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Pantene Knows Marketing - Secret Shampoo Revealed
Pantene is the world’s best-selling haircare brand, offering a variety of shampoo, conditioner and styling products, sold in around 100 countries.
But how does a shampoo become the best selling shampoo in the world? Is it the price? Is it the quality? Is it the branding and marketing? It’s the combination of all of them.
Pantene hair care products by Procter & Gamble are the number one selling hair care brand in the world, and after reading numerous (negative) product reviews in the online forums, seems like it still might not be voted as the “best shampoo in the world” *. This is an important note to take for the marketers when doing your marketing research, both quantitative and qualitative research is needed. The same people who vote another (higher priced) brand as “better shampoo”, still go and purchase the lower priced Pantene - the shampoo, which is giving them the overall better value than the “better shampoo”.
Pantene is a low price point shampoo, and the success of Pantene being the most sold shampoo in the world probably has a lot to do it being an inexpensive shampoo beating other cheap shampoos in the quality. What is worth the notice here, is that the Pantene advertising does not focus on their low price point, it focuses on quality of the shampoo, great visuals and to the feedback they hear from the consumers.
QUALITY OF THE SHAMPOO
2007 ad. Strong Hair, Glamorous, Hollywood Worthy
GREAT VISUALS
2008 ad. Strong Hair, No Questions Asked. Very strong visual
GREAT VISUALS INTERACTING WITH ENVIRONMENT
2008 ad. Stop Split Ends. Very strong visual, the message combined with the environment, the double light post.
2008 campaign. Strong hair. Interactive display, free shampoo samples distributed.
CONSUMER BASED & INTERACTIVE
Pantene doesn’t just encourage women to use their hair care products, but also cutting the hair - for charity. Pantene started Beautiful Lenghts last year to collect hair, 8 inches at the time, to be used for wigs for cancer patients. Pantene works together with American Cancer Society, who distributes the wigs made out of donated hair to women who have lost their hair due cancer treatments. Even the writer herself was inspired to cut her hair earlier this year. The Beautiful Lengths campaign is an excellent example of Pantene’s community involvement, philantrophy and interactive marketing. They for example host hair cutting events across the nation.
Another great example of Pantene’s community based marketing is their new song used in their commercials. Pantene held a user generated song writing contest at Midem in Cannes. “We are always looking for new ways to emotionally connect Pantene, the number one haircare brand in the world, with consumers,” said Freddy Bharucha, Marketing Director for Pantene North America about the song writing contest. The winning song was “Shine” by Rosi Golan, which has already aired in TV commercials like in the one below.
This TV commercial with the happy woman & girl also targets one of Pantene’s important target market: moms.
SALON SECRET SHAMPOO CAMPAIGN
As I write this blog post, Pantene’s “Salon Secret Shampoo” campaign is going on, and I am actually spoiling the secret here by telling, yes, the TV commercial with Stacy London telling you about the “secret shampoo” is about Pantene Pro-V.
Pantene teamed up with Walmart to create a Salon Secret Shampoo campaign, and the secret being told at Walmarts on November 24th. Walmart’s Eleven Moms **, real life mothers and also bloggers in Walmart’s social media reach out campaign, got to test the shampoo in a blind test and Pantene interviewed moms about their hair dilemmas. Pantene had done similar type testing in hair salons country wide and their results was that 70% of people liked Pantene shampoo better than the salon brand.
The participating moms of the Walmart’s Eleven Moms campaign are also featured in the Secret to Great Hair website and the videos, like the one above, are also in the campaign’s YouTube channel. The women are offering their honest opinions in the videos. What makes this campaign brilliant, is that the same women also promoted the campaign in their individual blogs.
They were not told what the shampoo was, but all of the Eleven Moms received a mystery box of the secret shampoo in mail and the anticipation was built online by their blog posts and videos. The bloggers also posted the Secret Shampoo badges to their blogs and told their readers they also they could receive free samples of the shampoo to test it at home.
A few weeks later, the blogger moms received another mystery box - revealing the sectet. This time with a lock and a note that the number code for the lock would arrive a few days later. The anticipation grew now even among the testers, and many bloggers (writer included) couldn’t wait the code to arrive and used creative ways to open the box to reveal the shampoo in fact was Pantene Pro-V.
The video star is Alyssa, Kingdom First Mom.
I will be very interested to hear what kind of results Pantene is getting with the Salon Secret campaign. But according the information on hand now, their target market was reached well so far online and off line. They participated in the community of their target market via the Eleven Moms, who made the campaign spread organically online. The beauty of the campaign was also that it was the real life consumers marketing the product by their honest opinions.
Ps. This Blog Post was mentioned at Advertising Age even before I hit the publish button.
* The writer hasn’t been using Pantene before, but received free samples of Pantene’s Pro-V Hair Care line during the Salon Secrets Campaign and was pleasantly surprised, but won’t quit using her salon brand shampoo. The negative comments can be found anywhere where Pantene Shampoo is reviewed, and no, the writer did not do any type of quantitative research whether Pantene got more positive or negative reviews.
** The writer is one of Walmart’s Eleven Moms, but did not participate the salon testing and this is the only blog post she has written about the “Secret Shampoo”.
