Case study
Unified Service Architecture
Tide Cleaners/Procter & Gamble · Service Strategy
Situation
Tide Cleaners had grown to three distinct formats through acquisition: freestanding suburban locations with drive-thrus, university wash-and-fold operations, and urban delivery and locker drop services.
Leadership wanted a more coherent identity across the three, driven by the operational challenge of managing multiple brand identities under one roof. Each format had its own visual language, its own systems, and its own way of representing Tide.
Complication
An identity solution would have produced visual coherence without strategic foundation. But the deeper challenge was a collision of worldviews.
Two owners.
The core P&G org funded the work, but the Tide Cleaners services group was the one who would have to live with it and actually use it day to day. The stakeholders with budget power were removed from the stakes.
Two frames.
The core org saw brand through a CPG lens: a product, a package, and orange bottles on a shelf. The services group brought a lean startup and experience-oriented perspective, seeing brand as something people interact with over time.
Too internal.
Both owners argued from inside the organization, one from operations, one from experience design, but neither started from how customers actually moved through their relationship with Tide.
Action
I reoriented the problem around something both owners actually shared: the customer.
One goal.
Reframed the ask, elevating it from visual identity to brand architecture, to give both owners a shared strategic objective. Three formats needed common ground to work from, not just visual alignment.
One system.
Grounded stakeholders' individual perspectives by giving both owners' points of reference a place in the same frame. Looked at the opportunity holistically, as a single system spanning both packaged goods and service experience.
One customer.
Reoriented the system from the outside in, starting with the customer's perspective instead of the organization's. Mapped the formats against human life stages, revealing a connective thread: campus laundry for students, urban lockers for young professionals, suburban dry cleaning for families, with Tide detergent surfacing throughout.
Outcome
- Unified packaged goods and service experience into a single system, giving both owners a shared foundation to build from
- Threaded a coherent narrative across life stages, extending the Tide brand relationship to span a lifetime
- Delivered a strategic direction the brand adopted (eventually), even as full alignment between the two owners took longer to settle.