The Campaign

The campaign was built around the idea of delivering smart solutions to alleviate a mother’s worry, and be seen as a trusted adviser in times of need. The “24-Hour Doctor” concept encompasses everything Lifebuoy’s young mother target needs in situations of worry and despair: Instant, uncomplicated, convenient access to trustworthy medical professionals who can offer support by giving an initial diagnosis to the child’s ailment, which in many cases aren’t serious enough to warrant a hospital visit. It’s for these cases that the 24-Hour Doctor initiative relieves mom’s worries and saves her the exhausting and time-consuming endeavour of visiting a doctor in a hospital.

Creative Execution

The core of the 24-Hour Doctor initiative is providing moms instant access to Lifebuoy-branded medical professionals on LaMaBang. All a user has to do is visit the “Q&A” section inside the APP, a highly frequented section of LaMaBang and a mere 2 clicks away from the homescreen, guaranteeing exposure. Once in the Q&A section, users can choose among healthcare specialists from different fields, all of which are carefully screened and selected to ensure the highest degree of professionalism and quality of diagnoses. All doctors are on hand 7 days a week. To further increase our reach within LaMaBang we leveraged the in-APP search functionality by placing native Lifebuoy advertising into the top 3 content items for a select group of health-related search queries. Driving trial, an on-ground team of medical experts brought germ and handwashing education and medical advice into Kindergartens. Product samples were delivered to expecting mothers in hospitals.

The 24-Hour Doctor initiative has been a great success so far. Lifebuoy’s market share in the soap bar segment grew by half, showing that our challenge to the competition is rewarded with success. The impact on the brand has been significant: • The key brand attribute of “protects from germs” has seen a spike in equity tracking of 25%. • Interest in the brand as measured through the Taobao search index grew by 69%, • E-commerce sales increased even more significantly by 131%, clearly outperforming a category that grew by only 30%. In the first two months, a total of almost 300 million impressions were generated. Our native advertising in germ-related content was viewed over 10 million times, proving the effectiveness of our in-APP search initiative. Over 4000 questions have been submitted to our Lifebuoy doctors so far.

Their child’s health is the most important thing in a mother’s life and anything that helps them protect it is relevant to them. Tapping into their native behaviour of turning to “Mom APPs” to search for, receive and consume child-care related content, the 24-Hour Doctor initiative leveraged a partnership with LaMaBang. LMB is China’s most popular mom APP, and offers what moms need the most: access to trustworthy medical professionals and content that helps them navigate the most critical situations when their children are sick. This approach established Lifebuoy as a helper rather than just another anti-germ soap. This was critical to our success as it needed to set itself apart from the powerful, yet conventional, competition that resorts to the same old approach of presenting itself as an old, white coat wearing doctor talking at mums rather than offering solutions.