Wilkinson Sword
Problem
The shaving fixture in store is a highly competitive environment, with dominant players and slightly unconventional challengers. The team at Wilkinson Sword asked us to create a distinctive and compelling seasonally-relevant activation platform to drive stand out in store and drive consideration and trial (switching).
Insight
After a bit of chin stroking and quite a bit of thinking, we identified the insights that told us that there were two real issues to crack with this campaign.
To begin with, razors and blades are a low involvement category in general, and consumers are highly price sensitive – so they don’t really care – close to 95% of purchase decisions in routine categories are made by customers in autopilot mode.
Second, according to Kantar data, just under half of male razors category shoppers are extremely brand loyal, so they have no need to switch.
The truth is that 80% of the time, humans make decisions based on ‘System 1’ – quick, unconscious, and instinctive – and research shows that shoppers are emotionally driven by nature.
Emotion is what drives purchasing behaviours, as well as decision making in general.
So we set ourselves a challenge: how can we create a feeling in store that will shake people out of their “auto-pilot” / established behaviour?
Activation
We were given a set of brand guidelines and told to incorporate a healthy dose of British humour into our concept. So, instead of the usual razor category narratives (blades, etc.), we thought about the consumer and what happens in their world.
We identified that Sometimes occasions throughout the year offer up ‘nightmare moments’ that we’d rather escape – Christmas with the in-laws, nightmarish Valentine’s days, and so on.
This promotion is all about providing people with a stylish escape route from those realities, laced with a healthy dose of British wit. Our collaboration with travel brand Secret Escapes allowed us to offer shoppers the opportunity to escape these moments when they were advertised seasonally in store.
Results
The campaign launched in January 2023, and we have results so far for 3 activations that have completed – it’s a year long series of activations and we have live promos in stores now.
With these, we measured average sales per store per day for Hairy Moments vs Pre Promo. Sales performance varies by retailer and our best performing retailer had a massive 298% increase, while the average sales increase across all retailers was 166%.
ASDA also informed us that our New Year promotion was one of the top five promotions for entries across all of their promotions in the previous year – this single ASDA activation received over 17,000 entries!