BRIEF

Winter was coming and along with it the usual horde of cough remedies vying for consumer attention. 

Despite 65 years’ global heritage, Prospan faced increasing competition so our task was to make the clinically proven natural cough medicine cut through the clutter of brands over winter — and all on a tiny budget. 

So instead of simply saying we were the best — like all our noisy competitors were shouting — our strategy was to engage healthcare professionals and mums (the primary caregivers) with a completely original angle.

STRATEGY

To do this, we set out to challenge human behaviour itself.  

Using qualitative research and online search pattern analysis, we discovered that huge pharma budgets weren’t our main competition, it was apathy — with healthcare professionals and mums unwilling to treat a cough with medicine thinking it will pass ‘naturally’ over time. 

This led to our core creative idea — don’t ignore a cough — backed by insights telling us that unlike a cold, mums were just as likely to ignore a cough than treat it.

SOLUTION

So, naturally, we hyper-targeted them with a weather-polling app predicting exactly when their kids would get sick.

Aka, The World’s First Cough Predictor.

THE WORLD’S FIRST COUGH PREDICTOR

To ensure our messaging didn’t come across as condescending, we based our creative on a funny family truth, warming to mums with scenarios they could relate to. 

In this way, suffering families and HCPs were encouraged to “Prospan it” via a humorous creative campaign that dramatised a lingering cough’s impact, and a bespoke algorithm that dictated programmatic spend across digital, social, print and POS.

EFFECTIVENESS

Sales have never been stronger for Prospan, growing by 10% in a shrinking market.

Since turning on our revolutionary algorithm, click-through rates have surged by over 54% with cost per click dropping by 67%, drastically reducing media costs and allowing our activity to stretch longer over the winter months. 

Add to that a six-month market share rise of 18.5% versus an overall decline of 8.5% and the suddenly the combination of creative, intuition and empiric information becomes a formidable ally to a stringently defined business problem.

But best of all, total unit sales have increased by 27% despite a budget of less than 1% of the overall market spend in Australia — proving the power of data is nothing to sneeze at.

MEDIA

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