The Campaign

In an uber-cluttered water purifier market, where brands have become commoditized, A O Smith wanted to stand for their essence – Innovation. Incidentally, the number of men who’ve liked our Facebook page were significantly higher than women. Hence the brand wanted to engage with more women to alter that skew. And Women’s History Month proved to be an ideal opportunity to do that. We began the ideation process by sourcing Google search data with regards to women scientists and innovation we found that people were having the right conversations, about women’s representation in science and gender stereotypes. Yet, more men came up in searches for scientists than women. Clearly there was a bias, not just in the search algorithm, but in people’s perceptions as well. Hence, we decided to hold up a mirror to our consumers and shine a light on bias they didn’t even know exists.

Creative Execution

We created a 360-degree social media campaign that was actually a social experiment designed to engage with consumers and change their perceptions by highlighting their inherent bias. We started with an experiment – a quiz (on a microsite) that asked people to identify the names behind some famous innovations. Incidentally, all the innovators were women, but we mixed things around with a few male scientists. And to no one’s surprise, most people associated the innovations with men. We followed this up with posts that urged people to participate and created content that celebrated women scientists. We also made a video that encapsulated this experiment and remarketed it back to the people who took the quiz, as well as AO Smith’s own database of leads and consumers. We primarily targeted women through our media campaign and promoted the entire activity over a month, using posts, blog articles apart from the above