Gillette: GILLETTE SHAVE SEX, 3

Credits & Description:

Award: AME Silver Medallion
Competition: AME
Competition Year: 2014
Agency: BBDO
Agency Country: CHINA
Agency City: SHANGHAI
Competition: 193 2014 AME Awards
Category: PS18 personal items
Category Group: products & services
Brand/Sponsor: GILLETTE
Title: GILLETTE SHAVE SEXY
Creative Director: KIT KOH
Production Company: N/A
Production Company Producer: N/A
Product Type RAZORS & BLADES FOR MEN
Campaign Start 12 / 03 / 2012
Campaign End 12 / 23 / 2012
Campaign Ran CHINA
Campaign Description brand repositioning or restaging
Marketing Context THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT WET SHAVING
For most men in China, wet shaving (razors) was an utterly inconvenient chore. Given the population’s lack of facial hair, it simply did not warrant the time and effort required. And this sentiment was only amplified with the increasingly time-starved lifestyles in China.
In dry shaving (electric shavers) they saw the perfect alternative- decent results but none of the inconvenience. And with the rise of electric shaver brands like Philips and Flyco, men deserted wet shaving in droves: whereas in 2006 50% of men in China were wet shaving, in 2012 only 30% were [Source: NCS 2011]. This translated to 18.3 million switchers every year and a 20% shrinkage in Gillette’s addressable market.
THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH FOR GILLETTE
For Gillette, the leader in wet shaving (84% value share in November 2012), this was becoming a crisis: category erosion represented US$647.2 million in lost earnings between 06’-12’ [Source: P&G Internal Data]. It was clear that Gillette’s classic approach of communicating closeness and comfort was falling on deaf ears; men simply didn’t care. Despite extensive marketing efforts, campaign reach declined, product launches became less effective, and overall growth slowed to single digits- a particularly worrying fact considering China’s importance as a market. The whole premise of Gillette’s promise needed urgent and radical re-thinking.
Our challenge was clear: how could we reframe Gillette’s promise to overcome wet shaving’s inherent inconvenience, resuscitating the brand's business in China?
We set 3 aggressive objectives for our annual December campaign:
1. Surpass success of previous best-in-class launch of Gillette Fusion, in reach and participation
Best-in-class launch of Gillette Fusion in 2010 achieved a reach of 66 million and 57,000 interactions [Source: P&G Commissioned Tracking]. In light of category erosion and wet shaving becoming more and more low-interest, the aim was to match that.
2. Stunt year-on-year growth of the dry shaving category
The dry shaving category had been growing at a 3 year compound rate of 21% every year (average unit growth/ December 2009-11) [Source: P&G Internal Data]; between December 2011 vs. December 2010 alone, the category sold 50,000 more units. The ambition for the campaign month was to zero their growth (vs. December 2011).
3. Accelerate total brand growth beyond past 3-year high of 3% over campaign month
Gillette’s December value growth had been plateauing since 2009, with the best growth recorded at 3% in 2011 (December 2011 vs. November 2011) [Source: P&G Internal Data], the ambition for the campaign was to double this growth to 6%.
Achieving these with an equivalent to just 10% of the average monthly media spend of the dry shaving category [Source: Nielsen 2012].
Campaign Planning
For the campaign to have any hope of succeeding, we needed to have a complete re-look at the opportunity for wet shaving.
WET SHAVING MUST DELIVER TRUE VALUE MEN CAN SEE
We spoke to our target extensively- in bars, gyms, ethnographic home-visits, multi-city focus group discussions; and their perception towards wet shaving was consistent: ‘why bother?’ We then tried to convince them of the superior closeness and comfort delivered by wet shaving, leveraging a range of scientific claims and demonstration videos to amplify our impact, but still the target was utterly unmoved. To them, shaving was but a chore they wanted to expedite, and their trusty Philips or Flyco was doing just fine in that endeavor.
THE BIG AHA: IT’S NOT ABOUT THE STUBBLE, STUPID!
The real breakthrough happened when we started speaking to women about shaving. While those with boyfriends or husbands who dry shaved bore a nonchalant or somewhat negative perception about shaving (noisy, bulky, messy etc.), those with boyfriends or husbands who wet shaved expressed a totally different and wholly unexpected sentiment. As they described their boyfriend or husband’s shaving habits- we noticed their eyes light up, and their voices drop. It was at that moment that we realized we had uncovered a forbidden secret about Chinese women: the act of wet shaving was an extremely sexy experience to watch. ‘Wet shaving makes any man sexy’ they said, demonstrating courage, focus, and most importantly manliness; which in turn made her feel ‘beautiful’ and ‘taken care of’.
When we sought to validate the insight via a national qualitative research, showing dry shaving men across the country video footages of women sharing their arousing thoughts on wet shaving, the response could not have been more impressive. Heads were turned, eyebrows were raised, and a sentiment of disbelief and curiosity filled the air; suddenly we had the target’s attention.
At last we had discovered a powerful and revolutionary insight that could revive the wet shaving category - wet shaving wasn’t inconvenient, it was…SEXY (and which progressive urbanite doesn’t want to be attractive to women?).
Marketing & Media Strategy
THE BIG IDEA: ‘SHAVE SEXY’
A strategically deployed, fully integrated campaign that extolled the sexiness of wet shaving with Gillette. It was a campaign of many organizational firsts:
1) Unbranded content & PR partnerships- to enhance public acceptance and creative liberty, much of the campaign was intentionally unbranded, deployed through strategic partnerships with opinion leaders, and target-relevant media. Only at the height of interaction did Gillette ‘join in’ to own the conversation.
2) Unconventional advertising- we designed ‘Shave Sexy’ to be deliberately authentic. Traditional media and historic preference for iconic athlete endorsements played second fiddle behind social media, activation and collaboration with popular and controversial cultural icons, facilitating greater interaction and conversation.
3) Overhaul of marketing language- we reframed shaving from (a) self-experience to the experience for watching women, (b) stubble removal to an act of courting, and (c) from clean & comfort to sexy.
Such bold shifts required meticulous planning and hourly/ daily monitoring to ensure nimbleness and to mitigate the risks involved, it also required absolute cohesion and messaging consistency across the different facets of the brand; from marketing, PR to distribution channels and sales force.
Creative Strategy
THE ‘SHAVE SEXY’ SOCIAL EXPERIMENT
The issue with our insight (that women found wet shaving arousing to watch), was that men found it too surprising and unbelievable; to the extent they doubted its credibility. Even Gillette employees kept wanting to check the facts! Because of this, we knew it was not enough to simply communicate the sexiness of wet shaving with Gillette; we had to prove it.
We worked with social psychologists to create a large-scale social experiment to test the effect of wet shaving on on-looking women. We hired a pair of handsome identical twin brothers and invited 40 women to congregate and vote whom they found to be sexier.
The moment we signaled for the twins to start shaving- one with a wet razor, one with a dry shaver, women started smiling and posturing for the wet shaving twin, and one by one started gravitating towards him; deserting the dry shaving twin. And crucially, the longer the twin wet shaved; the more he ‘inconvenienced’ himself; the greater the transformation: women went from bored to interested, interested to fixated, fixated to AROUSED. By the time the wet shaving twin had finished, 85% of women voted for him as being sexier.
A ‘SHAVE SEXY’ NATIONAL DEBATE
With our offer of exclusivity, FHM agreed to release the clip of the social experiment ‘unbranded’ through their social media platforms. Diffusing this via a PR stunt where two controversial female celebrities had a planned public fall-out online over their contrasting views on the experiment, the clip went viral overnight. Suddenly, inconvenient became sexy; and better still, the more inconvenient the sexier. Then; leveraging on FHM’s connections; carefully deployed editorial, opinion-leader involvement and dialogue-seeding from celebrities drove men to prolifically tweet about ‘Shave Sexy’, debate it, and even reference it in their everyday conversations. ‘Un-planned’ celebrities soon got involved, posting photos of themselves wet shaving, amplifying ‘Shave Sexy’ even more. The highlight was when we deployed famous Japanese adult movie star Aoi Sora to post her own shaving photo, let’s just say it inspired her army of fans to get creative and reciprocate (!). Within one week, ‘Shave Sexy’ was featured on every web news portal, men’s magazines and even national radio; it became a meme.
CUE BRANDED ‘GILLETTE SHAVE SEXY’ CONTENT
At the height of commotion (week 2), a barrage of ‘Gillette Sexy Shave’ content was released to translate the on-going dialogue into dry shaver conversion for Gillette:
1) ‘Gillette Shave Sexy’ PR events/ road-shows- recruiting men all over China to ‘Shave Sexy’, tapping onto FHM’s extensive CRM database to drive awareness and participation.
2) ‘Gillette Shave Sexy’ tips video & TVC- teaching men how to maximize the sexiness of their shave, distributed through FHM, social media and high-traffic markets.
3) ‘Gillette Shave Sexy’ online & in-store animation- games, banners and voting initiatives to drive engagement online; shelf-talkers and ‘Shave Sexy’ activities at point-of-sales.
All the above fronted by no-nonsense football commentator Huang Jian Xiang (another first compared to Gillette’s normal preference for athletes) to drive cut-through.
Evidence of Results
The category-shifting insight and innovative diffusion model helped ‘Shave Sexy’ achieve all three objectives:
Objective 1: Surpass success of previous best-in-class launch of Gillette Fusion, in reach and participation
Result: Our most successful campaign to date, engaging more people vs. Nike Olympics campaign
‘Shave Sexy’ ran for 3 weeks in December 2012, and reached 197 million people [Source: P&G Commissioned Tracking]; that’s twice the viewership of Super Bowl 2013, more than the population of Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam put together, and a 198.5% increase compared to the launch of Gillette Fusion- what was previously our best launch to date. Furthermore, ‘Shave Sexy’ drove upwards of 200,000 interactions (comments, voting), tripling that of Fusion and exceeding that of Nike’s hugely successful and highly involving ‘Greatness’ Olympics campaign in 2012 [P&G Commissioned Tracking].
Objective 2: Stunt year-on-year growth of the dry shaving category
Result: Reversed growth of dry shaving category for the first time since 2009
‘Shave Sexy’ successfully reversed the monthly sales of the dry shaving category by -21% [Source: P&G Internal Data]. If we assumed that the dry shaving category was on course to sustain their 3 year compound growth rate of 21%, this represented a category decline of -34% or a shortfall of 200,000 dry shaver units; equivalent to an entire month’s sales of Philips shaver units (market leader of the dry shaver category).
Objective 3: Accelerate total brand growth beyond past 3-year high of 3% over campaign month
Result: Helped Gillette achieve its highest ever sales growth
‘Shave Sexy’ far exceeded the objective of doubling the value growth of Gillette in December (vs. November 2012); it more than tripled it to 10.2% [Source: P&G Internal Data]. And to rule out seasonality effects, we also looked at December 2012 sales vs. prior year periods and found a 19.1% growth year-on-year. In fact, the campaign could’ve easily exceeded this growth had we better anticipated the huge surge in demand, which left many of our channels experiencing perpetual stock shortages within just one week of launch. According to historic data, this represented the highest launch sales month in the history of Gillette’s business in China.
Ruling out possible bias
(a) No change in pricing/ distribution- price points/ distribution of all Gillette products remained constant during the campaign period. Furthermore there were no special promotions in place to incentivize purchase.
(b) No change in competitive activity- no change in competitive activity: aggressive spending was maintained by dry shaver brands like Philips, Panasonic and Flyco through the campaign period, and no additional (hardly any activity as per usual) spending by other wet razor brands like BIC.
(c) Other factors- no new films or books that glamorized wet shaving; even the latest James Bond film (with that shaving scene) didn’t screen until months later; and no scandals from dry shaver brands of any sort; as far as we can see it was strictly business as usual.
“In summary, ‘Shave Sexy’ was an idea that single-handedly and radically revived the business of Gillette, and successfully put wet shaving back into the consideration set of men across China. All this achieved by overhauling our classic approach of communicating closeness and comfort, reframing wet shaving from inconvenient to…SEXY” (Alexander Dony- Managing Director, Male Grooming Greater China).
Target Audience
We targeted dry shaving, progressive urbanite men aged 25-35: they displayed the highest incidence for dry shaver usage [Source: TNS 2012], and they were the group other men looked towards for trends and wisdom.