'VoltExercise!' is a story of how a brand encouraged an entire country to do physical exercises by smartly integrating a forgotten tradition into the current news agenda, finding an engaging PR format and supporting it with comprehensive communications.

Voltaren Emulgel, an anti-inflammatory for muscles and joints, needed to boost sales, increase customers’ loyalty and distinguish itself in a competitive Russian market. The brand was looking for a new PR format that would help earn media coverage and expand it from specialized to news and lifestyle media.

Encouraged by USSR mass sports traditions and upcoming international sporting events in Russia (the Sochi Winter 2014 Olympics, etc.), we launched VoltExercise, the largest public exercise session since Soviet times: 10 open-air events in the 7 biggest Russian cities. A fitness world champion was recruited to design exercises preventing joint pain (supporting Voltaren’s benefit of pain relief), and the live events were hosted by the coolest instructor - Olympic figure skating champion and TV star Alexey Yagudin! To support VoltExercise events, we worked with a pool of 200 journalists, secured 13 media partners nationwide, organized press events in each city, incorporated advertising and enabled on-site engagement.

As a result, Voltaren occupied a stable position in the top 3 brands in its segment by market share in units, attracting part of consumers from the long-term leader (Fastum) and demonstrating growth comparable to the other (Ketonal). Considering that Ketonal is 24% cheaper than Voltaren, Voltaren owes its growth purely to VoltExercise. In June 2011, Voltaren became 1st by market share, for the first time in at least three years.

Purchase intent of consumers exposed to the campaign reached 64% (vs. 44% of those unexposed). Spontaneous brand awareness of consumers exposed to the campaign reached 48% (vs. 30%), and 44% were ready to recommend Voltaren to friends (vs. 30% of those unexposed). (Q3 2011).

Voltaren’s media coverage over 2011 outpaced the closest rival more than 5-fold; no competitor had such powerful newsbreaks! The campaign earned 475 media hits, of which 75% directly mentioned VoltExercise or Voltaren brand. Previously featured mainly in medical and health periodicals, Voltaren increased the share of coverage in news media 3-fold, in lifestyle - almost 2-fold. Media outreach was 95,800,108 impressions.

VoltExercise events drew over 5,500 attendees and provoked a wave of requests from local communities to organize similar happenings in their cities. Thus, “VoltExercise!” started growing into a nationwide movement for exercising!