The Challenge

Gillette had achieved leadership in India. How do you accelerate further growth?

Our Objective

Get Indian men shave more often.

The Insight

87% women prefer to go out with clean-shaven men in the evening

Idea

A women's movement against men's 'Evening Stubble'

Execution:

The term 'Evening stubble' got women all fired up. They threatened to make men crave if they did not shave.

In response, Gillette launched the Fusion Gamer – a razor that makes shaving effortless, even twice a day.

The razor was launched in a moving train in the evening. Celebrities also got on board the train too.

Outcome:

The campaign received free media coverage worth over USD 4.1 million.

Over 3.5 billion free editorial media impressions.

Sales went up by 16%..

What makes this a strong PR case?

We exposed a startling Nielsen report - 87% women prefer to go out with clean-shaven men in the evening.

We then coined the term ‘Evening Stubble’ which was fresh and deeply rooted to a strong women insight. Top female celebrities joined the war and expressed their dislike for ‘Evening Stubble’ at appearances.

They told men to shave or crave. This was an extremely bold statement for the Indian media.

Married women went so far as to say that they would sleep in separate rooms, creating front-page news.

Finally, a group of men launched the Fusion Gamer by shaving in a moving train in the evening! The news cascaded further when celebrities got into train and shaved.

Getting more men to shave in order to achieve this goal; seemed extremely difficult and expensive.

So, we needed a creative solution that got men to shave more often!

Thus our target audience was drawn from existing customers.

Women were our source of inspiration. A Nielsen report revealed that 87% women prefer to go out with clean-shaven men in the evening.

The campaign received free media coverage worth over USD 4.1 million - the highest-ever in Gillette India history.

Over 3.5 billion free editorial media impressions.

Over 500 million digital impressions.

For the first time, Gillette India trended on twitter with #shaveorcrave becoming India’s No.1 trend for over three days.

We witnessed India’s biggest blogging outburst by women, with over 500 blogs and a reach of over 34 million.

Gillette India share grew by 1.2 points, reaching its highest ever share.

Sales went up by 16% in spite of an existing high base.

We coined a term called "evening stubble".

'Evening stubble' became a bad word and women got all fired up. They began to put pressure on men. They threatened to make men crave if they did not shave.

Married women went so far as to say that they would sleep in separate rooms.

As part of our digital PR campaign, over 500 women bloggers blogged about the movement in less than 24 hours, creating a storm in the digital space.

In response, Gillette launched the Fusion Gamer – a razor that gives men such a comfortable shave that they will enjoy shaving twice a day.

The razor was launched in a moving train in the evening by a group of home-bound men.

Celebrities got on board the train too. This got media talking and created explosive news.

Over the past three years, Gillette had worked its way through to achieve market leadership in India.

So, our challenge was to further accelerate growth on an existing high base.

Our objective was to get men to shave more often.

Thus our target audience was drawn from existing customers. We further focused our campaign on young men. The specific segment was defined as the ‘metro-mavericks’ – living in the large cities of India – who

had become notoriously allergic to traditional commercial messages, and were increasingly relying on word-of-mouth for information & brand choice.

To be able to effectively communicate to our target segment, we needed to:

A) Involve the one audience that men would listen to – Women

B) Adopt a more non-traditional approach. A PR technique that would generate word-of-mouth buzz .

While researching, we came across a startling report published by the Nielsen - 87% women prefer to go out with clean-shaven men in the evening. We spoke to more women who affirmed this finding.

Thus was born a women’s movement against “Evening Stubble”.