P&G Vietnam wins Digital Marketing Strategy of the Year – Vietnam award for revamped Head & Shoulders brand

Its Head & Shoulders campaign injected a fresher look and humour into the brand across Vietnam’s regions.

Head & Shoulders has been marketed in Vietnam for decades, still has a big room to improve the brand awareness in its product category. 

Whilst exploring the improving opportunities, the company found that the English brand name was too difficult for local consumers to pronounce, resulting in several “versions” and impacting overall recall.

Some of the pronunciations even bear comical meanings such as “Hít sô đa” translated as breath soda in the local language.

This inspired P&G Vietnam to launch the campaign around the theme “1 Brand, 100 Names, 1 Solution to Dandruff,” to put a positive spin on consumer tension by celebrating the hundreds of funny nicknames from across the regions.

The campaign not only made Head & Shoulders more memorable with the consumers, but also helped bridge the gap against its key competitor.

It delivered record-breaking results, attaining the highest-ever unaided brand awareness score and at 174% growth.

Meanwhile, Its equity scores jumped to 170% and reached its highest-ever value share growing at 107%.

Its campaign view-through rate of main assets grew by 39%, more than 6% versus the market benchmark.

For these efforts, P&G Vietnam was given the Digital Marketing Strategy of the Year – Vietnam award in the recently concluded FMCG Asia Awards hosted by Retail Asia.

The awards programme celebrates the most outstanding companies in Asia Pacific's fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry that have shown exemplary performance with their innovative products and initiatives.

In consideration of this award, the judging panel considered the following highlights of the campaign.

First is that P&G Vietnam launched regionalised videos with relevant talents for North-Central-South audience engagement that were communicated effectively via Youtube’s geo targeting approach.

To maximise awareness amongst target consumers, the campaign utilised other digital solutions such as seeding customised content within the brand ambassador’s Youtube channel by embedding campaign videos in new MV launch, local KOLs fan pages, top social communities, and collaborating with the two biggest online content platforms in Vietnam: Pops and Yeah1 to create conversations about the campaign.

Second is that the company rolled out minigames and quizzes to engage and encourage consumers to share even more ways they pronounced Head & Shoulders in their hometowns. It kicked off in KOL pages to drive participation from their own followers.

For the third achievement, the panel noted how P&G Vietnam partnered with Isaac, a well-known and loved singer and actor in Vietnam, together with popular local KOLs from the three main regions.

Lastly, leveraging on the humor that surrounded the brand’s misunderstood name, the company picked the top 3 most amusing and common mispronunciations of Head & Shoulders from the biggest regions and brought them to life through humorous song and dance productions as part of the campaign.

By identifying the brand’s disadvantage, P&G Vietnam was able to successfully turn its customers’ perception around and spark local pride. It was able to showcase the diverse beauty of the different regions and their phonetics and dialects in Vietnam.