The Campaign

Here in Japan, primarily the younger generation tends to turn away from TV and Newspapers day by day. On the other hand, they spend most of their time using Smartphone to enjoy Music, Artworks and Fashion etc., which creates the current trend immediately. Furthermore, the competitors of the popular confectionary brand keep on running traditional promotions to buy mass media for advertisements by investing abundant funds, and quite often try to draw attentions by launching a new product one after another rapidly.

Results

“Highly Skillful Band formed by 8 junior high school girls” At first, let’s have the Japanese Rock Band create an impactful tune. Then divide the tune into 8 parts, 5 parts for guitar, 3 for drums, so that junior high school students can play. On March 3, 2015, the mysterious band of 8 Junior high school girls,”五五七二三二〇”, made its debut from Japan’s largest record company, Sony Music Inc.. Various conjectures were talked about, and its uniqueness of the music became topical. Hence, the band gained passionate supports from the younger generation and the Music Video received 1.8 million views within a week. Right after the announcement that the band had been organized formally for the “coconut sable”, number of the relevant tweets primarily from young people to support the product and/or the band exceeded over 50,000. After that, it was ranked fifth on the iTunes Sales chart. After creating the popular band, the product is freely advertised without any charges.

Products acknowledged by celebrated artist such as “One Direction” must be sold well. If that was the case, the challenge was to create a popular artist from scratch and produce the same phenomenon.

Despite of not making any changes in the product itself, without buying mass media at all, sales of “coconut sable” was dramatically increased up to 133% compared to the last month. Since then, the sales still keep increasing. Number of relevant tweets by the youth to support the product exceeded over 60,000, and number of reaches on SNS came up to 63,000,00 impressions. Compared with the 8,000 tweets supporting the competitive products at that time, even though those products were also on TV commercial, “coconut sable” received over 7 times as much supports as those to the competitor’s products.

It has been 50 years since “coconut sable”, a long selling cookie was launched in the market. Because the company was just a microenterprise, it was impossible to change the product itself and/or to place advertisements. Consequently, the sales got stuck and reached a plateau. Positive impressions on the product(especially given by the younger generation assumed as primary consumers) drastically decreased. On top of that, in the Japanese confectionary market, every company was driving a cut-throat competition to buy mass media for a larger scale of advertisements. The situation was like; the more advertisements were placed, the more efficiently the company could dominate the market. In this situation, the mission for “coconut sable” was to how the company could win in such a futile market in a different way.