Exclusive | Philips urges Speed Styling with their new campaign

Philips India, the leading lifestyle brand for male and female grooming gadgets, had recently launched their Speed Style campaign which allowed youth to connect with their brand ambassadors Alia Bhatt and Arjun Kapoor.

With the latest technology and innovation, Philips Personal Care range of styling gadgets allow you to create your own personal style, or keep up with the hottest trends in grooming. These styling tools have been specifically designed to give you the confidence to achieve any look you desire and express yourself through your personal style.

In today’s fast paced life, you wouldn’t always have the time to go to a professional stylist and get a new styling done. Also, with changing lifestyles, there’s greater emphasis on changing your style more often than ever. Philips with its Speed Styling allows you to quickly and easily style yourself at home using products like stylers, trimmers, Straighteners and so on. It’s like having your personal stylist by your side all the time.

While the campaign got a huge response, they have recently announced their association with Lakmé Fashion Week (LFW) Summer/Resort 2015 as the official “Styling partner”, with all styling for LFW being done using Philips gadgets.

To get deeper insights about the Speed Styling campaign we at Adgully caught up with Anurita Chopra, Marketing Director, Personal Care, Philips India.

Concept

Speed Styling is our theme for this year’s Valentine’s and the inspiration really came from a couple of things. One is that today’s youth want everything quickly, whether it is anything in their life or even when it comes to styling. They want very quick results and frankly in Philips Personal care we are creating products which allow consumers to use the products very quickly and get results immediately as well. So in a two or five minute routine you can actually trim or style your hair with curls and that’s the concept behind Speed Styling as today’s kids want all results quickly and our product is prepared for giving them that.

Execution

We’ve worked with Pulp strategy on this and the brief was very clear that given the fact that Valentine’s is a youth occasion it is somewhere, where guys from colleges and young professionals, they use this occasion to look great and not just for that day but also a build up to that day. So the brief was that why don’t we create an experience for them which allows them to style themselves where our products really fit into their lives well. So given the idea that they came up with an app where you can time yourself on how much time you take to speed style yourself using our products and doing what they want to do which is to look great. So everything really fit together very simply and seamlessly.

We dint just let it shred on the digital space, we took it out offline as well. We went to colleges, we went to malls, we got a lot of buzz going through radio and even in our retail outlet we did promotions.

Response so far

The response has been phenomenal so far. We’ve had quite a few downloads on our apps so far. The colleges have done fantastic so far because the gratification of this thing because the kids are excited to meet our brand ambassadors Alia Bhatt and Arjun Kapoor. So that has really kicked off well.

The first point is that these two brand ambassadors embody self-styling themselves. Alia on one hand doesn’t believe in being given styling, she believes in self-styling and that’s exactly where our products come in. You don’t really have to spend hours in a salon to look great.

We’ve got an overwhelming response from the campaign. The teaser vines and the launch content have been highly appreciated with views of over 1.5 lac viewers in just 1 week. The organic Impressions of the campaign is more than 3 crores.

On twitter:
• 42,000 conversations in a single day
• #tag trended for 8 hours on 8th Feb Nationally

Worldwide trending – 4 minutes
• Around 4500 consumers engaged with on-ground so far and counting
• Over 1800 participations on-ground and counting

Media Mix

For this campaign we used Radio where we had Alia give tips to the listeners on how they can speed style themselves. We also had interesting animated videos which went viral on the digital space.

Speed Style vs other campaigns

If I have to compare it with our last year’s campaign, we have done really well in this campaign because we trended nationally during Delhi elections this year, we were even trending internationally for a bit say 5 minutes. I think the buzz around it is even higher than what we achieved last year.

Innovations

From a category view on the personal care segment a lot. We are pretty much the category leaders and if you look at beauty at the segment then the air straightener which we launched last year is a huge innovation. Till now women could either dry their hair with a hair dryer or style their hair with a straightener. But with the air straightener one can do both together and one can do it on wet hair, so when you are drying your hair and your styling your hair at the same time, again we get to the fact that kids don’t to spend half an hour styling themselves. They don’t have the time or patience to do that. So it’s a convergent solution that brings two things together. Similarly, if you look at Kerashine as an overall portfolio, then before last year people used to style their hair with products but there was no way of benefitting your hair with the same product as well. With Kerashine, you are not only styling but also reducing frills and helping nutrition to the hair at the same time.

So these were some of the innovations we had in this segment. If you look at men’s grooming, trimming is one option where we keep innovating on technology. Similarly, we are also innovating on cost and opening up to newer audiences. We are also into wet shaving. Aqua touch is a complete electrical shaver where you can actually put the shaver under water and wash it up and you can clean up very nicely because there is no fear of cutting yourself.

So across categories, we are pushing the needle, changing dimensions, challenging the norms. We don’t want consumers to go for casual occasions to salons. Casual styling needs to be done at home.

Industry Size

We define our industry as male grooming as both manual and electrical trimming. That market size is roughly about 284 million euros out of which electric is 40 million Euros and this segment is growing at 30-40% CAGR, whereas manual market is shrinking as its growing at only about 8-10% CAGR.

If you look dryers and straighteners in the beauty market, it’s roughly about 50-55 million Euros and we are the market leaders in that category.

Focus for 2015

We will continue to focus on male grooming and beauty this year as well. We will consider shaving and trimming and look at fewer opportunities as well. Similarly, in beauty our focus will continue on expanding hair care and on hair removal and again we are evaluating newer opportunities. By Archit Ambekar | Twitter: @aambarchit