The Campaign

Nestle Water home delivery (NWHD) is building the brand preference through a charity campaign. With long-term sponsorship on running, we decided to expand NWHD from the current running group to influence more people. Meanwhile, China has more than 83 million disabled who have difficulty with grocery shopping. The disabled tend to be withdrawn and reclusive in the large cities, due to their physical constraints. Why not ask runners to help disabled people while doing their exercise? This campaign encourages runners, also users of Nestle Water to help others, without much inconvenience. Communicating with the public makes a good PR campaign. An APP is designed to allow runners to connect with disabled people; all registered runners can search for these people and their requests in their running routes. Once the identification is done, the APP will lead runners to help these individuals. They can also share their experience on SNS to invite more participants. This activity started in Dec. 2013 in Shanghai, and obtained 1311 participants within two months’ time; and completed 18399 tasks. End of Feb. 2014, it reached 2000+ registers in Shanghai. The program will kick off in Guangzhou and Beijing later. Compared to the same period last year, Nestle Water home delivery business increased sales by 12%.

The Brief

This campaign aim was to build brand preference among sport-lovers and make Nestle Water the ideal brand for family consumers. Because Nestle Water believes sports can benefit not only athletes, but others as well. It turns Nestle Water into a brand not just for health, also for healthy minds. The positive thinking is the key to lead this campaign successfully.

Results

From 3 perspectives to measure the success of this campaign: 1. Earned media: regardless of PR, forwarding numbers in Weibo increased to 470K within 2 months’ time, with almost no negative mentions. Most forwards and mentions show the appreciation of runners’ charity behavior. NWHD is also appreciated. 2. Registered runners and disabled individuals must go through the QR code to download the APP. More than 20,000 registrations means we switched regular users to brand fans. More than 5000 participants, means 5000+ brand ambassadors. 3. Sales increased by 12% compared to the same period last year.

Execution

The news releases in 6 news media and 2 TV stations with the angle of “help disabled through jogging, an APP launched for runners’ charity”. It received much attention and many internet searches, with many leads to the NWHD website. The Package QR code helps to approach our target audience; people need to order NWHD to gain the QR code. When registered runners began sharing their records of helping the disabled, the registration numbers and attention increased quickly in the second month. However, most registration of runners arose from existing runners’ sharing.

The Situation

China has 83 million disabled people. Most of them live in large cities but may not receive proper living care, and some of their grocery shopping is too small to be commercialized. Meanwhile, research showed that families who enjoy running for exercise are more health conscious and willing to pay more for water. This makes runners perfect target audience for Nestle Water. But most charity campaigns could ask for participants to sacrifice their interests in order to help others… it has become a barrier for people to participate. How can we build the brand without sacrificing anyone’s benefit? That was the challenge for this campaign.

The Strategy

News releases were prepared to draw attention, then the package QR code was the vehicle to connect with target consumers. Social media brings in more eyeballs through consumers’ sharing. However, no impact on the runners’ exercise but benefit to more people, this is the key to arouse attention of the society. Not only to make Nestle Water users more positive towards their exercise, but also build the brand with social responsibility.