Ariel: Share the load

Source: Cannes Creative Lions, Bronze, Creative Effectiveness Lions, 2016

Downloaded from warc.com

This case study details how Ariel, the detergent, created relevance in India by reframing the conversations, moving away from
clothes stains, and focusing on the cultural stain of gender equality in the home.
A category leader for years, Ariel was able to focus on performance, but as the competition, Surf, mounted a relevant
and newsworthy campaign to Indian women with 'Dirt is Good', the brand had to find a contemporary conversation.
Fighting is best done with issues, not with competitors: Share the Load was an attempt to engage a social movement in
India, tapping into the force of progress that demands gender equality, the campaign began a far reaching national
debate.
Provocative content was complimented by unexplored media like packaging, matrimonial websites and even the
forgotten wash care label on clothes.
As 1.57 million men pledged to share the load, Ariel benefitted from USD 10 million in earned-media publicity; Ariel
grew value and volume sales by 106% and 105% respectively.

BBDO India

Objectives
Communication in the premium laundry detergents category in India has traditionally been unengaging, with a focus on product
performance and demos. Here, Ariel led the category thanks to its superior performance and stain removal claims.
This however changed with time as Ariel's key competitor - Surf engaged the urban Indian woman with its 'Daag Acche Hai'
campaigns ('Dirt is Good'). With its approach, Surf created a new context for the category - laundry is no longer just about stain
removal, it was about creating a playful, learning environment for your children. Over the years, this social context made Surf more
newsworthy and relevant to the urban woman in charge of laundry. (Source: Client data)
To combat this we needed to change our approach: focusing on product performance and stain removal alone wasn't going to
work. More so a conventional advertising campaign approach was not going to move the urban Indian women because previous
such campaigns were not working. And to make matter's tougher, the client wanted to lead the initiative with Ariel's most
expensive detergent, Ariel Matic for washing machines.
In this context, we needed to find a new deeper relevance for Ariel; a purpose that would get the attention of and engage the urban
Indian woman in a contemporary conversation about laundry and the brand in a socially interesting and fame generating way to
make Ariel more relevant and drive sales of Ariel Matic.
1. Get the attention of the urban woman
With the category awareness at almost 100%, especially for players like Surf, we had to deliver a campaign that was
sufficiently interesting to get the attention of more urban women i.e. a campaign that would increase unaided brand
awareness of Ariel by 20%.
2. Engage the urban woman in a conversation about laundry and the brand.
With few engagement benchmarks in the category, we looked at Facebook engagement rate since more urban Indian
women are on Facebook Vs other social media platforms. Here we wanted to double our engagement rate on the
Ariel Facebook page, a tough ask for a low involvement category like laundry.
3. Drive relevance of the brand and as a result sales
Increase purchase intention by 50% over the year before i.e. a purchase intent index of 150.
Critically, we had to aggressively grow value and volume sales of Ariel Matic, Ariel's most expensive detergent.

Strategy

To drive a deeper relevance for Ariel and sales of Ariel Matic, the brand's most expensive detergent, we had to explore new
territories and social context that the category hadn't gone into before.
Our target audiences were women between the age of 25 and 35 years across India's top metros. We spoke with both working
and non-working women and also conducted a quantitative study with Nielsen that included their husbands. What we found helped
us shape our thinking and idea.

The cultural stain of gender inequality is deep rooted in urban Indian homes:
2/3rd of women we spoke to said men don't help with household chores and 3/4th of them felt men prefer relaxing over helping
with household chores (Source: Study commissioned by Ariel with Nielsen). This problem was especially acute for working
women who were doing 2 jobs dutifully, one in the office and the other at home. They spent over 298 minutes (close to 5 hours) per
day doing housework, while their husbands spent just 19 minutes (Source: OECD 2014 survey). This pointed us to a deep rooted
culture of gender inequality embedded in urban Indian homes where outside the home women could walk shoulder to shoulder with
men; but at home, the burden of housework still lies on their tired shoulders.

Laundry was the symbol of the cultural stain of gender inequality at home:
Digging deeper into our researches we found laundry to be the one housework that symbolized the gender inequality at home.
According to our Nielsen study '76% of Indian men believed laundry is a woman's job'.

In challenging the cultural stain of gender inequality at home, Ariel finds a higher purpose:
Ariel Matic's tough stain removal promise was 'one wash stain removal'. But in the context of the cultural stain of gender inequality
at home, it was more than that. It was about making the job of laundry so easy that anyone can do it, even men. Here is
where we believed lay an opportunity for Ariel. By challenging the cultural stain of gender inequality at home, Ariel's deeper
purpose was to liberate women from the obligation of doing laundry.
This we believed was far more meaningful to the urban Indian woman because while Surf's approach was progressive, it still
positioned the urban Indian woman as the dutiful housekeeper while Ariel pushed the gender rails further.
Thus was born Ariel's 'Share The Load' - a provocative social movement by Ariel that didn't focus on clothes stains, but on the
cultural stain of gender inequality at home to liberate women from the obligation of doing laundry.

Creative approach
We knew in 'Share the Load' we had an idea and message that had the power to make the brand more meaningful to the urban
Indian woman in-charge of laundry. But to turn this into a movement that gets the attention of and engages the urban Indian woman
to become a force of change we needed to tap into forces of progress - hidden, yet seismic - demanding that Indian women be
treated and respected as equal to men.
So we started by raising an important question: 'Is laundry only a woman's job?' This was brought to life through a provocative
video on national television, cinema and online. It immediately sparked conversations. Influential Indians stepped forward to push
our message online. Celebrity couples became the ambassadors of the movement -from newly-weds like Soha Ali Khan and
Kunal Khemu, to Arbaaz and Malaika who are married with teenage kids.
As the conversations grew we knew we needed to push our boundaries in how we spurred the movement to turn this into a
genuine national debate and push men towards their responsibility of sharing the load. For this we explored innovative and
otherwise unexplored media.
For starters, gender equality at home had to start with the product. So Ariel launched the 'His and Her' pack - a first of its kind
with instructions on how to share the load of doing the laundry.
Next, we took up the most forgotten part of our clothes - the wash care label - and we reinvented it by adding a new instruction:
'Can be washed by both men and women'. Celebrated designers, India's leading clothing brands and online portals like Amazon
and Flipkart embraced the idea and even changed their wash care labels.
In addition to that we tied up with leading matrimonial websites, where millions of marriages are arranged, to take up the
message of gender equality at home by making sharing the load of laundry a mandatory requirement while signing up.

With all of these playing out in conversations online and articles by leading national publications and newsroom debates, we also
directed men towards sharing the load through various events across the country - from giant installations in malls that taught men
how to do laundry and become 'laundry graduates' to 'basketball laundry' in multiplexes that turned the boring task to a fun game
that men would enjoy and want to be a part of.
Together these turned the issue of gender inequality at home into a genuine national debate that pushed Ariel's message of
'Share the Load'. We began to see the change with men across the country coming out in large numbers to pledge to share the
load.

Effects
1. Get the attention of the urban woman in-charge of laundry
With the category awareness at almost 100%, especially for players like Surf, we had to deliver a campaign that would get the
attention of more urban women. Specifically, a campaign that would increase unaided brand awareness of Ariel by 20% i.e.
deliver unaided brand awareness of 120 Index: we achieved 134 Index, a 34% increase in unaided brand awareness.

Source: Brand Health Tracker 2014-2015, GFK

2. Engage the urban woman in a conversation about laundry and the brand.
With more urban women on Facebook vs. other social media platforms, our target was to double our average Facebook
engagement rate: we achieved 3X, the highest ever for the brand. To put this into perspective, the best ever achieved
engagement rates for similar efforts in India by another P&G brand Gillette - in a high involvement category like male grooming
was 7%. Ariel with 'Share the Load' surpassed this despite competing in a low involvement category like laundry detergents to
achieve 10% engagement. (Source: Facebook Analytics)

Source: Facebook Analytics

Examples of engagement the #ShareTheLoad campaign generated

Not just that, the movement generated USD 10 million in earned media coverage and over 1.6 billion earned media
impressions, the highest ever achieved by the brand. (Source: Earned Media Tracking, Devries) With coverage across leading
TV news channels & publication, 'Share the Load' movement turned gender inequality in the home, an unspoken and
unacknowledged issue into a genuine national conversation.
As a result, over 1.57million men pledged to 'Share The Load' across the country through mobile, social media, mall
activations and purchase of the His & Her packs. (Source: Client data)
3. Drive relevance of the brand and as a result sales
With a target to increase purchase intention by 50% over the year before i.e. 150 Index: we achieved 210 Index,

more than doubling purchase intention on the brand to add over 7 million new trialists to the brand during
the movement.

Source: P&G Survey via GHH

We had to aggressively grow value and volume sales of Ariel Matic, Ariel's most expensive detergent: during the
movement Ariel Matic more than doubled its value and volume sales by growing at an unprecedented 106%

and 105% respectively. That's more than 4 times what Ariel's key competitor grew by during the same
period.

Source: IMRB HH Panel data, 2014-2015

(Note: in our Cannes creative submission in 2015 we had quoted sales growth of 60%. This is different from the numbers quoted
above because immediately after the campaign ended in March 2015 we only had access to P&G's internal sales data for the
Cannes submission. The above numbers are as per IMRB Household Panel data that P&G and the industry use normally to track
and benchmark sales.)

More so...
Ariel's 'Share The Load' movement was honored to receive the inaugural Gold Glass Lion at Cannes 2015; an award
that recognizes work that implicitly or explicitly addresses issues of gender inequality or prejudice, through the conscious
representation of gender in advertising. The award was created in partnership with LeanIn.Org, the organization founded by
Sheryl Sandberg, COO Facebook, to achieve true equality.

In addition to this, the movement was awarded...

3 D&AD Pencils, including a White Pencil 2 Golds at Spikes Asia 2015
1 Gold for Effectiveness at Appies Asia 2015
2 Golds at Effies India 2015

Other factors
Ariel's 'Share The Load' movement ran from January to March 2015, and was the only brand activity in market at that time.
The detergent market in India is of course subject to seasonal fluctuations, and as is common with many developing markets it is
in year-on-year growth, so we would expect to see Ariel's volume and value growing irrespective of our activity.
The clearest and fairest way to see the effect of 'Share The Load' is to compare the full year 2014 with the full year 2015 in value
and volume terms (rather than comparing Nov-Dec 2014 with Apr-May 2015).
Ariel grew in both value and volume terms comparing 2014 and 2015, almost doubling in size, both value and volume growing by
95%. The market grew also, but much more slowly, by 6% in value and 3% in volume. Was this growth simply to do with the
premium part of the market growing, and Ariel just being carried along by this growth? No. The main premium competitor also
grew, but only by 29% in both value and volume terms, much less than the Ariel brand:

Source: IMRB HH Panel data, 2014-2015

Commercial results
The 'Share the Load' movement helped significantly grow value and volume sales of Ariel Matic, Ariel's most expensive detergent.
Here both value and volume sales more than doubled in size growing by 106% and 105% respectively. This helped deliver an
ROMI of USD 5.08 for every USD 1 spent by the brand on the campaign.

Source: P&G Internal Construct

Media used
This case demonstrates how creativity is effective when it makes a brand matter to its target audience. With Share the Load, Ariel
took on the issue of gender inequality at home; something the whole category had ignored. This made the brand not just matter,
but also become a force of social change.

Entry Composition

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