The Sunsilk Hairapy aa Gaya campaign launched Sunsilk shampoo to South Asian Canadian women by making the mainstream brand promise culturally relevant. With Hairapy aa Gaya, we spoke to South Asian women not just in their language, but in their idiom too.

We discovered that our audience accepted the product’s problem-solving mainstream positioning and fun personality. But they found the mainstream advertising with its “hairapist” hairdresser spokesperson culturally irrelevant. You see, South Asian women have minimal relationships with their hairdressers. We quickly realized that South Asian women were their own hairapists.

We anchored all our creative work around this insight. For instance, specifically chosen sampling staff with poofy hair were trained to distribute samples to poofy-haired women and to discuss their own struggles with their poofy hair. Sampling and activation were deployed through Mountain-to-Mohammed marketing techniques using a variety of geo-demographically selected media and sampling activations.

The Sunsilk Hairapy campaign for South Asian women won 6 Summit 2007 awards. It was the first time that a Canadian multicultural campaign had swept a mainstream award show.

This launch attracted quite a bit of positive media attention. Our maildrop for Sunsilk in particular was the featured creative in a Sorted Magazine article titled The Mailbox Mosaic. Click on the link to view the article - it's on page 14.

For a detailed case study, write to info@barrettandwelsh.com.