relevant once more. reclaiming lost ground

 The ​Client. P&G
The Category. Fem Care 
The Brand. Whisper
The Market. Japan

The Issue. ’I know you. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I like to interact/ engage with you’. In other words, a problem of high brand awareness that didn’t translate into brand engagement & transaction, and that resulted the brand sales declining year on year.

The Problem to Solve. The brand was losing ground among the design target, the 18 – 24 year olds. In a category, and with an audience that is uber feminine, with highly exaggerated & detail oriented feminine cues, and a behavior that closely guards privacy, Whisper, behaved in a transactional, purely functional, almost stereotypically masculine manner adopting a problem solution & a very public, tone & manner – thereby, alienating its audiences – and gradually sliding into irrelevance.  

The Solution. The solution for Always (Whisper) Japan, involved creating an equity centered Integrated Experience Model that reimagined the brand behaviour & the shopping experience. This work was developed on the foundations of qualitative and quantitative research that focussed on understanding the desired experiences of the Japanese design target, esp. their emotional expectations around choices they were making. This complete immersion in their lives through video journals, live chats, visual ethnography, & in situ observation, helped us understand the culture, the context, the media choices and how they interacted with the category, thereby inspiring solutions that served their needs versus 'advertise' to them.

Connections that Matter 

• From a Category Perspective, for the Japanese women, with all the preparation & the planning involved, periods was never a 3 day affair. It was an almost 2 week affair with varied lifestyle rituals and routines leading up to it AND during it. It was not just a physical issue to be managed, but a matter of holistic wellness with diet, exercises, lifestyle choices inextricably interwoven into it. And they consumed communication and engaged in experiences that helped them with this ‘prep’
• They craved conversations and shared experiences but in discreet, personalized, enviroments, aka Digital. And once experienced Digitally, they sought to extend that interaction in offline spaces. To them, it was all about the FrMOT . Friends are the ultimate moment of truth.
• Experiences with shopping the category (Fem Care) existed in a continuum ranging from neutrality at best to negativity, irritation & embarrassment at the worst. In contrast to this were experiences with shopping outside the category that seemed to be associated with entertainment, enjoyment, gratification, pleasure for the senses, expression of what one values. It was as though the experience of shopping for Fem Care was divorced from the any positive expectations.
• And most important of all, these women were Expressively Feminine. While they acknowledged the added challenges and stresses that girls face, they loved being a woman and sought to enjoy their femininity via small everyday details– for example, having ‘kawai’or cute boxes to store all their femcare needs for the Wakuwaku (excited) feeling. Feeling ‘unfeminine’ was a source of deep dissonance & disengagement. 

All of this understanding was inextricably interwoven in new media and content choices with the intention to  increase the engagement with the brand.

The Result? Covering Paid, Owned, Earned Media, the human experience solutions influenced the creation of a mobile forward & shopper encounters that were expressively feminine, discreet and ‘Between Us Girls’. The content solutions fuelled conversations & experiences that they naturally wanted & a value exchange that was utalitarian and that acknowledged their wellness beyond the 3 days of periods. By owning not just the periods – but the cycle – and doing so in contexts that communicated discreetness and femininity to the Japanese women, the work, doubled e-commerce growth within a year & saw an exponential increase in off-line sales to exceed the sales goals. Brand desirability and affinity registered a positive rise for the first time in 5 years of declining brand performance, proving once again that to create a positive dent in culture, one first needs to understand the culture.