Social Media Campaign Review: Pantene's Share 'n' Shine

Objective

Pantene’s ‘Share n Shine’ campaign aims to increase Pantene users using incentivised word of mouth marketing. The campaign seeks to reach out to new consumers using its existing consumers and strangely, men, as a referral base.

Execution

What seemed to be a friendly referral-based campaign turned out to be something quite strange! You have to create a music video to pay tribute to a ‘friend’ and Pantene will send a sample pack of its products to this friend.

There is a simple process where you select a friend, select certain words from a list to form a song and put together pictures to make a video with music. The campaign is conducted through Facebook and you can see other users’ videos before you make your own.

Positives

You can’t access the app unless you like Pantene’s Facebook page first. So the brand has scored quite a few likes. The app doesn’t say how many videos have been generated so far but there seem to be a fair number.  It’s certainly fun to look through other people’s videos though the templates get repetitive after a while.

Scope for Improvement

There are two huge problems with this campaign. Point one – the list of words, the music, the templates, nothing is customisable. Everything is already given to you on a platter and there is no recourse if you happen to dislike all the options or simply find them unsuitable which is more likely. That leads me to point two – the choice of words is really very strange.

They are addressed more to a girlfriend / wife than a friend. These words range from ‘angel’ to ‘divine’ and ‘gorgeous’. Imagine using these for a friend. So now it strikes me that this campaign isn’t really about users of Pantene sharing their secret with their friends.

No, this looks like a twisted attempt to get men to get their wives / girlfriends to look more beautiful by encouraging them to use Pantene. Marketing genius right? Umm, not really.

Obviously, this campaign should have been directed at existing users of Pantene. But even so, it’s more than a little cheesy to be making a music video for a friend simply so you can gift them free samples of a common hair-care brand.

But I might have still considered it if I’d been allowed to use my own words and make a funny video. The combination of pre-set choices and couple-directed phrases makes this app extremely limited.

Also, there is no scope for learning anything about the brand. A simple quiz or game with a Pantene gift hamper as the prize might have worked a lot better.