How Team The Incredible HUL IMT Ghaziabad became the campus winners of HUL L.I.M.E Season XI

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We followed a basic two-step approach to tackle the case given to us in the Campus Round. First, we interacted with consumers that lie in the segments that Dove caters to while also studying the hair care and skin care market as a whole. Using the information we received from conducting interviews we generated several insights. The second step involved getting into the shoes of the brand manager and building strategies from these insights. This is what helped us reach the Semi-Finals as Campus Winners of HUL L.I.M.E Season XI.

The Challenges we faced

For the first round of submission, we dedicated around two weeks for studying the consumer habits and working on the precision marketing plan. For the semi-finals, we were given two weeks in which we had to first sharpen our cohorts. Then we had to develop the right messaging for each group and run a digital marketing campaign.

Since all our members were from the first year, we had to learn some concepts ahead of time to approach the case comprehensively. We also had to familiarize ourselves with Facebook ads manager to effectively launch our campaigns. 

Out of the 22 teams selected for the semi-finals, 4 teams made it to the finale. We interacted with all the teams that went to the grand finale and found all of them to be fierce competitors. The ideas that they shared with us were quite unique, and they gave us many other perspectives to think from.

The Incredible HUL - The team that stood together

All three of us come from diverse backgrounds (IT, Commerce, Life Sciences) with no prior work experience. We were a part of the same section. That is where we discovered that we have one thing in common that is solving problems. Thus, we decided to participate in competitions together. We always look forward to learning new things and take on new challenges

Working in a team was a great experience. The competition taught us a lot and we also got to learn from each other. Throughout the course of the competition, we realized that disagreements and conflicts of thought are essential to critical thinking. With someone challenging your thoughts, you come up with solutions that are not only creative but also executable. We always respected each other's opinions. We also made sure that we never made a decision that even one of us was dissatisfied with.

Since we are from very diverse backgrounds, we brought with us a perspective that was unique to each one of us. Broadly speaking, individually, we represented one of the three dimensions: ideation, creative and critic. We complemented each other with our talents. This helped us come up with an exposition that we believe could not have been done by anyone one of us individually.

The nuances of the competition

The competition was conducted on a very grand scale. The preparations that were done for the campus round and the semi-final were excellent. Presenting in a Television studio was a great experience. As far as the framing of the competition is concerned, there is no other competition we have participated in, which allows you to implement your strategy. Most competitions require you to develop a strategy. And, thus the solution mostly consists of the deductions that the participants can make from the available data. We were excited to hear that HUL wanted us to run an actual digital marketing campaign. As Campus Winners of HUL L.I.M.E. Season XI, we learned a lot from the semi-final round. 

Overall, we learnt a lot from both the rounds of competition. We got to apply our theoretical knowledge of segmentation, targeting and positioning, and precision marketing. We also got a hands-on knowledge of digital marketing, especially marketing using Facebook ads manager. Finally, we became well-versed in the concepts of marketing communication. Writing a copy of an advertisement, making creatives, deploying them and then analyzing and editing our approach were some of the key takeaways from this competition. 

Our special moment

Before developing creatives for each of our cohorts, we went and talked to consumers falling in our target audience. We asked them about their likes and dislikes online, their online buying behaviour, their media consumption habits and several other factors. On the basis of this information, we developed creatives that we felt would appeal to these groups and would engage them. Few of our ideas were pretty fun to develop and when these ideas generated a great response from the consumers, it was very satisfying. We were very excited to deploy these ads online and were happy that the audience was very receptive of the content.