Why is this work relevant for PR?

Communication has always played a paramount role in building a brand. It defines the brand and what it stands for. This campaign transformed the brand’s quirky tone of voice by cleverly utilizing Instagram’s new voice note feature to its advantage. It assertively established the brand’s capability to think-out-of-the box in terms of communication and has enhanced its creative reputation. The wackiness of the idea made this fun activity travel across various channels, garner attention and make a measurable impact on its business and consumers.

Background

Situation Swiggy with its fleet of 120,000+ delivery personnel across 100+ cities, 30 million orders per month and 3.3 billion dollar valuation is India’s largest food-delivery mobile app. Its competitors like Uber Eats are fighting it for market share, especially among 18-35 y/olds. Brands understand that their relationship with this age cohort is critical to their long-term value. It’s never been more important for Swiggy to be the preferred choice for an increasingly hard-to-reach target. Brief Swiggy is a mobile-first company and upwards of 95% of our traffic is mobile. Our brief was to drive brand engagement on mobile-first social platforms where our audience spends their time. Objectives Create an entertaining mobile-first brand experience that aid visits to Swiggy Increase affinity for Brand Swiggy among its core user-base (18-35 y/olds) Increase engagement & collaborate with Swiggy’s online community Build fan-base on Instagram

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

Sending voice notes are a huge part of young India’s Whatsapp behaviour. This December, Instagram launched voice notes & unlike WhatsApp, voice notes on Instagram created visual waveforms that closely resembled all kinds of food shapes – kebabs, pizzas, cakes, etc. Bingo! Swiggy’s Voice Of Hunger Challenge - Recreate hilarious food shapes using Instagram’s newly launched voice notes feature & win a year's worth of food from Swiggy. We invited participants to re-create food shapes by capturing wacky sounds on their phones from anywhere and anything. Millennials jumped on to what was a natural extension to existing behaviour. Ever so often, they went overboard. Think cats. Think pressure-cookers. Swiggy then converted winning sounds into hilarious coupon codes for a year’s worth of food redeemable on its app. Who knew beautiful looking food could be created by nifty use of a new social trend?

Describe the strategy (30% of vote)

In a price-sensitive category like food delivery, there is a frequent shift in loyalty between platforms among our audience. This audience (21-35 y/o, urban) is also a mobile-first one: the quickest to adopt new social platform features. To gain affinity with this cohort, it was obvious that we had to design a social and mobile-friendly activity that resonated with their behaviour. 67% of consumer interaction with brands on social media are customer service related. However, Instagram’s comparatively friendlier personality combined with the interactive element of messaging was an ideal combination for the brand to ease into a user engagement campaign. With voice notes, we noticed that Instagram inbox features could also be hacked to hold amusing conversations – a welcome change. The intention was collaboration & the idea of using wacky sounds to create even wackier food shapes matched Swiggy’s personality.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

Bluueeblaahhhbleehhhblueeblahblehblue: a gibberish tweet from one of India’s biggest brands. While Twitter-verse began trolling us, little did they know that they were helping launch our biggest social media campaign ever and Swiggy’s initiation into Indian social pop-culture. Over 100 Comedians, musicians, rappers, actors etc. formed the core team of influencers driving voice and sound experiments through mobile for the campaign. Behind-the-scenes videos were instrumental in upping the crazy, resulting in even more UGC and traffic to Swiggy’s handle. We featured unique creations and replied in real-time with either text or voice on Instagram DM. Content created for Instagram went on to form the crux of our partnerships with popular radio stations like BigFM, and publishers like Scoopwhoop. All this, while Instagram blocked us 11 times giving the campaign an unexpected PR-push.

List the results (30% of vote) – must include at least two of the following tiers:

 The campaign generated 16 million+ Social Impressions and over 150,000 voice notes filled our inbox.  During that time, Swiggy witnessed a 40% rise in Instagram followers resulting in over 40,000+ new 18-35 y/olds joining our Instagram community.  The nature of the campaign resulted in 1165% growth in brand interactions.  The brag-factor of creating a perfect voice note meant users organically ended up sharing their creations and as a result, Swiggy’s Instagram reach went up 7700%.  The campaign crossed borders, receiving entries from Italy, Japan, Thailand and Canada – countries Swiggy didn’t even deliver to.  We turned winning voice notes into hilarious coupon codes, giving users their ticket to a year's worth of free food!  Swiggy amassed a 2100% spike in traffic to its app from Instagram.  A totally unintentional 24% average increase in orders for food resembling our most popular voice note creations.