The ratio of of gender segregation in Compass is rather biased. Boys outweigh girls to a staggering 4:1 which makes the testosterone level in the office rather, intimidating, So when we heard that we've been awarded a project to work on Palmolive's Pure Silk shower gel via MindShare, we embraced it with a sigh of relief. Finally an excuse to be in touch with our feminine side.
As with every project we take on, the work flow always begins with a grand idea. This sparks off a chain reaction in every department to get their butts off the coffee table and return to their desks. In the case of Palmolive's Puresilk, we digged real deep and looked to history for a dose of inspiration. A few months back we were brainstorming for a previous project also by Palmolive called Thermal Spa when we came upon a neat idea of personalizing a "spa" experience in line with the product(
thermal spa is a shower gel manufactured specifically for a home "spa" experience). The user (that's you) will be allowed to input their name, fav colour and a host of other details to generate their own virtual spa. Unfortunately the stars didn't align itself so this grandiose scheme was shelved.
Ahh but as with all great things, they remain timeless. When MindShare came to us to help market Palmolive's latest Puresilk body wash, we immediately pitched this idea in and everyone was smiling with approval. Of course we had to tweak the concept to suit the purpose of Puresilk and here's what we got.
A personality test that displays a bathroom according to your character.
Whoa..What in the world, you ask? Allow me to explain. The girls will get to participate in a personality test that asks all sorts of intimate yet addictive questions which will generate your personality. Once that has been determined, the system will automatically render a bathroom that fits your designated personality. Imagine you're a Man-Slayer (for example-lah), your bathroom will be fitted with seductive decorations like luscious red towels and expensive designer lipsticks and....well you get the point.
Designing the site was easy. We've had enough experience with website constructions that we breezed through the framework in a matter of days. The challenge began when we started development on our personality bathroom segment. First step was to give life to our characters.
Giving them a soul, making them matter was quite a task. We scripted out a short survey and passed it around to our female staffs, our girlfriends and anyone of the fair sex who walked by our office entrance. Once enough information was gathered, we scoured through them and with it as reference, we created 5 unique characters that girls will definitely be able to relate to.
Next step was to commence the 3-D rendering of the bathroom layout for each character. Our visual artists cracked their minds and work closely with the compiled survey to come up with an accurate depiction of each character. This is where our programmers came in and started lending their geeky skills to construct a viral element to this.
How it works is simple.
"I take the test and I get my personality. I'll send that over to my girl friends and ask them to take it on my behalf so we can compare if they know me as well as i hope they do. They then loop back the test to me and soon enough we've got a whole web of bathroom-personality girls who can't wait to talk to each other about it."Here's a sneak preview of what you can expect. We're excited. We hope you are too.
