APG Awards 2007 Wash & Go - Mum gets it again Leo Burnett & Target Campaigns for international

brands which have NOT run in the UK

Synopsis
This paper illustrates the rollercoaster journey from a clichd haircare category promise to a proposition able to move hearts and literally squeeze tears while building one of the most valuable Balkans shampoo brands: Wash&Go After 4 years of profitably boring consumers with its scientific ingredients and irresistible price offers, Wash&Go was now forced to deal with so many me too brands that finding an emotional and hard-to-copy promise became a must. In the search of that emotionally meaningful something to stand for, an unconventional research experiment was designed to over pass the limits of the classical focus groups. The experiment successfully dug out the truth we needed: women involved in long term relationships want more than recognition for their cooking or house-cleaning, they actually secretly desire to get RE-noticed as women by their partners. They long for a relationship revival. In conveying the relationship revival idea new consumer touch points where activated while Wash&Go also learnt to make the most of the traditional ones. Reviving relationships helped Wash&Go revive its shares, reaching the best business result in its history through an impressive 24% total brand volume increase (Sept. 06May 07 vs. a year ago).
Word count: 195

Mum gets it again

Knelt by yet another marketing myth The largely spread marketing belief that the emerging markets are traditionally functional ones has been slowly transforming the Balkans haircare ads in a never ending product demonstration. At the beginning of the 2000s, everybody was still talking rational about haircare, boringly promising the smartest way of getting a beautiful hair and offering as arguments either exotic ingredients and secret formulas or aggressive promotional offers. In terms of emotional promises, the plot remained for years depressingly simple: the princess finally gets the prince because of her beautiful hair. For 4 years now, Wash&Go, a mid tier shampoo brand, has been by far the traditional winner of this whos the best deal of the day game. Its voluminous hair with no fuss promise was the success recipe which made Wash&Go the best selling shampoo in Balkans. However, at the beginning of 2006, things slowly stopped to be so rosy. Firstly, due to its leadership position, Wash&Go had obvious difficulties in sustaining its growth. As this wasnt challenging enough, Wash&Go was also facing the most cluttered and aggressive competition in the past 2 years with 10 active competitors all launching new stuff. Moreover, 6 of them were entering Wash&Gos territory with their own volume extensions1 making it obvious that continuing solely with the rational promises is not a winning strategy. The challenge: stepping out of the crowd In order to keep its leadership position and further increase its already high volume share, Wash&Go was now forced to find something more meaningful than voluminous hair to stand for. This basically meant reinventing the game at which we were best at. Wash&Go had to go emotional for the first time.

No clue whatsoever
1

TNS-AGB Data Research, 2006

Going emotional was a mission that made us all enthusiastically get on board. But this enthusiasm was quickly tempered when we realized that we knew almost nothing about how our consumers felt. We were successfully promising beautiful voluminous hair for years now, but little we knew about why this should really matter. At that point, research started to seem a really smart idea and it was only a matter of days until we found ourselves jammed behind the mirror watching consumers talking in a no window, no smoking, no familiar faces around focus group room. Focus groups talk a dead end We were slowly starting to rediscover our mid tier consumer or at least the part of her that she wanted us to see: a mid tier shampoo consumer, who was also the mideverything type. In short, she was middle age, having a middle income, enjoying middle comfort at her home along with her middle sized family. Moderation was the word of the day and, from what she told us, the wise secret of what looked like a depressingly happy life. She suspiciously seemed to have everything under control. Despite this rather discouraging discourse, we went further and asked the big question: Why looking beautiful matters?. The answer basically contradicted all the assumptions on which our the princess gets the prince stories were built on. In reality, they told us that the princess got the prince long time ago, that they were already married for some years now and that looking beautiful became irrelevant in this context as she was actually keeping him in love with nice food on the table, smiling children who get good grades at school and a neat, good smelling house. Putting effort in looking beautiful didnt seem to pay off. It didnt take too many focus groups for us to realize that we had come to a dead end. We were apparently dealing with a women who was playing back what seemed to be her wise grandmothers discourse about how beauty is superficial and how there are more important things in life a woman should care about. She was giving us a preach sadly leaving our question unanswered.

Back to the start

Being nowhere, we decided to try again. We kept the question and went looking for more efficient ways to ask it. We started from the little we already knew. The only thing we could get a grip on was the fact that after she got married she considerably reduced her beauty ritual and was now minimizing in defense the overall importance of looking good. In other words, as she was not feeling as beautiful as she used to, she managed to convince herself that beauty was irrelevant. And now she was trying to convince us too. At that point, it was obvious that as long she will not feel beautiful again, she will never point out the true importance of it. The What if? factor But what if we gave her looks back? Would she than be more aware of why looking beautiful really matters? While this might have worked, we now had another tough question to answer: how do you make a middle-aged woman who declares that looks dont matter feel and act beautiful again? One of those really weird planning solutions was needed. Professional hairstylist were asked to visit our respondents house once every second day, arranging their hair so that they could experience the improved look. We didnt want huge changes so we asked the hairstylist to provide only minor improvements. Basically, we were betting on a placebo effect. After a week, we invited our consumers back in the focus group room and asked the question again. What we heard made the focus group coffee taste better. Things she didnt know she knew The discussions that followed were amazingly consistent. The women couldnt help talking about the surprisingly flattering reactions that their long term partners had. After years of showing appreciation only for the daily plate of homemade food or for cleaning around the house, their partners finally rediscovered the woman they felt in love with:
He suddenly started to be bothered by my work program because it doesnt allow us to spend the night together He finally decided that our son was old enough to sleep alone., He stopped working late and surprisingly managed to find more time for me2

Similarly interesting was the fact that these compliments were not the cheesy-type, conventionally romantic love proofs you usually get in a typical Hollywood movie, but
2

Leo Burnett & Mercury Qualitative Research Romania, March 2006.

indirect, almost coded ones. It was the small, non-clich things that flattered our respondents. Joining the dots The resigned mid tier consumer weve met during the focus groups disappeared without a trace. Proud of having brought the romantic love back into her relationship, she was now eager to make us understand how really important that was to her. The frustration and the suffering caused by the partners ever growing ignorance towards her as a woman had finally come out in this process. The tears in one of the respondents eyes made us realize that we had finally arrived at something meaningful: in spite of not acting about it, women are secretly longing for a relationship revival. Saying it right After deciding to have the relationship-revival as Wash&Gos new communication territory, we started searching for ways to creatively convey our key promise the beautiful look that makes him see you as a woman again. As an emotional approach was obviously required, it was clear the old rational TV storytelling framework which included a hair-related issue set up a solution presented within a product demo and a celebration moment was not helping. Consequently, we decided to take out the traditional demos and air emotional stories free of 3D strangely animated substances doing wonders for the hair. Having no demos within the story, we could now focus on what was emotionally meaningful: the small rewarding gestures a guy can do to impress when he finally reacknowledges the woman in his long term partner. Things like having a shave before getting in bed (while most of the Balkan men prefer to shave in the morning), taking the time to arrange clothing so that she wouldnt have to or secretly sending love SMSs during a night out with the buddies, helped us insightfully build the emotional stories we needed. The next step was to back up our promise with appropriate and convincing enough product related promises. Three product variants were simultaneously presented within separately aired demos, proving Wash&Gos performance. Moreover, we used contextualized print adverts to capitalize on further receptivity insights. Thus, advertorials talking about the importance of looking beautiful were placed in specific magazines where women are looking for advice. In addition, a more boldly approach was used in prints inserted in the popular sex-related magazine sections.
Print advert sex-related magazine sections

Print advert sex-related magazine sections

Finally, we took advantage of the opportunity provided by Bergenbier, the masculine Romanian beer brand, which was airing a huge campaign pleading for a

Mans Day. As part of this campaign, men were asked to name the reasons which give them the right to have a day of their own. As many of those reasons where related to the things men have to do in order to please their female long term partner, Wash&Go decided to answer back. The answer consisted in a simultaneously aired campaign which emphasized the reasons why women also believed that men deserve a special day. The Wash&Go reasons however where basically making public the pathetically sweet gestures men do when in love. They where conveyed through a short, but intense campaign including a dedicated TVC, prints, transit and a consumer generated internet platform which allowed women to unmask their partners out of love weaknesses.

Wash&Gos reply campaign consumer generated platform (www.noifemeilestimdece.ro)

Print advert.

Being a first in Romania, Wash&Gos reply campaign was received with high interest, generating both free media coverage and word of mouth.
Press examples coverage

Revived business results Reviving relationships helped Wash&Go impressively revive its business results in all the 9 Balkan countries where the campaign run (September 2006- May 2007). In a relatively flat market, Wash&Go further increased its already high volumes with an impressive 24% growth (Sept. 06 May 07 vs. a year ago)3 reaching the highest scores in the brands history. Moreover, in Romania, the top 1 country, Wash&Go managed to consolidate its leadership position reaching a record share of 16%.4 Additionally, the quantitative copy-testing scores make us wait with optimism the not yet available long-term tracking results for the advertising and brand equity. Thats especially because the value of the indicators which show the emotional relevancy of the ads was three times higher than the one reached by the previous Wash&Gos campaigns.5
Word count: 1757 excluding footnotes

3 4

P&G Data, May 2007 A. C. Nielsen Data, Jan/Feb. 2007 5 Off Air Quantitative Research P&G Proprietary Tool, Jan 2007