The Campaign

We developed a social network specifically for Valentine’s Day. “Valentine Post” is a brand-new service for people to use during the Valentine’s Day season to exchange chocolates even if they cannot meet one another in person.

Creative Execution

All you have to do is to set up a virtual post box for virtual chocolates and share it on your social networks. When someone gives you chocolates, you will immediately receive them. Chocolate givers may choose from a selection of KitKat chocolates, and add a 20-character message of affection, gratitude, or joke for the receiver. To make virtual chocolate exchanges more easy and fun, the service also offered functions such as “give out chocolates to all my friends,” and “chocolate requests” which gave users who communicated actively through this service chances to win actual KitKat chocolates. Valentine Post started its services on February 1, two weeks before the actual Valentine's Day on February 14. On February 5, with additional promotional activities by YouTube creators, the number of Valentine Post users increased exponentially.

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

We succeeded in raising awareness of KitKat through the buzz about “Valentine Post” on social networks, especially on Twitter. Feb.14 Twitter Trending Topic No. 1: #KitKatForValentinesDay (In Japanese) Twitter Trending Topic: No. 1 for 8 Times in 14 Days Social Media Shares: 1,500,000+ Virtual Chocolates Exchanged: 5,000,000+ KitKat Online Shop Visitors: 800,000+ Total Reach: 460,000,000+ Note: Results are collected from the period of Feb. 1~14, 2017.

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

During the campaign, users posted over 1,500,000 KitKat-related content on social networks, KitKat ranked as the top trending topic on Twitter for eight consecutive days, and the hashtag #KitKatForValentinesDay (in Japanese) ranked in the Twitter trending topics on February 14, 2017. These online activities marked a moment of extraordinary buzz generated by a digital campaign in Japan, and contributed to the sales of KitKat.

In recently years, young people in Japan have been actively communicating with friends as well as the wider public through apps such as LINE LIVE and Snapchat. With this in mind, we incorporated a function in Valentine Post for users to exchange virtual chocolates with followers as well as non-followers. Through posting with the campaign's Twitter hashtag, users were able to exchange chocolates with people beyond their own social media connections.