Author: naren@hybreed.co

Program

HUL Market Immersion And Team Engagement Workshop

Objective

To engage 120 professionals from the Homecare division of HUL in an activity that serves the purpose of both team building and spreading brand awareness.

Solution

The opportunity was brought to us by one of our favourite event partners – Shobiz, who were working closely with HUL on this engagement. The brief they came to us was as stated above.

While exploring various options along with Shobiz, we figured that in our discussions about the home care products and how they get used, the word ‘housewife’ cropped up several times. This led to a question – How can we make a difference for the housewives belonging to lower-middle-class families? And from there was born “The Home Make-over Challenge”.

The broad idea was this: To identify houses in the city from the lower middle class strata and challenge the team, broken into smaller units to give them a make-over using mostly (but not restricted to) HUL Homecare products.

The roll-out involved different steps:
⦁ Step 1: Ideation
How do we deliver to the client brief and yet bring something more to it? Some fizz as like to call it. In this case, it came from the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) angle of the whole engagement.

⦁ Step 2: Planning & Preparation
Ideas are dime a dozen. At the end of the day, it comes down to the rigour in planning and preparation. We set out on the streets of Jaipur, where the HUL team offsite was scheduled to do a recce of possible households who would be amenable to an engagement like this. It was a revelation of sorts. The trust levels in our society is so low because of people always trying to pull a fast one, that we had to contact 3 times as many houses to shortlist and identify 10 houses, which the teams would work on.

⦁ Step 3: Getting our co-conspirators on board
At home, the wife is generally the boss. To be able to pull off something so audacious, we had to first get the husbands to secretly collaborate with us. Brave husbands are few and far between. And yet we did finally manage to find this intrepid species. Their role as co-conspirators was to find plausible reasons for sending their wives out during the make-over of their homes. From visits to beauty parlors, shopping, to complimentary coupons – which were arranged by the HUL team.

⦁ Step 4: Actual Execution
Vision without action is fantasy. So it came down to the D-Day execution. On the day of the workshop – the session started with some interesting energizers to get the ball rolling. Once the team was sufficiently energized we randomly split them into 10 groups and handed them their challenge for the next 4 hours. Jaws dropped in awe and anticipation. But the excitement was palpable. We knew that this would be one of our most joyful experiences so far.

All the teams had pre-designated houses and were shown pre-captured video of the house that further helped them broadly plan all that they needed to procure for the makeover.

Each team was handed a virtual budget, which they used to buy the material from the shops we had set up with all the household material that was pre-purchased. This included curtains, flower vase, lamps, bed sheets, cushion covers, plants, cleaning mop, Vim, Rin, Domex, etc.

After the procurement, teams headed out with a mission to transform someone’s house. The next 3 hours saw the teams getting their hands dirty in the execution of this holistic activity and giving their best. The time pressure was real here because the woman of the house can be kept away from her kingdom, but only for a limited period of time. Work happened at a frantic pace, with everyone working as a team.

Finally, came the moment of truth. The housewives knocked on the doors and the sheer look of surprise, delight, and wonder on the faces of the women when they entered the house made this challenge worth all the effort. All this was of course recorded discreetly by our team with handycams.