The Brief

Women in India have two jobs – one at the office and the other at home. They have to do all the household chores alone. More than ‘76% of married women feel men prefer relaxing over helping with household chores’ according to our research. Ariel decided it was time to address this inequality at home and so we launched #ShareTheLoad. To get our message of equality at home out, we decided to reach men and women in ways they would least expect. We turned an unexpected medium – the wash care label – into an advocate of gender equality. Here we created new icons that symbolized how easily the piece of garment can be washed by both genders. With this, an ignored part of the garment caught the attention of the nation for the first time.

Creative Execution

Ariel is one of the most expensive detergents in India. To drive relevance of the brand, Ariel decided to address the issue of inequality at home through the launch of #ShareTheLoad. The campaign started by raising an important question – Is laundry only a woman’s job? While this was provocative, it was not enough. We needed to reach out to men and women in ways that created impact and got them to talk about our message. Hence we created the world’s first gender neutral wash care label. This label was embraced by leading clothing brands, manufacturers, retailers and designers. Not just that influential Indians came out in support of the label and the message of equality behind it. It also generated huge amounts of interest in media and social media.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Our target-audience were new-customers; women who didn’t see Ariel as a brand for them. Analysis of the audience revealed an interesting statistic: ‘76% of married women feel men prefer relaxing over helping with household-chores’. This pointed to an inequality embedded culturally in each and every Indian-home… where women can be equal contributors to the family-income, but the burden of household-chores still lies on their shoulders. With this Ariel decided to stand up for women’s equality at home with #ShareTheLoad. But to create impact for and drive conversation about our message we created the world’s first gender neutral wash care label.

Results

The Ariel #ShareTheLoad wash care label immediately grabbed the attention of people and media. • Leading clothing brands, manufacturers, retailers and designers embraced the label. • Influential Indians came out in support of the new wash care label and the message of equality at home behind it. • Not just that, it grabbed the attention of the media and people on social media. • Unaided Brand Awareness increased by 132% within the first month. • The campaign generated free-media worth USD 9.5 million • Millions of men pledged to ‘Share the Load’ across the country • On Facebook, engagement-rate went up a record 225%. • On Twitter #ShareTheLoad trended nationally with over 8 million impressions. • Sales went up by 60%.