CD One Price Cleaners: Case Study- Breaking Consumer Habits

The Company:

CD One Price Cleaners is a fast-growing, Chicago-based franchise.  Uniquely, it offers one set price for dry cleaning and another for hand-finished laundry.  It also offers one day service for no additional charge.  With 30 locations in Chicagoland, CD One Price Cleaners represents a new, and revolutionary approach to traditional neighborhood dry cleaners.

Key Consumer Issue:

While all current stores were doing well, CD One Price found it hard to engage new customers to try their concept.  Because dry cleaning in general is a low consumer interest category, they were having trouble getting customers away from their neighborhood dry cleaners, even if they were unhappy with the results customers were getting.

Through extensive online and focus group research, we discovered some surprising insights about customer behavior in this category.  For one, price of service is not the #1 most important attribute consumers look for when selecting a dry cleaner.  For another, habitual behavior drove consumer behavior; even if service at their current dry cleaner was less than satisfactory, they still had a hard time trying a new place. 

Building on Today’s Consumer Behavior:

Those important consumer insights, along with a number of others, helped us determine the best path forward.

We needed to provide a very compelling reason to break the habit of potential customers, and get them to quickly understand and recognize the value of CD One Price Cleaners.  We did this with a very simple expression of “habit-breaking” behavior… we challenged them to try us and compare CD One Price Cleaners to their current, neighborhood dry cleaner.  Once they experienced us for themselves, we knew our new approach and superior service would win them over.  Additionally, for current customers, we created messages and tactics that would allow them to feed their habit of coming to CD One Price for all their dry cleaning needs.