Vaseline uses online contest to induce product trial

Vaseline, a skin care brand owned by Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), has partnered with Zapak.com for an online contest, titled Confidence Challenge, to promote its Healthy White body lotion.

Available at Vaselinebodyvibe.zapak.com, the contest will invite users to register with the website, select their body type out of the four skin care categories and upload their full-length pictures.

Speaking to afaqs!, a spokesperson from HUL says, "The contest aims to inform consumers that Healthy White body lotion helps to balance or restore the original skin colour of the face and other parts of the body."

He adds, "The idea is to induce trial of Healthy White body lotion, especially among our target audience, which is mainly represented by SEC A women in the age group of 18-25 years."

"Zapak is promoting the contest through banner ads on its home page, on the log out pages of various games and across its network of gameplexes," says Arun Mehra, chief marketing officer, Zapak.com.

The gaming portal claims that the microsite has already received 1.48 lakh registered users and 1.45 million page views so far.

This is not the first time that HUL is using online media to promote its Healthy White body lotion.

Earlier, in April and May, the company had launched an online banner advertising campaign across various horizontal portals such as Yahoo!, MSN and Indiatimes to create awareness about the launch of the product.

TV and print advertising were also used at that time.

The HUL spokesperson also hints that the company plans to use only TV and digital media in the subsequent phases of the promotion in the current fiscal year.