Astro reveals smoother skin with Venus

P&G’s Venus teams up with Astro to negate shaving myths

In this fourth case study in the ‘Winning Partnership Series’, we discuss how Astro leveraged on its digital content to connect with Malaysian women on the truth of shaving for P&G’s Venus.

Overview
Astro came up with Sehalus Venus (as delicate as Venus), a campaign created to elevate the awareness of Venus being a razor created for women as it is designed based on women’s needs.

Ranging from the razor’s flexibility to compliment the curve of a women’s body, the soft gel ensures smoothness of shaving and protects the skin’s delicateness, while precision of the blade allows maximum shaving results. 

Challenges
Hair removal is a sensitive issue to Malay Muslim women, hence it needs to be communicated well.

Insights reveal that removing hair for Malay Muslim women is encouraged by Islam. 

The wisdom behind the prescription of removing pubic hair and armpit hair helps one attain a high level of cleanliness and prevents bad body odour.

Shaving is often a taboo subject and many refrain from speaking openly. Malay women often feel embarrassed to discuss it and would rather practice in silence, rather than share their experience.  

Target Market
Malaysia’s total market size is RM25 million with P&G’s Venus having the potential to grow by 4 times. 52% of the market share is currently driven by the women’s razor category.

Venus holds only 30% of it and the rest by its competitor Schick. This proves that Venus has a huge potential to grow the market and challenge the market leader.

Consumer Insight
Astro identified a few Malay keywords that best describe the product’s functional superiority without being to direct or ‘revealing’. Words like delicateness were replaced with ‘kehalusan’, smoothness with ‘kelembutan’, and lastly fragrance with ‘keharuman’. 

Strategic Fit
Astro possesses a strong Malay audience base with 93% household penetration. 50% of them are female who are Astro’s Malay vernacular content’s biggest consumers. 

Astro is also a source for fans to engage themselves with popular local digital publishers the likes of Gempak, Era, InTrend, with female visitors as high as 81% of the  visitor base. Astro is home for strong Chinese digital IPs like MY, Xuan and iFeel. 

With the current successful joint venture with Karangkraf, Astro has the capability of extending its campaign to Karangkraf’s strong Malay IPs in the likes of Mingguan Wanita, Remaja, Hijabista and Vanilla Kismis which have a female audience of up to 83%. 

Objective 
The campaign’s main objective was to create awareness about Venus thus conveying its functional superiority in an emotional way.

The task at hand also required Astro to educate the audience about shaving and debunking myths around it, as well as to achieve the sales target. 

Target audience
Venus’ primary audience (80%) are Malay females between 18 to 45 years while its secondary audience are Chinese females, aged 18 to 35.

Solution

Astro coined a strategic communication of ‘Sehalus Venus’ that strongly conveyed its superiority in shaving ensuring consumers that nothing beats Venus in providing smooth perfect skin.

Owning the word Halus was a way to convey the efficacy of the product. Astro appointed Farah Ann (pictured) to front the campaign as she is well received by the target audience across all segments with minimal risk of push back.

Astro identified relevant influencers like Sharifah Sakinah, Elfira Loy, Mia Ahmad, Chan Won, and Jovin Chan to create talkability about the product efficacy in their social space.

Content Strategy
A 30 second capsule featuring Farah Ann deployed on both TV and digital was launched to create awareness. Channels with a high female audience base were identified for maximum reach. 

By working closely with the client, Astro tracked sales performance against the deployment pattern of the capsules on TV and constantly changed the formula of airing (ratio between prime time and fringe time), to maximise the exposure that correlated to the product sales. 

Astro pursued efforts to educate consumers through a series of digital capsules featuring Farah Ann to debunk the myth about shaving. 20 sec x 3 capsules were released on digital publishers with high female audiences, the likes of Gempak, Era, InTrend, Salam Muslim, iFeel, MY, Xuan. 

The notion of ‘Sehalus Venus’ was reinforced to propagate shaving as the best method of hair removal by launching 9 advertorials on relevant Astro’s digital platforms and Karangkraf’s digital IPs. 

Astro also created talkability on social media by using Sharifah Sakinah, Elfira Loy, Mia Ahmad, Chan Won, and Jovin Chan to spark the conversation about shaving, demonstrate the convenience and efficacy of the product through various forms of social postings (static pictures, video and boomerang). 

Creative Treatment
30 sec capsule of Farah Ann
The capsule was crafted to depict Farah’s moments before the competition where she is seen to be using Venus, as part of her grooming essential.
20 sec capsule x 3 versions of Farah’s Shaving Myth buster
Farah’s images in graphic motion were used to deliver vital info about shaving and emphasizing its advantages. Some myths that were busted:

Results
Branded advertorials across Gempak, Salam Muslim, Era, In Trend, Xuan, and iFeel achieved cumulative views of 102,775 while its social media pages recorded a reach of over 2.4 million, total likes of 7,828 and total engagement of 9,306. 

Social media influencers sparked talkability and their postings about the campaign received a total of 2,099,742 impressions, 1,750,808 reach and total engagement of 67,044.

Digitorials in online magazines received GA pageviews of 20,213, FB instant article views of 18,700 and total page views of 38,913. 

The TV deployment strategy that correlates with sales performance has gained unprecedented result for Venus.  Sales surged by 66% within the first 3 months of campaign period.

Total female razor category recorded a double digit growth of 16% within 6 months. Market share of Venus increased by 8 percentage points from 26% to 34% within 9 months.  
Source: Kantar Media DTAM (Nov-Dec 2017) 
This article first appeared in the Mid-June issue of MARKETING magazine.
You can read the full magazine here: https://issuu.com/marketingmagazine.com.my/docs/issue223?e=31407353/62286193

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