Herbal Essences "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Ads
A woman steps into the shower, lathers up and murmurs "feels so good," then "yes, yes, yes," and the whole thing ends in a cry that was, technically, about shampoo. Clairol's "totally organic experience" campaign made Herbal Essences one of the most talked-about ads on 90s TV and every kid in the room suddenly very interested in the carpet.
Herbal Essence had been around since 1971, a green Clairol shampoo in a clear bottle with a cartoon nature girl bathing in a pool on the label, and by the early 90s it was an aging one. The relaunch came from the New York agency Wells Rich Greene BDDP, where creative director Linda Kaplan Thaler built a campaign around the line "a totally organic experience." It broke in 1994 and went wide in 1995 with a print, TV and radio push of roughly $15 to $20 million, and the money went to one idea: women who really, really enjoyed washing their hair.
The signature spot put a woman in the shower, murmuring "feels so good" and building to "yes, yes, yes" and a cry that lifted its punchline straight from the deli scene in When Harry Met Sally. Later versions moved the moan to a crowded supermarket and to an airplane, where the other passengers could hear it, and in the late 90s Clairol hired sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer to appear in the spots. Kaplan Thaler founded her own agency in 1997 and took the account with her, and the campaign's budget had grown to about $30 million by 1999.
It worked, at least by the campaign's own case-study accounting: Herbal Essences roughly tripled its market share between 1994 and 1999 and became the second-largest shampoo brand in America, and Clairol called it the most successful product launch in the company's history. Clairol sold the brand to Procter & Gamble in 2001, the moaning finally stopped in 2004 after a year of slipping share, and P&G later reintroduced the gag with Nicole Scherzinger in an airplane lavatory in 2014. But the original shower spot is the one people remember, usually because they watched it sitting next to their parents.
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