Chances are you haven’t thought much about the ethical and environmental impact of your toilet paper. But if you have, would you be willing to pay more for toilet paper that has a positive impact on the environment and contributes towards social good?
Who Gives a Crap, a direct-to-consumer premium toilet paper brand, has cultivated a following of loyal customers who are prepared to do just that. An Australian company that originally launched in 2012 via a crowdfunding campaign, Who Gives a Crap now sells in multiple international markets and is renowned for its strong ethos, creative and humorous marketing copy and a great product.
It has achieved all of this largely through word-of-mouth and a commitment to excellent customer experience (CX). So, how has Who Gives a Crap succeeded in setting itself apart with a product as unglamorous as toilet paper – and built such a beloved brand around it? Let’s take a closer look at Who Gives a Crap’s product offering, online presence, UX and CX to find out.
A feel-good brand
The first thing you tend to notice about Who Gives a Crap is their irreverent, funny and memorable copywriting – right down to the name of the business. Who Gives a Crap is a real winner of a brand name in that it works on multiple levels – it’s memorable, it’s a toilet pun (unsurprisingly, the company uses a lot of them) and it hints at the company’s ‘social good’ founding purpose. They literally do “give a crap”.
Browsing the website reveals many more entertaining turns of phrase, from product copy – one listing boasts that “Our 3-ply is as soft as unicorn kisses and as strong as 1,000 ponies” – to the email newsletter pop-up, which promises “a lifetime supply of toilet jokes”. The email receipt for a product purchase is written as a ‘love poem’, while the shipping notification email (with its 19-digit tracking number) contains a link to “how to memorise stupidly long numbers”. Shoppers are left in no doubt that this is a brand with a great sense of humour, and one they might actually look forward to receiving marketing promotions from.
Who Gives a Crap’s email newsletter promises a “lifetime supply of toilet jokes”. Source: Who Gives a Crap
The look of Who Gives a Crap’s product is as fun and carefree as its brand tone, with individual toilet rolls wrapped in jazzy, colourful or metallic paper. The website features big, high-quality product images of the type you might expect from a fashion or accessories brand – not a toilet paper brand. But this is all part of Who Gives a Crap’s appeal – it’s not your typical TP brand, and it sets itself apart by being visually appealing and memorable. Many of the approving customer reviews cite the product’s attractive wrapping paper, and Who Gives a Crap encourages its customers to re-use and get creative with the paper, particularly at Christmas.
Who Gives a Crap’s product has a fun look to match its light-hearted brand tone. Source: Who Gives a Crap
In an interview with the Australian magazine Marketing , Who Gives a Crap’s growth marketing manager Tim Baxter spoke about the importance of creating a “feel good” brand experience for Who Gives a Crap’s customers and how it sets the brand apart not just from other toilet paper brands but other companies that set out to make a difference in the world, such as charities.
“A lot of charities tend to take an angle of guilting the customer or making them feel bad to create an action for a charitable cause,” he told Marketing. “We want them to feel alive and happy when they’ve interacted with us, whether that’s buying a product or even if it’s just chatting to our ‘customer happiness’ team, which is our customer service team.
“While we are dealing with a very serious cause and serious problem – which is the 2.3 billion people in the world that don’t have access to sanitation – we want to make sure people want to come on that journey with us to help solve it and we believe the best way is to make it a delightful, fun experience rather than one that they feel bad about.”
This seems to have resonated well with Who Gives a Crap’s customers, many of whom have come on board with – and continue to purchase from – the brand due to its ethos and mission, which involves donating 50% of its profits to partner organisations that work on building toilets and improving sanitation in communities that don’t have access to basic levels of hygiene and sanitation.
Social purpose
Consumers, particularly younger consumers, are reported to be more likely than ever to buy from brands that are driven by a genuine purpose, are ethical or sustainable, or set out to benefit the environment. According to a 2018 report by Kantar Consulting, nearly two-thirds of Millennials and Generation Zed express a preference for “brands that have a point of view and stand for something”.
It comes as little surprise, therefore, that customers warm to Who Gives a Crap, a brand that isn’t just jumping on the corporate social responsibility bandwagon but was founded specifically to do good in the world – and is environmentally friendly to boot. Who Gives a Crap makes sure that its social purpose is featured prominently on the website, encouraging customers to buy its “feel-good products” and highlighting the fact that they are “made without trees” (Who Gives a Crap offer two different types of toilet paper: one recycled, and one made with sustainable bamboo) as well as the fact that 50% of the company’s profits are donated to help build toilets.
Who Gives a Crap makes sure that its brand purpose is clearly laid out and highlighted on its website. Source: Who Gives a Crap
The website features an ‘Our Impact’ section that explains the company’s mission and how profits from Who Gives a Crap benefit its partner organisations, including a running total of how much money Who Gives a Crap has raised for good causes to date (converted into different currencies for each regional website). Who Gives a Crap also publishes a yearly ‘impact update’ with a video from the company’s CEO and co-founder talking about the brand’s impact so far.
This webpage also curates a range of toilet-related content with videos on sanitation, historical toilets and toilet-related comedy – it’s not content marketing exactly as none of it was made by Who Gives a Crap, but it helps to strengthen the brand and reinforce its purpose. At the bottom of the page there’s also a ‘Shop now’ call to action which invites customers to “do even more good” by buying from the brand – creating a direct link in the customer’s mind between making a purchase and supporting a good cause.
The Who Gives a Crap website draws a direct link between shopping with the brand and “doing good” – incentivising customers to buy from them. Source: Who Gives a Crap
“Seamless” customer experience
Like many direct-to-consumer brands, Who Gives a Crap has placed a high priority on creating an excellent customer experience, from its order process to its customer service. The company’s About page features eight staff whose role title contains “Customer happiness”, out of a total of 16 (17 if you count the cat) – meaning that half of Who Gives a Crap’s senior team is devoted to customer service and customer experience.
In an interview with eatbigfish, Who Gives a Crap co-founder and CEO Simon Griffiths talked about how creating a “seamless” customer experience made the company’s signature irreverent humour work without being overwhelming:
“When you’re on our site, you want to be able to get to our product and go through to checkout without being bombarded with irreverence. But if we can make our customer experience really seamless and frictionless, then we can put the irreverence around the edges of it and allow people to discover it at their own pace. Irreverence is an important part of who we are, but it’s also about using irreverence in the right place.”
Does the company’s website live up to this goal? Overall, I found the experience of browsing and ordering from the site to be straightforward and clear – with just a couple of exceptions. The pricing on the company’s multi-box toilet paper listings is a little confusing, as they are listed as “£36” and “£40” respectively – but this is the per-box price, not the total price, and also doesn’t account for the 20% discount that is applied when you order multiple boxes (for example, five boxes of 48 double-length rolls are sold for £160, which is £32 per box, not £36).
I was also less than impressed to find that the 100% Recycled Toilet Paper product listing uses a bit of a dark pattern (a murky pattern, maybe): the recycled toilet paper is sold in batches of 24, and the main page lists its price as “from £24.00” – the price for 24 rolls. However, the product page selects 48 rolls by default, making the customer go out of their way to select the 24 roll product offering (which is also listed below the 48 roll product offering in the drop-down menu, the reverse of what you would expect when selecting product quantity).
Who Gives a Crap is guilty of using a murky pattern with its product page for recycled toilet paper. Source: Who Gives a Crap
While I can appreciate that the 48 roll product listing is better value at £36, the website main page still advertises a different product option to the one that’s selected by default – and I find it hard to believe that no customers have ever accidentally selected more rolls than they intended to order as a result. For a company that prides itself on its ethics and customer experience, it’s a little disappointing.
A look at Who Gives a Crap’s Trustpilot page also reveals a number of complaints about unresponsive customer service from the past three to four months, which appear to have been caused (at least in part) by a support platform migration that prevented the company from responding to issues in a timely fashion (insert message about the potential dangers of poorly-executed tech migrations here…).
However, the company deserves credit for responding to and resolving the vast majority of them. It’s worth noting here that Who Gives a Crap also has a “100% money back guarantee” for dissatisfied customers and seems to be good about issuing refunds or replacement boxes – something that goes a long way towards improving the customer experience and also improving customer trust.
The company’s commitment to keeping costs low in favour of putting more money towards good causes may work against it on the customer service front, as some customers have complained about the lack of a phone line for customer support, which the company doesn’t yet have due to the costs associated with it. While this might seem like a bad move from a customer experience standpoint, it does lend additional weight to the company’s commitment to its mission.
It’s a trade-off, but one that Who Gives a Crap has evidently decided is worthwhile – and customer service hitches aside, the other elements of the brand, from its fun presentation to its ethos, seem to be winning it plenty of glowing reviews and repeat business.
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