KAO
To promote its new Pyuan hair care product, the cosmetics company ran a campaign on Instagram and Facebook that increased brand awareness and purchase intent among its main audience of women in their 20s.
The rebranded Pyuan shampoo and conditioner reappeared in Kao’s Merit hair care brand lineup in April 2017. The shampoo contains specially selected ingredients that clean the scalp and prioritize removing dirt. The conditioner has a fresh aroma that lasts the whole day. Through its “cleansing life” brand message, Kao encourages customers to only incorporate the most important things into their daily lives.
lift in brand awareness
lift in purchase intention
higher in-store sales share year-over-year1
Historically, Kao used TV commercials and other mass advertising channels to increase awareness of its products. With the release of Pyuan, however, the company decided to go digital without any TV commercials. It wanted to reach young people, and in doing so, to expand the market for the whole Merit brand.
Kao developed Pyuan for women in their 20s. As this demographic has more contact with information on their smartphones than on TV, the company decided to focus on digital media and not use TV commercials, when it introduced the reformulated products. Using both Facebook and Instagram, Kao ran a campaign targeted to women between the ages of 18–29.
Survey results have shown that the attention span of young people is decreasing, so Kao took an extremely visual approach. On both platforms, the brand used video ads in the carousel format, which rotated through several animated GIFs (short, looping videos). On Instagram, Kao used ads in Stories to make an impression on the audience in a short space of time. Rather than creating standard ads that promote product benefits, the company came up with the idea of depicting its “cleansing life” brand message through the daily life of an imaginary character called “Pyuan of Green Gables” to delight and motivate viewers to add Pyuan to their daily lives.
By using short, fun videos that resonated with its audience, the company turned product awareness into purchase intent. The campaign resulted in a 10-point lift in brand awareness for Pyuan among people exposed to the ads, a 3-point lift in purchase intent among people exposed to the ads and a 1.5X increase in year-over-year in-store sales share.
