Having crafted a social media campaign to create brand consciousness and loyalty in young girls with its cartoon character, Kita, Kimberly-Clark’s ad agency in Israel, Smoyz, has come up with another campaign aimed at a somewhat older demographic.
Once again tapping into the spread of social networking systems, a new Kotex marketing plan has found a way of infiltrating one of the latest iterations of web-based show and tell known as Pinterest. For those not yet aware of this new exercise in narcissistic display, here’s what it is. Pinterest users, more than two-thirds of whom are women, create virtual bulletin boards largely consisting of pictures, though sometimes captions are added and other forms of graphic displays.
Pinterest has taken off in the last year with the rise of cell phone devices that make it possible to snap photos and instantly post them to one’s Facebook page or other shared internet site. According to USA Today, the number of users has jumped from 117 million in January to 18.7 million in March.
According to their video, Smoyz, the Kotex agency, perused Israeli women’s Pinterest pages and “located 50 inspiring women” woman and then created a previously unknown commemoration named “Woman’s Inspiration Day.” The chosen women had “pinned” photos of objects they found attractive or desirable on their Pinterest sites. The agency staff then duplicated, as best they could, the objects depicted on the sites. However, though it is not mentioned, it’s pretty clear that they avoided posts with very expensive or hard to acquire objects.
Having gathered up many of the actual items depicted – bracelets, mugs, paint brushes, craft items, etc., they packaged them in a gift box along with a full line of Kotex products and delivered them to the women’s homes.
Smoyz reports that, “The women got surprised and excited and posted about their gifts”, which resulted in “2,284 Interactions” and “694,853 Total Impressions”.
Obviously this is just an extension of the already well established idea of getting consumers to wear your logo or brand name across your chest, on your sleeve, or even across your posterior. The term “viral marketing” takes on even more nuances as marketing drives continue to invade every aspect of our lives. AdWeek‘s online commentary concludes, “Pretty labor intensive, but smart. Any brand message centered around female self-expression could do well on Pinterest, if the tactics don’t overwhelm the target.”
Menstruation may not yet be completely out of the shame closet, but at least it’s making it way onto the Internet.
