Background

As the nation faced a once-in-a-century situation, confusion and uncertainty reigns a people have scattered understanding of the true risk of the situation and they had limited guidance from the authorities. As Indonesians begin to spend their time at home, many struggle with the sudden restriction in their life and they begin to react negatively on social media. While the rest of the mineral-water brands reacted by shifting their out-of-home consumption proposition into indoor consumption (and cancelling their out-of-home advertisement), AQUA chose not to be trapped in the rat-race of reactive marketing. Instead, it chose to serve a bigger purpose: standing up to provide guidance and goodness in the face of extreme uncertainties.

Describe the strategy

A couple months have passed since the Indonesian government imposed lockdown across the nation due to Covid-19 in hope for flattening the curve. While the nation slowly adapted to living indoors, the younger Generation Z struggled with the situation as they are forced to pause their exciting life outside. After a couple of weeks, a new pandemic was detected on social media: Bored to Death. Many of the younger Indonesians took to social media to complain about their boredom at home. They complain about the things they've missed, and they begin to spread the bad idea of stepping outside. This in turn made others think it's safe to venture outside. In reality, doctors and frontline workers were overwhelmed treating those infected due to the virus. AQUA, who have always believed inspiring goodness through healthy hydration, sets out to flatten the rising curve of negativity by putting things into perspective.

Describe the execution

To kick off the idea, we started by conducting social listening on Twitter. We gathered the number of these negative tweets and created a negative curve, totalling up to over 45 thousand negative tweets since the beginning of the lock down. We then curated the most ridiculous "bored to death" tweets and asked over 10 doctors and frontliners to read these bored tweets. We documented their real response, and created our "Quarantweet" video to be shared on Twitter. By juxtaposing the ridiculousness of the tweets with the medical worker's sacrifice and visible fatigue, we hope to make people realise that the pandemic is not over and they need to do their part to help flatten the durve. We launched the Quarantweet video on AQUA's Twitter account, and we also replied those negative tweets to help change their perspectives. After that, we continue to monitor movement of the negativity curve.

List the results

The film worked like an antidote.
Twitter users started to change their perspective and joined our fight by tweeting their positive take on staying at home.
 Within just a few days the film was retweeted over 7,300 times, reaching over 3,9 million twitter users.
This support resulted in to a flattening of the curve and finally it went down from 45,615 to 7,414 tweets. Reminding people about their power as a community also helped to increase the brand's equity from 45.2 in Q2 2019 to 50.7 at the end of Q2 2020, the highest level in 5 years. This sentiment was also reflected in a consumer survey done by SWA, a leading business magazine in Indonesia, that puts AQUA as the top mineral brand of choice by Indonesians during the Covid-19 Pandemic.