Always is a brand of feminine hygiene products, owned by P&G since 1983. The brand achieves market leadership with 78 percent market share. Even with such high market share, Always faces intense competition in the global sanitary napkin market which is dominated by several key vendors including P&G, Kimberly-Clark, Edgewell personal care and Hengan Group. In addition, at the time of 2013, Always has realized its brand image was not apparent to the younger generation because it has put its priority in great product performance and technological advancement of products. So, the brand eagerly wanted to build an emotional bond with teenage girls and make an impact among them.
Always’ customer segment: teenage girls and their moms
How come Always could not ignore its dissatisfying performance in teenage girls and their moms market? Why teenage girls and their moms mean so much to Always? There are 3 specific reasons for these questions.
First of all, teenage girls tend to use the brand for a lifetime if they develop emotional bonding with the brand as girls. Along the way, Always’ goal is to build loyalty to the brand, which makes a particularly big difference in a category with high loyalty rates and where women often stay for with the brand they start using as girls. Popular theories of gender differences (Cross and Madson 1997b; Meyers-Levy 1988) suggest that women are more loyal than men regardless of the group versus individual nature of the loyalty object. So it can be interpreted that women customers are more loyal to the brand, once they have an emotional bonding with it.
Therefore, teenage girls are essential to Always as a potentially loyal customer group.
Secondly, teenage girls can be easily effected by their closest ones, especially their moms. They have not been fully developed in terms of discriminability and aethestic standard and rely heavily on their mothers’ opinions and guidance. Also, it is noted that moms are the main force of shopping who are responsible for buying daughters’ sanitary products. Therefore, building positive, healthy and inspiring brand images can be very likeable for mothers with teenage girls to educate. Involving moms in the target customer segments can be a wise decision.
The 3rd reason is that Always’ biggest competitor, Kotex, have made moves to communicate with the younger generation by producing girl power online shows called Carmilla, attracting over 150,000 fans worldwide and other campaigns like ‘Declaration of real talk’ to empower girls to speak the real truth. Apart from Kotex, Unilever’s Dove has been on a mission to improve women’s and girls’ confidence about their looks with the campaign for Real Beauty as well. Always has been left behind in terms of empowering girls and building connections with them.
How did Always target teenage girls and their moms?
Before Always released their campaign, they have conducted a research to understand the emotional states of girls at puberty. It turned out that 56% girls claimed to experience a drop in confidence at puberty and lowest moments for them were when they got their first period which can leave a lasting effect.
Based on these results, Always has launched a video on their YouTube channel called ‘Like A Girl’ which captured how people of all ages interpret the phrase ‘like a girl’. This video showed that many women believed ‘Like a girl’ means weakness, and the contradictory behaviors between younger girls and women presented that girls are born to be strong and confident.
After the videos gone viral, the company introduced hashtag ‘LikeAGirl’ on twitter and invited famous celebrities like Vanessa Hudgens and Bella Thorne to post tweets and expand the impacts. And they also reached out to online and broadcast media to increase popularity. This campaign spread the messages and empower female by showing that ‘Like a girl’ should be a meaningful and powerful statement all women should embrace. With such positive energy, Always managed to build an emotional bond with teenage girls and their moms.
Great results
The video achieved 76MM total global video views on YouTube from 150 countries (90% from the 20-country activation). 1 million+ people shared this video, 35,000 commented and user-generated content was 13%. Also, Always twitter followers tripled in the first three months and their YouTube channel subscribers grew more than 40 times. Most importantly, claimed purchase intent towards Always grew more than 50%.
Reference
1. P&G. Our brand.
http://www.pg.com/en_AP/brands/care_about_family.shtml
2.. Case study: Always#LikeAGirl
https://www.dandad.org/en/d-ad-always-like-a-girl-campaign-case-study-insights/
3. Are Women More Loyal Customers Than Men? Gender Differences in Loyalty to Firms and Individual Service Providers
By Valentyna Melnyk, Stijn M.J. van Osselaer, & Tammo H.A. Bijmolt
http://journals.ama.org/doi/pdf/10.1509/jmkg.73.4.82
4. P&G's Always Aims to Change What It Means to Be 'Like a Girl'
By Jack Neff
http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/p-g-s-change-meaning-a-girl/293895/
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