Behaviour Change
I think I love you guys!!
Rodrigo Ferrari, Brand Director at Unilever
Working globally with Unilever across America, Rotterdam and Port Sunlight, the initial brief was to help Unilever develop a Behavioural Change approach that could be used by marketeers and use Signal as the pilot brand to test it.
Back in 2008 there were three different behaviour change models within Unilever, all of them built meticulously by behaviour scientists, but unfortunately not simple to translate into an approach that worked for marketeers.
Starting with digesting the voluminous amounts of research and information available, Marketing Mums and the core Unilever team, developed a working Behaviour Change framework. This distilled over 320 behavioural principles into 10 levers that marketeers and could use easily for their brands, starting with Signal.
For Signal we identified the opportunity to focus on 4-8 year olds - getting them to start right - brushing their teeth twice a day. Previous research showed personal hygiene habits were formed in these years so by instilling the message to ‘brush day and night’ at this stage, healthy lifelong habits could be formed.
Co-creating with parents, teachers, and dentists every step of the project was routed in tangible real life insights.
Working with a global team to find an insight that resonated in Europe, Asia and Middle East, the team landed on the unique yet universal relationship between father and child - and the desire to spend quality time together. This later became the foundation for a highly successful campaign, ‘Pablo & Oliver’.
Along with a huge schools programme, a professional programme for dentists and the consistent support of Unilever team who saw the project through for five years, the campaign created a significant behaviour change in the target group.
The results:
By 2017, Signal had already reached their 2020 target of reaching 50 million with its simple, life-changing message (Source: Unilever.com). The 21 day Brush Day & Night intervention lead to a 25% increase in the number of school children brushing their teeth twice daily. Further details of the effectiveness of the campaign can be found here.
And the pilot framework of 10 levers was further refined by Marketing Mums after the project to create Unilever’s 5 Levers for Behavioural Change which is still used widely today - with Marketing Mums being the only accredited agency to deliver it.