Active Wheel | Lo Kar Lo Baat

BRAND:

Active Wheel

BRAND OWNER:

Hindustan Unilever

CATEGORIES:

FMCG

Household Goods

REGION:

India 

DATE:

June 2015 - February 2016

AGENCY:

PHD

MEDIA CHANNEL:

Mobile,Retail/POS

Insight

In rural India, there is an increasing trend of men having to move away from home to secure work.

Whilst this has, in many ways, made positive in-roads towards women gaining greater influence in the running of households, it also means there are now 4.2m married Indian couples living apart in order to provide for their families.

The only way for these couples to keep in touch is through mobile phones. And there is, of course, also the issue of how much it costs to call on a regular basis and how much of the weekly household budget would be used up. 

Keeping in touch with the person you love is becoming, for many, an expensive luxury. (Single most important insight)

Strategy

Apart from the functional benefits of providing a clean and fragrant wash to clothes, the core of brand Wheel stands for the light and playful romance between the husband and wife. The brand catalyses and holds alive the romance between couples through various boring daily chores such as doing laundry.

Since the Active wheel consumers are couples who are living apart and are consumed by the daily grind of making ends meet, the brand wanted to bring alive its core of kindling romance between them, by enabling easy communication hence bringing a smile on their faces.

The idea was to elevate the ‘renewal of the product formulation’ message and make it relevant to consumers by helping them keep in touch with their partners periodically, through an easy and accessible mechanism, without sending their monthly household budgets in a tizzy no matter how far apart they were.

Laundry detergents are one of the most penetrated categories in India and Active Wheel was ready to introduce 10 million packs in the market with the ‘new formulation’ messaging. The fact that the consumer was based in geographies with little or no access to traditional media apart from mobile phones, the product packs were more likely to reach them than any form of media, hence the go-to-market strategy for the campaign was designed to use the Active Wheel packs as the medium.

Execution

PHD created LO KAR LO BAAT – a mobile service which offered couples a FREE three minute mobile phone

conversation that wouldn’t use up their mobile phone currency.

With its own packaging as the communication medium, LO KAR LO BAAT had a free-to-dial phone number on the pack with the promise of a call back mechanism from the superstar actor (and housewife favourite and the brand ambassador for Active Wheel) Salman Khan, who played cupid by acting as their personal telephone operator, connecting them to their loved one.

What’s more, LO KAR LO BAAT is accessible to one and all, with no terms and conditions that required the caller to have even bought the product.

The process was designed to be as simple as possible. No registration or code redemption was required.

Once connected to a pre-recording of Khan, all the caller needed to do was read out the phone number they wanted to call and he would connect them to their loved one, with the help of a thoughtfully created voice recognition software which was developed to recognise 19 different Indian dialects, making it user friendly for the semi urban population with limited literacy levels.

Whilst this connection was happening, a 30 second ad for Active Wheel would play on both ends of the call.

Results

With no purchase required, even in the least connected regions of India, news spread fast making it one of the most successful campaigns in the history of the brand, with consumers using the service even six months after the ‘packs with the campaign message’ were introduced in the market.

The campaign used no traditional media spends, which was instead vectored to providing talktime to consumers.

• The service connected 10 million unique phone numbers

• Today, it continues to receive 200,000 calls PER DAY, despite the packs only appearing on shelves for three months till July 2015

This has led to a 145% increase in Top of Mind Awareness post campaign. Sales in the market grew by 5% in the second half of 2015 which was otherwise declining by 5.3% in the second half of 2014 volume growth.

Active Wheel had connected 10 million Indian hearts and won a place in all of their hearts. That’s how the brand created an emotional connect beyond the functional campaign message.