Outside the English-speaking world, much of this range carries another name. Wikipedia says that in many non-English-speaking countries the products are sold as Ambi Pur. That brand has its own history: Wikipedia’s article on Ambi Pur says it was launched in Spain in 1958 by the company Cruz Verde, which Sara Lee bought in 1984, and that on 11 December 2009 Procter & Gamble announced it would acquire the Ambi Pur air-care business from Sara Lee. Since then P&G has owned both air-care names.

The name also travelled into other P&G categories. MediaPost reported in 2011, citing the research firm Mintel, that P&G had put the Febreze name on new products from candles to laundry detergents and cleaning tools. On the shelf it competes with S. C. Johnson’s Glade and Reckitt’s former Air Wick, now part of Vestacy.

The two rivals have also met in court. In October 2007, Marketing Week reported that the UK High Court had ruled in favour of Reckitt Benckiser in a dispute with P&G over the design of its Air Wick Odour Stop spray, which P&G had argued copied the Febreze air spray.

Design and documentation.

Household glue and air-care brands sit on the same kind of shelf, in hardware aisles and supermarket cleaning sections, and both have to be recognised quickly by someone who is usually in the middle of a job. A glue’s identity is often carried by a small tube, a squeeze bottle or a twin syringe, where a name, a colour band and a few words about what the product sticks have to fit on very little space. An air freshener’s identity is carried by a can, a cone, a plug-in or a jar, and by the names given to its scents.

In air care, a fragrance named after a flower, a fruit or a season gives a label designer a colour and a picture to start from. On a glue pack, the name has to share its space with directions for use and safety wording.

Many of these names have also changed owners more than once. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its packaging and advertising have been described, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Blindfolds, a scent oasis and two words.

Febreze’s best-known advertising turned a smell into something a camera could show. In July 2011, MediaPost reported that P&G had launched a new Febreze campaign called “Breathe Happy”, built around a live scent experiment. The television spots placed Febreze in public settings such as hotels and restaurants and recorded people’s reactions. Adweek credited the campaign to Grey New York and described the format: people approached on the streets of SoHo, blindfolded and led to unpleasant places — a restaurant kitchen with raw fish on the counters, a dingy room with grime on the walls — that had been sprayed with Febreze, then asked what they could smell before the blindfold came off and the room was revealed.

The campaign extended beyond the screen. MediaPost reported that it opened with a “scent oasis” at a Summer Solstice yoga event in Times Square on 21 June, with activity planned at events around the United States, “Breathe Happy Moments” on the brand’s Facebook page and appearances at the Gilroy Garlic Festival and BlogHer 2011. The company said its own national survey, which it called a “Scentsus,” showed that people notice the smell of a home when they first visit it.

Later advertising returned to the idea from Duhigg’s account — that people stop noticing the smell of their own homes. Wikipedia links the brand to the term “nose blind,” the phrase used for olfactory fatigue in Febreze advertising.

The campaign’s name did double duty. “Breathe Happy” worked as a slogan, an event title and a description of what the blindfolded subjects were filmed doing, so the line and the film format reinforced each other wherever the campaign appeared.

For a design guide, Febreze shows how a coined product name and a single repeatable film format — a blindfold, a dirty room, a reveal — can carry a household brand for years. Compare it with Glade, S. C. Johnson’s home-fragrance name, and Air Wick, its long-standing rival on the shelf. For this guide we use breeze teal, fresh leaf green and linen white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Febreze’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.