Our solution was ‘Rexona Police’ – the Anti-Smell Agents of ‘No Smell Association’, a powerful pressure group designed to knock-off body odour!We raised public concern through HK’s breaking news (viral video) about body odour! Reports from ‘No Smell Association’ prompted a social movement to help ‘smelly’ guys and girls.

‘Rexona Police’ immediately stepped out in mass media to recruit Anti-Smell Agents who could identify the smelly culprits (friends). Daily ‘wanted’ Facebook newsfeeds urged suspects to review their social activities and remove their ‘smelly labelling’ by getting friends to verify their real causes of sweat and learn the benefits of using Rexona every day.

Rexona is a leading deodorant brand but in Hong Kong the category has only 30% penetration as usage is limited to the summer and sports. Our challenge was to grow the category and make Rexona’s deodorants an ‘everyday habit’ amongst the ‘deodorant dodgers’.HK consumers are ‘fun-loving’, but highly image-conscious and will do anything to avoid embarrassing social labels. Social pressure was our opportunity to influence their behaviour as no one wants to be labelled as smelly! We ‘gamified’ a problem-solution approach in an entertaining way to educate consumers about sweat and body-odour to activate regular usage of Rexona.

In just 2 weeks, we drove +70,000 visits to Rexona’s website and maintained a stable weekly traffic of 35,000 visits throughout the campaign period. 53.5% of the site’s traffic came from Facebook, proving a strong viral impact.In just 2 months, over 80,000 deodorant-dodging suspects were captured that resulted in over 500,000 Rexona bottles sold! Volume sales were up by +8.4% YOY and the category also grew by +7%, driven mainly by Rexona. Most importantly, we helped the smelly culprits regain their self-confidence. A massive achievement considering how hard it is to change a consumer’s behaviour! CASE SOLVED!

By ‘gamifying’ the consumer experience, Rexona (despite being a low interest product) successfully gained permission to enter into HK fun-loving consumers’ social lives. This became a trigger point in engaging the consumers in an in-depth dialogue with Rexona and their friends that led to activating self-consciousness about body odour problems that could only be resolved through regular usage of deodorants and favouring Rexona as their choice of brand.‘Rexona Police’ creatively transformed social pressure into an unique entertaining and rewarding psychological experience that paved the way for a change in consumer behaviour for the importance of using Rexona deodorants more frequently.