Results and Effectiveness

The campaign drove consumer engagement. 40,725 microsite homepage visits – a total of 99,011 page views across the four microsite pages 11,325 Webisodes views – equivalent of 94 hours of viewing time. 3,244 Facebook fans – ardent ambassadors for shower gel. The business goal of 1% increase in penetration was exceeded by 20% - attributable to a shift in purchase behaviour of bar soap users, the penetration of which declined proportionately. Palmolive achieved its highest share in one year in a major retailer, the highest in two in the other. Ranking for every SKU improved, delivering a massive revenue increase.

Creative Execution

A light-hearted and easy to share campaign was designed to deliver shock value and create a social stigma around bar soap usage. Paid advertising was used to showcase soap-sharing “shockers”. Health & beauty and social currency titles featured sealed Face/Bum sections or breakout boxes highlighting hygiene faux-pas in beauty or travel pages. Paid media was also used as a directional tool, steering consumers to owned digital assets housed on a bespoke microsite. Here owned content in the form of soap opera webisodes drove interaction. Both an online chain mail, designed to recruit friends to share soap, and an iPhone application, using a dirt-o-meter to determine participants “filthy factor”, were used to drive scale and incentivise others to visit brand owned spaces. Finally, an experiential piece staged in shopping centres saw two characters - a dirty soap bar and shower gel bottle - recruiting shoppers to “ditch the soap”.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

As the dominant market leader in a flat shower gel category, it was clear that Palmolive could only achieve significant growth by attracting new category users. Marketing communication needed to 1) shift bar soap users to shower gel to deliver a 1% increase in penetration 2) establish Palmolive Naturals as the first choice for new category entrants Segmentation identified our key target as socially aspirational females with more money than good taste. Qualitative research revealed that the concept that shared bar soap was unhygenic, and therefore less socially acceptable, was much more motivating for our target than the product attributes of moisture, perfume and packaging - traditionally the focus of category communication. This insight provided scope for a new type of communication within the category allowing the brand opportunities to inject humour and elements of social currency into its communication.