The enhanced Show Me My Home platform was the result of the learnings and insights the firm gleaned since it launched the first campaign in 2020, a successful exercise that saw 20-times sales uplift regionally at its peak.
“That was the start of COVID, and we’ve learnt a lot from that. We wanted to go back to the drawing board, reinvent, redesign, and redevelop,” said Shankar Viswanathan, senior vice president, Malaysia, Singapore & Vietnam, P&G and head of e-commerce, Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa, P&G.
Speaking to CosmeticsDesign-Asia at the launch of P&G’s Regional Super Brand Day on Shopee, he said: “We came back and said, okay, there are a lot of new technologies emerging – and more than that, consumers are evolving. We are seeing consumers getting more tech-savvy and we decided to look at other ways in which we can engage the consumer.
“We are one of the largest consumer product companies in the world. I think our challenge has always been and will continue to be: how do we make our brands’ shopping experience more exciting, more immersive, and make it more accessible to consumers?”
An initiative like Show Me My Home was akin to releasing a new episode of a hit serial show, said Viswanathan. “We have to keep getting consumers excited to come back.”
The virtual shopping experience is a step towards the Metaverse for the company, said Viswanathan.
Once logged on, the user will find themselves in a virtual platform with four rooms decked out with products from P&G brands such as Olay, Oral B, Gillette, and Downey. In this virtual space, consumers can click to learn about the products, view commercials on the television in the virtual living room and play games like find hidden dirty laundry to score exclusive discounts.
According to P&G, the Show Me My Home campaign had increased time spent by consumers by 60% and doubled conversion rates compared to its past campaigns.
This is arguably more important for beauty and personal care products, which consumers are used to having physical contact with, when in a shop or supermarket.
“On the e-commerce platform, it’s even harder simply because you can’t touch, try, smell, feel, or just hold the product. Those are the things the consumer is used to, so the objective is making things natural and intuitive on a digital platform – that’s really the objective,” said Viswanathan.
“I’m hoping that with this, we can gain a much better and deeper understanding and we can satisfy consumer needs in the process. We will learn a lot. I’m sure not everything we do is perfectly right. We are a continuously learning company, otherwise, we couldn’t have been around for 185 years.”
The Shopee-exclusive feature was rolled out progressively across six countries in the SEA, starting with Malaysia and Vietnam on July 10. Over the next couple of months, it will be rolled out to Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
According to the firm, elements of the microsite will be localised to each country with the aim of better resonating with consumers through more familiar imagery.