The Unilever hair care brand has undergone a two-year revamp. Olivia Solon reports.

 

Brand repositioning

Aspiring to be in the same league as Apple and Nike is no mean feat, but that was the ambition of Andrei Gemeneanu, global brand director of Sunsilk.

The process started in 2006, when Gemeneanu took the decision to turn strategic planning into an independent unit at brand level. “But not at the communications level or, worse, at an advertising level,” he says.

He approached brand planning boutique BrandThinkTank, which he had previously worked with on another Unilever campaign – Dirt is Good.

Pierre-Emmanuel Maire, founder of BrandThinkTank, was Gemeneanu’s “number one partner in crime” throughout the entire journey.

Maire says: “He briefed us to develop a brand-positioning idea for the global relaunch of Sunsilk in 2008. We were looking for a brand long term like Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ and ‘Swoosh’ logo.”

 

Agency partners

The team included PR agency Salt, digital agency AKQA, design agency DesGrippes Gobe, JWT, activation agency Jam and media agency MindShare.

According to Maire, the fact that every one was independent helped. “Integrated communications in the old way is bullshit, with one agency pretending to do everything,” he says.

“There is a lot of talk about agencies working together, but it can be a show and tell, like siblings trying to get their mum’s attention,” says Gary Jones from MindShare. “In this case, everyone shared the same ambition and everyone joined in.”

In order to successfully work with so many parties, Gemeneanu needed to manage the conceptual challenge and provide leadership.

It also required many meetings with everybody having the freedom to say what they thought. “We started with understanding the target 20-something girls. Research looking at 20-something girls around the world revealed that a woman in her twenties is ‘a woman in becoming. She has a burning desire to live and experience the urgency of life. She knows where she wants to take her life, but she has an urgency of getting there’,” explains Gemeneanu.

From this insight came the tagline “Life Can’t Wait”. Sunsilk also understood that hair has a deeply emotional connection with women. “It represents who they are and what they want to be,” he adds.

 

Insight

Richard Cox, founder of PR agency Salt, says: “The insight that sits at the heart is ‘Hair on, Life on’. Hair plays a disproportionate role in this audience’s life. It is different from clothes and skin. Like skin it is part of you, but like clothes it can be manipulated.” This is hugely relevant, not just to 20-something women. The twenties are an aspirational age to younger women and positively nostalgic to older women. By acknowledging this emotional connection Sunsilk would stand apart from its rivals.

“This game is not necessarily about differentiation, but about relevance,” says Maire.

Daniel Bonner, executive creative director of Akqa London, says: “Digital activity in the health and beauty category tends to be product-led, predictable and uninspiring. Lifecantwait.com was conceived to break the norms.”

Gemeneanu adds: “For us, hair’s not just a piece of fabric, but a canvas on which the story of 20-somethings’ lives unfold. We were playing in a much deeper domain that strives to have a bigger level of ambition and human relevance.”

 

Brand Identity

Once the idea was in place, Sunsilk needed to create a brand identity that could, according to Maire, “play in the same league as most fashion and luxury brands”. At this stage Paris-based design agency Des Grippes Gobe led the way. Gemeneanu says: “I am a firm believer in design-led brands. A precise visual identity that is distinct in the context of its category is trendy, cool and exciting.”

This involved packaging design, logos, strapline and, of course, icons to represent the brand. “We judged them by the same two pillars: the urgency of life and the key role of hair. This is not another celebrity campaign – we have really been looking deep into the brand equity of the celebrity,” he adds.

Marilyn Monroe, Shakira and Madonna were all deemed icons. Elie Hasbani, creative director of Des Grippes Gobe, explains: “We wanted to show people who have succeeded in doing life in their own way, who have changed their life by changing their hair.”

They formed the central group of icons with local icons to improve relevancy of the campaign in other markets. Thailand had actresses and TV hosts Um-Patcharapa and Aom Piyada, Singapore had singer and actress Joanne Peh, Argentina’s icon was singer and actress Natalia Oreiro and India had former Miss World Priyanka.

Cox says: “When we had the idea, we toured the regions as a little group working as a team.”

Jones adds: “We needed to take the enthusiasm for the ambition out. Sunsilk took us to all the regional centres and we presented to the local agencies in Asia, the US, Mexico, Turkey and London.”

The aim was to make the campaign live in very different markets. “The interaction with the regions was about factoring in the brand consistency, the stature of the brand in the various markets. For example, Sunsilk is dominant in Latin America, but smaller in Asia and has a different competition set in the US,” explains Marie.

Where the brand idea was “Life Can’t Wait”, the campaign idea was “Every girl’s hair tells the story of their life”. MindShare’s role was to translate this into media. “Some markets are really advanced in digital like the US, but in São Paolo they are banning out of home so we had to overcome this through other ways of executing outdoor,” adds Jones

Having had an ambitious repositioning strategy there was, of course, an equally ambitious media strategy. The global launch started with a Super Bowl spot in the US, the biggest ad spot there is. Then the idea was taken around the world.

The digital activation comprised the hub website with a playful and irreverent tone. “We wanted to bring to life the idea that ‘their hair tells their story’ so used Marilyn Monroe’s rise to stardom captured in an interactive timeline which charts her iconic looks,” says Jones.

Consumers could also upload a photo and plot a timeline of their own hair history, with a range of hairstyles from the past 25 years that can be customised by length, colour and highlights.

Following the icons execution there was a second execution with Madonna, which saw Sunsilk effectively launch Madonna’s latest single Four Minutes to Save the World as the soundtrack for the ad. The relationship could go further in future.

Results

“It is definitely too early to open the champagne,” says Gemeneanu, “but we can certainly put it in the fridge. The feedback is positive, there is a positive buzz from consumers and retail partners, which is enough to be confident that this is the right strategy and it will continue to be the right strategy.”

The next move is to “take it deeper”, with a global engagement campaign. “We want to move from icons to the iconisation of real girls, to inspire 20-something girls to live their life to the fullest.”

Sunsilk will reveal the stories of girls in their twenties who have done something good, using their stories “to inspire more girls and create a global movement along with Life Can’t Wait values”.

Would they have done anything differently? Maire says: “I would have included boys/men. The divide between men and women and girls and boys is relevant for older audiences, but not so much now – we should be working on something for them.”

He concludes: “Repositioning is a big piece of manoeuvring, but you need to be a big brand to succeed. It is dangerous in the best of times to be a commodity but in recessional times it is deadly not to be aspirational.”