India is a country of young people with 50% population <25 years of age. There is a burning need for information for a young person curious about her/his body. However, Indians do not talk about sex openly. With scarce access to credible information, they naturally gravitate towards unreliable and salacious, easily accessible sources. In December 2017, the Government of India banned all condom advertisements on television between 6AM – 10PM daily. This was a major blow to the urgent need of promoting safer sex and family planning.

Understanding the critical role of awareness of safe sex, for future growth of their products, Durex, the house of Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc, decided to provide a win-win solution.

The objective was to not only effect real change in the current situation by educating the youth about ‘safer sex’, but also create a larger behavioural shift in the Indian youth’s perception of ‘sex’.

Instant Messaging and Search were the two biggest digital touch points for our Audience. There are more than 200,000 monthly active users on Facebook Messenger in India and Google Insights and social listening reports revealed that approximately 9.1 million searches happened around ‘sex’, each month. Reports indicated equal interest among both male and female audience.

From the engagement numbers, the brand concluded that the average time spent by their audience on chat platforms supersedes average time spent on social media platforms. The entire premise of creating an online destination or encyclopaedia of sex on the mobile proved itself. The correct use of technology was critical to conduct conversations digitally.

The brand created engaging content, keeping the user’s thinking process in mind and also a few widely searched sex-related topics and keywords, and put it under simple & interesting headers. This made it extremely easy for the target audience to relate to it.

On opening RexBot, the consumer interacted with an animated character called Rex who offered him/ her a variety of dedicated sections of content specially curated for both male and female audiences. Rex’s female counterpart Roxy helped female users with their queries.

The brand focussed on bringing the characters of Rex and Roxy to life, creating various GIF based animations, giving both of them approachable, friendly and fun-loving personalities.

Considering the users were uninitiated in a conversation around sex, RexBot’s content was classified into various ‘information sections’ in a Decision Tree-based structure.

The bot was developed in a month’s time and beta-tested within an incubation community of over 1,500 Durex associates for over two months. The feedback was used to refine the user journey and enhance user experience.

RexBot was developed with an eye on the future. It can be integrated to almost all existing digital brand assets.