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Helmet Marketing Strategy: Making condoms accessible on screen & in the real world...

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Aishwarrya Chakraverty
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Helmet Marketing strategy

To spread awareness around the stigma associated with purchasing condoms through social media and in the real world, the Helmet Marketing strategy took a 360-degree approach to create buzz around Zee5’s latest release.

Taking a humorous route, Helmet revolves around the age-old taboo of buying condoms, especially in the small towns and cities. The movie’s marketing strategy reflects this dilemma in an equally funny and witty manner. Directed by Satram Ramani, the ZEE5 original’s star cast includes Aparshakti Khurana in the lead, along with Pranutan Bahl, Abhishek Banerjee, and Ashish Verma.

As Khurana a.k.a Lucky in the film navigates through the ‘supposed’ embarrassing moments and stereotypical challenges in the process of buying a condom, we take a look at the Helmet marketing strategy.

Teasing the Trailer with Dialogue Post

Leveraging the quirk and fun, the movie makers teased the trailer with the ‘To kya Chooran Laga Ke Karoge’ dialogue post without context in a humorous manner that paved the way for more conversations around the topic. The dialogue showcased the awkwardness experienced by Lucky in buying condoms from a crowded medical shop.

Several memes and dialogue pages caught upon the trend to generate conversations and mass reach, before the trailer launch.

The trailer to the movie was released on August 18, 2021, garnering over 8.6 Mn+ views on YouTube and 9 Mn views on Instagram. This was followed by memes and conversations that created a buzz around the new title by Zee5.

With slapstick dialogues, Ronit Ashra recreated the trailer in his own unique style helping in further enhancing the reach and visibility of the content.

Sex Education

Taking the movie theme ahead, the Helmet marketing strategy saw engagement and conversation with college students across India. The #HelmetGang or the Helmet cast connected with over 10 colleges and 500+ students to share their first-time experience of buying a condom, casting a spotlight on the subject and the taboos surrounding it.

The idea was to create awareness among the youth, while helping them get over the stigma and embarrassment wrongly associated with the purchase of condoms.

Also read: Mimi Marketing Strategy treads on the lines of debunking surrogacy taboos

Engagement Through Slogans

Targeting the typecasts surrounding contraceptives, Helmet’s creators released a ‘Slogan Campaign’. As part of the contest, the makers urged people to don their creative hats and create humorous, quirky slogans that would encapsulate the theme of the film aptly.

The winners stood a chance to e-meet the cast and win movie merchandise. To do this, they had to share the slogan post while tagging ZEE5 with the #HelmetOn and #HelmetSloganContest hashtags.

The actors also went Live through Panel discussions and interaction with News Nation for film promotions and engagement.

To promote the movie, Helmet cast even distributed Helmets to the Press and Media teams, as a token of appreciation for their hard work throughout the pandemic.

Content Marketing

Using Helmet as a metaphor for condoms, several actors/influencers supported the film and through funny content creation of their own, populating supportive content around the movie and further strengthening the buzz around the brand. This included names like Ayushmann Khurrana, Tony Kakkar, and Rajkumar Rao sharing social media posts on the subject with quirk and humor.

The movie makers roped in Sunny Leone and Anubhav Bassi to spread the message of ‘Saavdhaani Hati toh Durghatna Ghati’ and that it is necessary to wear the ‘Helmet’ whether on a bike or in the bedrooms. Both the influencers urged users to let go of the taboo and speak up openly even at chemist shops.

Each of the influencer then attempted to redirect users to watch the film.

The actors and influencers also shared Instagram stories with a swipe up option to watch the movie, keeping the buzz around the movie alive even post-release as well as driving footfalls to the app.

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Further, the makers released a series of 6-second bumper ads.

Helmet Stories

The makers aimed to spread awareness through further content marketing tactics like the lead actors sharing their ‘Meri Pehli Helmet Story’ while encouraging people to normalize conversations around buying condoms and speaking about their Helmet stories.

Pranutan Bahl and Aparshakti Khurana took this idea a step further with the ‘What’s in your bag and wallet’ posts. Viewers were given a sneak peek into Bahl’s bag and Khurana’s wallet, where both urged people to let go of the awkwardness around keeping condoms as one of the essentials amongst your belongings.

Brand Associations

On the day of the movie release, several brands, and platforms engaged in conversations on the theme of the film on Twitter with quirky posts. This included brands such as Kamasutra, Dunzo, Ixigo, News Nation, Bollywood, and Fever FM.

https://twitter.com/DunzoIt/status/1435203703435235332>;

To continue buzzing, Helmet also associated with Dunzo to initiate a seamless brand integration campaign with quirk and humor.

The video showcases how Dunzo comes to the rescue of a hesitant Lucky when Rupali finally orders the condom from the delivery service app.

OOH Marketing Efforts

Helmet further adopted guerrilla and ambient tactics for promotions.

In one of the activations, auto-rickshaws were given a make-over with helmets on the top. The initiative aimed to capture more eyeballs in Mumbai city. These autos are supposed to journey the city for the next 7 days, starting September 3th, 2021. The passengers are slated to also receive free condoms in each of the rickshaw rides.

The makers distributed condoms across three cities in India that included Mumbai, Pune, and Bangalore, where 50 people in each of the cities wore Helmet branded t-shirts and helmets on their heads. This was supposed to be followed by distributing condoms to the masses and bringing alive the idea and the world of Helmet.

ZEE5 released the ‘Zebra Crossing contest’ on social media where people had to spot the Helmet branded auto-rickshaws, sharing the image of the rickshaw and tagging the OTT platform. The idea was to tie up their on-ground initiatives with the online chatter.

Further, ZEE5 leveraged ambient OOH advertising by painting the Zebra Crossing across Mumbai as condoms with placards of the film on the dividers of the road.

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To Sum it Up

From going ambient across relevant locations in India to leveraging celebrities and influencers, Helmet marketing strategy is working not only to create buzz around the film but also to generate awareness around the importance of condoms for safe sex and population control.

Overall, the campaign for marketing Helmet among the right audience managed to garner:

  • Reach: 85 Mn+
  • Impressions: 76 Mn+
  • Engagement: 20 Mn+
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