Watsons targets women who puff

Singapore - Watsons recently embarked on a marketing campaign to celebrate its 20^th Anniversary while partnering Health Promotion Board (HPB) in a CSR initiative to help smokers - especially females and tertiary students.

The National Health Survey in 2004 revealed 44.5% of Singaporean women between 25 - 34 smoked to deal with stress or cope with problems. Further qualitative data gathered from focus group discussions - image concerns and social influences - were other factors to the burgeoning social problem. Watsons, hence decided to focus its campaign on female youths, which are part of its core customers, before they enter the workforce,

With the tagline of 'Be Healthy, Be Beautiful, Be Smoke-Free!' the beauty retail store launched an island-wide pledge-campaign to get support for its cause. Pledge booths at road shows were set up to get the public to pledge to quit or to stay out of the habit while inviting them to share creative ideas and ways to achieve their goals - about 4,000 pledges have been made to date.

In its bid to show the public that smoking is unattractive, talent who looked like heavy smokers were planted amongst the crowds while they plied the road show site.

Agencies involved in this initiative included SPOC Solutions for events and public relations, MediaCom for media buying and C & J Associates for creative and printing.