Brief Explanation

For the past 90 years, Lux has helped women unleash their most confident and beautiful selves through the power of fragrances. This has helped Lux become the leading beauty soap brand in India. However with competition heating up to target the growing millennial audience, we needed to re-establish ourselves with this new generation and boost sales. Category communications were focused on appearance, and we had to get this audience - programmed towards physical beauty - to comprehend Lux’s differentiated message. Research had continuously showed us the impact of fragrances on emotion, which made women feel externally confident and beautiful. With this as our key insight, we shook up the category with a story of beauty…with a fragrance twist.

Results and Effectiveness

With 15+ million film views, we achieved our brand objective of communicating the power of fragrance in overall beauty. Strong film completion rates of 47% helped double Lux’s online Share of Voice, leading to an increase of +33% in awareness of Lux amongst 25-34 year old females online. The conversation we created online also led to offline earned media success, with 78 media stories reaching over 11 million women. The strong media strategy helped drive impact on brand with +14% increase in Brand Preference and +9% growth in Lux being seen as having better fragrances. These improvements on brand impacted business very strongly, with Lux recording +30% increase in sales in India.

Creative Execution

To create conversation, we needed to drive fame. The behavioural insight of social proof showed us that if we created a ‘viral peak’ of views in the first week of the campaign, we would organically drive further views and conversations around our content for an extended period. We therefore created impact with a coordinated launch for the film, driving mass video views across YouTube, social networks, blogs & fan clubs, and networks of contextually relevant sites. We tracked the campaign’s progress in real-time from a mission control centre and strategically optimized our budgets to promote the film across the best-performing channels, giving us the best bang for our buck.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

To bring our insight to life, we needed to demonstrate the true power of fragrance and the impact that a truly beautiful woman has on her surroundings. The woman – Katrina Kaif; the most beautiful woman in Bollywood. The twist – her effect on a blind photographer taking pictures based on her presence, and her fragrance. Not her looks. Given our challenge of changing existing mind-sets, we needed a channel that allowed for conversation and debate. With Indian millennial women spending 24 hrs/week online, and 82% consuming video weekly, we knew that this story had to be told online, with social video as our key asset. Perfume Portraits was thus born.