There has been a lot of bad news about sanitary pads in Hong Kong lately. In a recent study, 10% of available pad brands contained menstrual disorder and infertility inducing levels of hormones.[1]

News like this has created a cloud over the category, causing Hong Kong women to scrutinize pads - especially their health credentials.

While qualities such as absorbency and comfort are still very much the core category drivers, protection from harmful health impacts is becoming more important in decision making.

Whisper FlexFoam protects from harmful germs and bacteria - the clearest signal for overall health credentials - better than any other product in the category. As we had focused on core category drivers in the past, no one know about this particular benefit of FlexFoam technology.

As such, our objective was to create associations between Whisper and the equity of “protection” in Hong Kong.

“Door Gods” are carvings that originated on Chinese temple doors to provide protection from evil spirits.

We immersed in 600 years of Door God mythology and craftsmanship to understand the process through which Door Gods were created.

All Door Gods are unique, but share a basic design system of a central figure surrounded by symbols, lesser gods and protective animals. Specific combinations create specific types of protection.

We followed this traditional process to create the Whisper Door Goddess.

We explored thousands of components to find four that best represented the qualities of protection and comfort.

Diao Yuee(刁月娥): “sacred protector from evil spirits”

Black Tortoise(玄武): “exorciser of evil spirits”

Fan Lihua(樊梨花): “the most powerful of protectors"

Vermillion Birds(朱雀): “protectors of peace and harmony"

The final Door Goddess design was inspired by these traditional examples, and then 3-D printed with the texture, contours and color grading of the Whisper FlexFoam material.

The Door Goddess stood guard vigilantly in OOH sites next to doors throughout Hong Kong, and while small scale, had the incremental impact we set out to create. Whisper’s association with “protection” increased 5 points as a result of the work, representing an 9% increase vs previous the previous quarter’s brand tracking results.