Marketing Needs To Start a Conversation
Marketing is all about telling the qualities, characters, and utilization of your products in a manner that the target audience could relate to them.
Simply put, how can you create a marketing strategy that begins a conversation?
Start by precisely identifying your audience. Who is your product for? What age group people can relate to your products. For example, if you are marketing chocolate for children, you might target kids and make your marketing advertisement in colorful graphics and cartoon characters to make it more fun. However, if you are marketing healthier, low-sugar chocolates for children, a parent may be the target and alter your packaging message system.
Obviously, if you have a product for women, you need to target a female audience. But which women, where do they live, what are their challenges and how can you help solve their needs?
Your job is to describe women’s particular needs and tell how your product could be helpful to them. If you want to market your product, a branding and marketing company can help your business by developing a bespoke strategic plan, just right for your budget and target audience.
The best advice is to engage a marketing team early in the process to be part of the brand’s journey. Adding marketing to the product’s development is often the root cause of problems succeeding in a marketplace.
Marketing Strategies of Stayfree (sanitary napkins)
Developed by Johnson & Johnson, sanitary napkins for women were created in 1888. Stayfree is one of their current brands in this category. Today, The Energizer Company owns the brand exclusively in North America.
How do they market their products?
Stayfree is a sanitary pad brand that is designed for girls and women on the move.
In some parts of the world, a sanitary napkin is a modern concept to live stain-free, protected, and active in those days. It has a fast absorption quality for those women or girls who suffer from heavy blood flow.
The brand works hard to be relatable to the real-life problems of women, earning high customer loyalty and trust. The brand supplies the product in all the pharmacies and grocery chains worldwide. It has cross-promotions with women’s organizations, clinics, and hospitals. In America, it is normal to speak about the menstrual cycle.
But in some other countries in Asia, this isn’t the case like in India.
Starting a Stayfree Conversation in India
Women do not openly talk about periods in India, and women in rural India are still not aware of sanitary napkins. It is a big challenge for brands like Stayfree sanitary napkins to sell their products in these regions.
So, their brand team created some tactics to make their brand more familiar with these women.
The marketing in rural India began by making the brand more visible to women. To do this, they hired brand ambassadors to create a door-to-door campaign and spread awareness about the menstrual cycle.
The brand discussed the difficulty women face on menstrual days in these campaigns and the side effects of using old clothes while bleeding. But they did these in one-to-one conversations. Of course, this isn’t scalable in larger markets, but it was precisely the right approach in these rural Indian communities.
Over time, they added a well-known face to market their brand. This helped to establish trust through the trust equity of the person hired.
Their “time to change” social media marketing campaign was a great hit. This campaign urged women to write about their brand and what changes a woman wants around her. This distinct talk and sharing strategy for the Stayfree brand helped women talk freely about their problems during the menstrual cycle.
A blogger contest where Stayfree encouraged bloggers to write about their brands.
Dream of Progress – A Conversation with PV Sindhu
They also created a “dream of progress” campaign and approached PV Sindhu,’ Rio Olympic Silver Medalist of India, to launch this campaign.
PV Sindhu spoke about her journey to the students how menstruation could never stop her success. She talked about her journey, dreams, inspiration, love for sports, and overcoming challenges in her journey.
She motivated other girls to follow their dreams without stopping on menstrual days. They created this campaign to change girls’ mindsets and encourage them not to let periods pull them down. Hence, PV Sindhu is a powerful woman and can inspire many girls. The brand gains more popularity and visibility among women.
Pregnant women also can use the Stayfree brand. Women experience discharge in early pregnancy, known as Leukorrhea. It may be difficult for some women to avoid and control this discharge, Stayfree guarantees that their product is safe for pregnant women.
This additional target audience (rural Indian pregnant women) helped expand the brand. Selling into hospitals opened new opportunities for use occasions.
Stayfree runs an engaging campaign, “Wall of Irritation,” which achieved 50,000 fans on its Facebook brand page. Launched on Women’s Day, they asked women to share their stories. They could also win some fantastic prizes, with the grand prize being an Apple iPad 2.
Through this campaign, the women ask questions, answer, listen to each other and get motivated or clarified about the contest.
Recently Stayfree launched a father-daughter ad campaign to urge fathers to talk and involve themselves in the conversation of periods with daughters. It is a hit advertisement and gains popularity in a short time.
These campaigns are the perfect examples of marketing and popularizing the product in the areas where people are not aware of it. Various other brands are inspired by the marketing campaign of Stayfree and adopt similar approaches to reach the audience. Today Stayfree is the best-selling product in its category.
Their marketing strategies have won the audience’s trust by becoming OF their community of women. They created conversations and dialogues. Innovative platforms were made for their target audience to share their thoughts.
The results: 70% of Indian women in rural areas started to use Stayfree pads because they became aware of a new solution to an age-old challenge.
Conclusion
The Stayfree brand became an essential part of a woman’s routine. They talk openly about periods and understand the need to use these napkins. And they demonstrated how a creative, strategic approach could open the door to raising awareness and creating action.
A valuable lesson is for a brand to help facilitate conversations – not to talk AT an audience but WITH them.
Their significant insight was to get the conversation started without selling first – but listening and engaging.
What conversations have you started with your audience you want to reach?
Guest Blogger: Tracy Lawrence, is a curious lady, who loves to talk and write about technologies. Her writing is clever and fearless, but in real life, Tracy is afraid of bees and the dark. Explore her writings by visiting www.crossmediadesigns.com.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
