The Brief

In less than 22 years, Taiwan will become a country with the most senior citizens in the world per capita. However, elderly care is not a priority for the public. Most public donations go towards children’s charities because of negative perceptions of elderly as being incapable, hopeless and at a dead-end. So the objectives of the campaign were to raise money to support the Hondao senior citizen’s welfare foundation for elderly care by changing negative perceptions through proving that elders are active, hopeful and progressive . Thus, making it a cause worthy to donors to be more charitable.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

We came up with the “Dreams Never Get Old” campaign. The strategy was to utilize “dreams” as a platform to make perceptional change because dreams are defined as future desires and have never been associated with the elders before, making it new to the public. With dreams as a platform, we emphasized elder’s spiritual needs in a positive manner instead of addressed the elders’ physical needs in negative manner strategically to differentiate and dominate the communication in the market unlike traditional charity foundations do. We wanted to change how people feel about elders and encourage the public to embrace elders around them instead of avoiding them by showing how happy elders could be.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Our post campaign survey indicated that 91% of our respondents had successfully changed their negative beliefs. The total charity donations increased by 24% compared to the previous year from US$192,825 to US$238,846. The most notable accomplishment of this campaign was the invitation by Taiwan’s President to the welfare foundation’s CEO to discuss current senior citizen social welfare issues. In addition, we generated earned media worth over US$3.5 million with accumulated reach of 40,716,900 and even attracted an American reporter and director for the Discovery Channel, Peter Starr, who arrived to witness the elders chase their dreams by riding motorcycles.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

We’re one of the elderly campaigns in Taiwan to raise money for elderly care. Most of others raise donations by addressing the physical needs of the elders in a pessimistic and negative tone to intrigue the donors’ sympathy to take action. They may work sometimes but only reiterate the publics negative perceptions as a group of people that consume societal resources. We are the very first to actually convince donors to be more charitable by emphasizing elder’s spiritual needs in optimistic and positive tones. The most notable accomplishment of us is we successfully invoked the president’s response towards elderly care besides achieving our pre-set objectives in optimistic positive ways by changing the public’s perception.