By Joseph L. Garcia
BOHOL’S MOODY SKIES did not kill the party for this year’s Nivea Sun 2016 kickoff, held on Jan. 26-28 at the Bellevue Resort.
Guests were taken to lunch at the Bohol Bee Farm before heading to the hotel for a talk with Dr. Liang Chen of Beiersdorf research and development, Far East Hub, on proper use of sunblock — a line from middle finger to wrist for each body part that will meet the sun).
Guests were divided into teams to participate in games for the next day, with water and land themes. The teams assigned land-themed challenges went off to a camp near Bohol’s Chocolate Hills, while the teams to play in the water were sent to Bohol Beach Club.
The guests assigned to water-themed challenges participated in games that included putting a Nivea beach ball between your legs and shooting it through a basket, capturing Nivea flags while riding a banana boat, and throwing a frisbee between rings.
The guests were brought back to the hotel for a relay race, where one player had to get 10 Nivea stickers from a pool of beach balls and pass it on to another player, who’d jump into a pool with a teammate to wade across the pool with a Nivea ball between their faces. The challenge ended with a march across a garden with the team walking in a straight line with the beach balls.
In the afternoon, Nivea also introduced, along with its line of sunblock, a line of Nivea boy and girl dolls. The dolls are made of an ultraviolet-sensitive material that turns red when the sun shines on it, prompting children to put sunblock on the dolls, which will then go back to their original color. The dolls, initiated by Nivea in Brazil, are not yet available in the Philippines but will be available in supermarkets soon.
Nivea Sun ended with a nighttime pool party with DJ Tom Taus.
As much as the three-day activity seemed like a beach party, Konstantin Stremme, Country Manager for Beiersdorf Philippines, Inc., thinks otherwise. “Our interest is in educating people… about sun [protection]… that’s our main objective for the PR event; otherwise, we could simply do a consumer event, but we’re using… guys from the media and from PR, bloggers, to amplify our message of education and protection against the harmful damages of [the] sun,” he said.
“For this one, we wanted to show and have our guests experience the products a bit more: so both on the scientific [side], but also in a live way. That’s why we did the two days, where one was more… a classroom approach, and the second one was more the experiential part,” he added.
“Ultimately… if people recognize that need, which is there, and some recognize it more than others, then ideally, they fulfill their needs with our product.”
