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, resulting 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!

Our solution was ‘Rexona Police’ – the anti-smell Agents of the ‘No Smell Association’, a new social pressure group designed to knock-off body-odour.We triggered a ‘social movement’ via HK’s breaking news (viral video) and activated consumers’ self-consciousness for intense body odour! Reports from ‘No Smell Association’ prompted the public to help the ‘smelly’ guys and girls.

Once consumers recognised that it’s a crime to smell bad, Rexona Police stepped out to reveal the victims on Mobile/Facebook and urged the suspects to review their social activities, learn the real causes of sweat and how Rexona can help them resolve the problem.

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: this led to activating self-consciousness for 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 a unique, entertaining and rewarding psychological experience that paved the way for a change in consumer behaviour, promoting the importance of using Rexona deodorants more frequently.