BRAND:
Dove Deodorants
AWARD CATEGORY:
The Best Influencer Strategy
CAMPAIGN TIME RANGE:
1/6/2023 - 31/12/2023
CREDITS:
ZEE, The A List, Mindshare
CASE STUDY VIDEO
STRATEGY
Category context
Not only being an underdeveloped category, Deodorant was also hit hard by Covid19 and then lost 1/3 of its buyers. There has been a recovery in penetration, but penetration is much behind the past 5-year base.
Thus, rather than making an effort in competitor war game, buyer base expansion is lower hanging fruit for every player who dares to be challenged in this job. In the light of that, GenZ completely dominates the other age range because of the highest penetration among this group & high potential to recruit. However, to make the move for a long-term under-developed category to such emerging consumer, this job is as a diamond mine – promising & challenging.
Brand context: The ambition of Dove Deodorant
As the top Mega Beauty Brand worldwide – with global & local reputation, Dove has not yet experienced great success in deodorant – one of the biggest categories of Unilever globally. Entering 2023 with a winning mix – superior in efficacy & differentiated in format, Dove figured the opportunity to strongly turbocharge in this category and become the game changer.
The challenge
Not only promising as game changer in this category, Dove took the opportunity and the risk to become a market maker – a whole new deodorant format – cream serum with active skincare ingredients – 3% Niacinamide.
More, because it’s Dove, which product will you call out when we called this name out in Vietnam? Of course, it will not be deodorant.
Thus, Dove faces the challenge as an emerging player in this category, the need to become a market maker convincing of something new to market and under a firm-associated brand.
Hence, we have to find a really disruptive approach for Dove to win the market and to win consumer mind.
INSIGHT
Firstly, it’s surprising that beauty deodorant demand space with skincare add-ed value, accounts more than 50% market. Consumer in this demand space simply take for granted anti-perspirant and deodorizing which are category fundamentals. Thus, they appreciate the product could grant them the beauty look of underarm skin.
This triggered our associative thinking, what if we would mimic a rising star in skincare in our upcoming campaign? What is their winning formulation? How was the emerging & small brand turn around the market with the bet on social, influencer, and limited media investment? How did they start educating the complicated format & sophisticated ingredient? It may be their way to create the motivation for consumers’ involvement and discussion – the provoking myths and the authentic-like content spread as apocalypse. They got a series of myths and facts to provoke consumer mind, stopping them from scrolling away and hijacking their curiosity. They haunted them with the aspirational beautiful outcomes rather than the old way to address hardly their problem.
Learning about GenZ, they are quite skeptical of brand voice, 99% of Generation Z consumers have admitted to frequently skipping ads & nearly two-thirds (63%) of Generation Zs use ad blockers to avoid online adverts. The concept of influencers, de-influencers or KOC becomes quite familiar among this group. This will be the game starter for us to win above all the bigger players in the category. We would aim to gather and produce many authentic contents as a key convincing point to consumer.
Furthermore, the emergency of today's social media, especially Tiktok, has created opportunities and turbocharged the emerging or low awareness product format and brand. Then, we chose Tiktok as our powerhouse platform with a huge room of tactics that we can play with consumers.
CREATIVE IDEA
What if we will not sell deodorant anymore? We will promote an underarm skincare product with deodorizing efficacy. This is our new winning approach through our consumer connection. Dove released a underarm skincare range with 3% Niacinamide active ingredient and a series of other potent skincare ingredients. Dove has 2 formats – traditional glass roll-on and cream serum with cream serum as the hero to build flagship portfolio. And our product could promise 5-day whitening & 48h deodorizing.
And it does not end there. To make our KOC universe plan authentic and convincing, we produce #cuucanh big idea endorsed by 1001 myths and contexts that you might need to grant your skin savior. (list a series of myths).
We seeded those myths to our KOC along with our product, then challenged them to pick the most unreliable myth. They had their chance to experience our product in 5 days and shared experience on Tiktok even however the outcome.
CONNECTION PLAN
We have 2 main phases with strong product hijack: 1. Seed and convince the underarm skin phenomenon; 2. Drive contextual content for relevancy
In the first 5 months launching, we in parallel maximized the available Tiktok KOC hub and self-organized KOCs contest, then in which we could have more than 2000 KOCs joined through this period. The good assets would receive the high prizes and being invested media promoted on their video, which could help them become more accessible on Tiktok. This offer was quite appealing – especially to new KOCs who really need the products and brand support. This is a win-win deal that brand will have high quality social first assets.
In the second phase, we tapped into festive season to promote ‘Bo Canh Xinh’ idea. 24K Right & Phap Kieu will be our main players to trigger UGS & KOC content. 2 rappers released a catchy demo with a Capcut template with brand injection in lyrics and visual. We mimicked this as a non-branded activity on the collaboration of 2 rappers, which encouraged many UGC content. And then, KOC will react on the PhapKieu visual to see if product has their efficacy.
Throughout the campaign, we nearly bet on Tiktok channel with 3 layers of media promotion: Tiktok TopViews to grab consumer attention especially in Pureplays Mega day, Tiktok Reach and Frequency to build awareness, and Tiktok Traffic to optimize traffic to Pureplays – our core channel.
OBJECTIVE-BASE KPI
1. EXPONENTIALLY BUSINESS RESULT – BECOME NO.1 BEST SELLING BRAND ON #1 SHOPEE AND KEY CUSTOMERS TO CONQUER DOMINANT LEADERSHPI IN FEMALE
- 30% month on month uplift in terms of sales running rate
- 4x Dove Deodorant business in 2023
- Become No.1 Volume sales on Shopee & conquer leadership in female deodorant in key customers
2. INCREASE PENETRATION & SHARE SIGNIFICANTLY:
- Double penetration base driven by Household Age <30
- Gain +14% market shares with limited channel choice in 6 month launching.
3. Outstanding results in Tiktok Brand Lift Survey:
- 9.2% Ad Recall Lift (vs. 4% Consumer Packed Good – CPG benchmark)
- 10.1% Purchase Intent Lift (vs. 0.7% CPG benchmark)
4. Impressive media performances – especially cost sufficiency to Pureplays: Low cost per Visit with high quality as Low Drop Rate at 19% vs. 40% FMCG benchmark & 44% Visits converted to ATC
5. HUGE EARNED MEDIA WITH 30M IMPRESSIONS: With 2000 KOCs joint in KOC contest & promoting program & 1500 organic consumer engagement (Capcut template #BoCanhXinh)
