Sunsilk Gangs Up with Young Women in India
The Indian shampoo and hair-care market was highly competitive in the mid-2000s, with brands like Hindustan Lever Limited's Sunsilk, Procter & Gamble, Dabur, CavinKare, and Clinic Plus vying for market share.
Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL) noticed that young urban women were spending more time online and realized the need to engage with them through digital channels. The company had already tested the waters with an earlier digital property, Sunsilknaturals.com, which offered hair-care suggestions and a message board for users.
The stated objective was to move Sunsilk beyond being a product that solved a hair-care problem toward becoming a brand that was woven into the everyday social and aspirational life of young women. HLL wanted to position the brand as an enabler of confidence, individuality, and social bonding using hairstyle and hair-related self-expression as the entry point.
HLL launched Sunsilk Gang of Girls (sunilkgangofgirls.com) on June 17, 2006, a social networking site built entirely around the Sunsilk brand. The platform was designed to engage young women through features like blogs, live chat rooms, job listings, games, contests, and a 'Makeover Machine' tool that let members experiment with new hairstyles.
The campaign also included a full 360-degree media push spanning television, print, and outdoor advertising, as well as mall activation programmes and college youth festivals. The platform was later extended to include city-based events and offline equivalents of the online community, such as 'Sunsilk Hair Bars' in cities like Delhi and Bangalore.