The Campaign

THE WORLD’S LARGEST COLLEGE OUTREACH PROGRAM. The Gillette Bachelor Of Shaving prepares rural Indian Graduates for Life. It was designed to improve the employability of rural Indian Graduates and give them a fighting chance to succeed. Improving the employability of rural youth was a critical, long-term growth opportunity for Gillette. Gillette stepped in to prepare graduates for the real life in a way that no academic curriculum did. In terms of impact, literally the lives of hundreds of thousands of students wore touched and improved. The program is the start of giving an entire generation a chance they otherwise could have missed.

The Brief

-

Creative Execution

We created the World’s Largest College Outreach Program! Gillette cooperated with 10000 +Colleges in Indian rural districts to offer 4000,000 students invaluable career advice, including grooming and interviewing tips. The Gillette Bachelor of Shaving presented workshops in CV/ resume writing, Career Counselling, Grooming, and Interview Skills, giving rural young men the fighting chance to build confidence, develop social skills and try Gillette Guard razor. With mass electronic media not always sufficient in reaching rural areas, our communications plan centered around THE ACTUAL ON-CAMPUS OUTREACH PROGRAM. On-campus events extended the executions to inside the university venues, the activities, the posters and the experts in attendance. Local media were also used as executions were communicated via Print, Radio and Single Screen Cinema, Out-of-home, and Geo fenced Facebook ads to the target audience. Local celebrity engagement helped to drive reach and awareness, and generated massive free, earned media coverage.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

• More than 4,000,000 students graduated from the program each receiving an accredited Gillette Bachelor of Shaving (B.A.s) diploma. • Thousands secured job placements within the first couple of months and many immediately recruited by major corporations straight out of the program • Gillette Guard Razor sales catapulted 43% • Market shares grew 4%-year over-year, Making Gillette Guard No. 1 Razor in India. • But best of all, for 30 million young Indian men, clean shaving became synonymous with achieving professional successes, giving them an equal chance to be ‘The Best They Can Be.’

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Every young man is familiar with shaving as a rite of passage. In India, Gillette could have easily developed a traditional mass-awareness media campaign, but Gillette realized that they could use media to not only introduce young Indian to shaving messages, but to use media to help fundamentally change young men’s lives. Gillette had an inspiring media idea that could immediately impact millions of rural young graduates, especially those from impoverished backgrounds. It was a first-to-the-world channel strategy and creation of a brave program that was the world’s largest.

TARGET AUDIENCE Indian Male Graduates embarking on their first University job search and living in Indian rural states experiencing burgeoning male unemployment. While these graduates did disproportionately better on their university tests than urban graduates, their job hunts were often less successful. Rural graduates were unaware of professional possibilities and lacked the critical social skills like etiquette, personal grooming and interview ability to gain their first job which their more prepared university contemporaries from more affluent areas exhibited. We know that shaving usage should rise dramatically at this life stage as a point of habit change. PLANNING/ APPROACH Traditional mass advertising had limited reach in rural markets. Besides, awareness wasn’t our issue, belief in one’s own potential for success was. We needed a media planning approach that not only drove awareness but immediately could foster behavior that improved a job candidate’s ‘success-potential’ in order to drive Gillette Guard razor incidence.