Rexona is a fierce battle to retain its spot at the top of the deodorant category in Indonesia. With few product differences and Indonesians consumers keen on the lowest price, Rexona needed a creative strategy to separate itself from competitors.

Instead of fighting with its competition to find new ways to get the “dry” and “fresh” message across, Rexona wanted to find its blue ocean and reinvent the way Indonesian consumers view a deodorant brand.

The objective was simple...find a creative use of technology to separate itself from its competitors. This is what lead to the idea of developing a mobile app to help handicapped Indonesians move more freely.

The DNA of the campaign was mobile, as the entire idea for the campaign spawned from an innovative mobile app solution. Gerak, Rexona’s mobility assistant app, used the ever-growing voice trend to fundamentally change how people with disabilities would move across Indonesia.

The $500,000 USD budget earmarked for the Movement for Movement campaign was one of the largest digital only campaign for Unilever. Approximately 80% of that budget was dedicated to mobile media.

The Gerak app was engineered with Google’s Cloud Speech API and Dialogflow technology. Powered by its artificial intelligence capabilities, the Gerak app was a voice-activated chatbot that could direct people with disabilities to handicap accessible places.

For example, if someone made a query to find a restaurant, the app would recommend a list of restaurants in the person’s immediate vicinity with the most handicap accessible traits (i.e. bathroom, seating, parking). Since Rexona is dedicated to helping Indonesians move, Gerak closed the loop by partnering with leading ridesharing company Grab.

This partnership enabled Gerak app users to not only find places they could enjoy, but directly order a handicap accessible ride to.