Essity – All Seasons Zenith

Essity

United Kingdom

Challenge

Libresse is a global brand known for its period care offering. To grow and remain relevant in a declining Feminine care category, Libresse expanded its offering for women’s intimate area into washes & wipes. It wanted to enter this category with stature, distinction and relevance.

Libresse is a straight-talking/taboo-breaking brand that respects women’s needs. The challenge was to translate our understanding of women’s reality into intimate care and stay true to our taboo-breaking values and behaviours as a brand in a highly sensitive environment.

Insight & Idea

The approach in this category hasn’t changed for decades. It reinforces the fear of smelling bad, and portrays perfectly normal discharges as body leakages that need fixing. In other words, it broadcasts a sense of shame to women.

We conducted quantitative research (8,000+ women) across multiple countries and fastidiously reviewed academic studies and poignant articles. The same themes kept cropping up again and again, which led us to our insight:

There’s an unhealthy quest for the perfect vagina: 44% of women are embarrassed by their vulvas and 57% feel pressure for it to look a certain way (Essity quantitative research) – as a result, labiaplasty (the procedure to alter the labia) was the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery in the world, up 45% in 2016 vs. 2015 (ISAPS). This toxic quest is fuelled by societal shame and censorship around women’s genitals.

To show women how much we care, we overturned a long history of shame and objectification to respectfully shatter the myth of the perfect vulva!

Execution

We created a long-form film showing diverse, beautiful vulvas of every shape and colour through analogous images such as oysters, conch shells, juicy fruits and cupcakes, singing loud and proud to the women who love them, subverting dozens of taboos. To drive awareness, trial and education, we activated a digital-led campaign. We created Instagram votes that helped educate women about the do’s and don’ts of caring for their vulva. To further encourage women to have a healthy relationship with their V-zone, all content drove to our campaign page, which featured articles that provided much-needed clarity on the questions no one else was addressing. We collaborated with best-selling authors Nina Brochmann and Ellen Stokken Dahl, authors of The Wonder Down Under: A User’s guide to the Vagina.

Results

Released in the Nordics, the campaign received immediate praise in media globally.

Paid media:

Reached 90% of our target with 32m impressions, 21% over-delivery
Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat delivered 37% of impressions, despite only a 16% share of ad spend, leading towards a lower CPM vs estimated
Achieved best view (12.5%) and engagement rates (0.8%) of any product campaigns to date
YouTube Brand Lift Study: 35.3% lift in Brand Awareness = ‘Best in class’ performance

It smashed all brand metrics. Most importantly, the ‘brand seems different in the category’ metric more than doubled versus norm (Ipsos, Dec. 2018).

A new entrant, we immediately met and surpassed targets, and Libresse wipes’ market share reached 33% five weeks after launch (Nielsen, Dec. 2018).

Viva La Vulva gaining the right to exist was a very hard battle with our media owners, but it paid off handsomely in the end:

The campaign was a glittering success driving brand consideration and sales.