Case Study: Clorox Uses AI to Transform Consumer Insights

Earlier this week, we posted about what AI might mean for advertising. This recent Wall Street Journal article, “How the Owner of Hidden Valley Ranch Learned to Love AI” (July 4, 2025) provides a case study about how Clorox is using AI to enhance its market research and advertising.

In a bold push toward digital transformation, Clorox is leveraging generative AI to rethink how it markets and develops products across its portfolio, including brands like Hidden Valley Ranch and Burt’s Bees. Through tools like Pencil and ChatGPT, Clorox is generating thousands of visuals, ad variants, and product concepts quickly and cost-effectively. One example involved improving an unappetizing AI-generated image of chicken wings by refining prompts—highlighting how even small tweaks in generative AI inputs can make or break consumer appeal.

Rather than imposing top-down AI mandates, Clorox’s leadership encourages grassroots experimentation. Departments use AI for tasks like summarizing consumer reviews, ideating new products, and rapidly testing digital prototypes. This people-first approach has sparked efficiency and creativity, while maintaining a human filter to ensure outputs are both strategic and marketable. This real-world case offers valuable insights into how AI tools can support—rather than replace—marketing teams, making it a compelling example for instructors teaching innovation, product development, or marketing strategy.

Relevant Chapters in Essentials of Marketing

• Chapter 7: Improving Decisions with Marketing Information. AI is used to collect, summarize, and analyze customer reviews across platforms like Amazon and Walmart—an example of next-generation marketing analytics and decision support systems.
• Chapter 13: Promotion—Introduction to Integrated Marketing Communication and Chapter 15 Advertising and Sales Promotion. The use of generative AI for creating and testing digital ads supports understanding the Promotion blend, including AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) and digital creative strategy.
• Chapter 9: Product Management and New-Product Development. Clorox’s use of AI in brainstorming, prototyping, and testing new products (like the Toilet Bomb cleaner) ties into the new-product development process and innovation pipeline .

Discussion Questions and Initial Ideas

1. What are the benefits of allowing grassroots AI experimentation in a company? (Chapter 7) Encourages innovation, reveals real use-cases, and allows best practices to emerge organically rather than being forced top-down.
2. How does Clorox use marketing information systems to stay competitive? (Chapter 7) Clorox uses AI to analyze customer feedback, detect trends, and improve its marketing mix based on real-time consumer sentiment.
3. How does AI change Clorox’s promotion strategies? (Chapter 13, Chapter 16) AI enables rapid creation of microtargeted content, lower-cost ad production, and greater personalization.
4. What ethical concerns arise from AI-generated marketing? (Chapter 19) Potential for job displacement, bias in AI outputs, or misleading visuals. However, Clorox’s emphasis on augmentation rather than automation mitigates some concerns.
5. What’s the marketing logic behind Clorox’s Mad Libs-style prompt builder? (Chapter 13) Ensures brand consistency, saves time, and democratizes creative content production across teams.
6. How does the use of AI support Clorox’s segmentation and targeting efforts? (Chapter 4) By rapidly generating and testing ads for different food pairings and consumer segments, Clorox can fine-tune messaging per target market.
7. How does generative AI support or hinder product development? (Chapter 9) It supports idea generation and prototyping speed but may produce impractical ideas like “bleachless bleach” without human judgment.
8. Why might Clorox continue to rely on human oversight despite AI’s capabilities? (Chapter 9) Because AI can “hallucinate” or generate off-brand or unrealistic ideas—e.g., cat litter ads about loving pet poop—requiring human filtering.

ChatGPT was used to generate initial ideas for this blog post.