Background

Wanting to take a fresh approach to launch Pepsi Lime, Pepsi Thailand saw an opportunity to drive deeper engagement with Thai audiences online by tapping into one of their top passion points: their love for food. Pepsi wanted a launch campaign to boost awareness of #PepsiLime and strengthen associations between the Pepsi brand and the nation’s love of food. As part of this new product launch, sales of this new flavor of cola is also a key tangible KPI for the team to hit.

Describe the creative idea

As a nation of food lovers, Thais love talking about food. Based on social listening on Crimson Hexagon and sifting through the top #hashtags, @handles, and keywords, food is one of the top three most talked-about topics for Thai audiences on Twitter. Leveraging on this conversation pool, Pepsi partnered with Twitter to develop a launch plan to engage food lovers and put #PepsiLime at the centre of food conversations. Pepsi used key insights about what motivates Thai people online to maximise the launch of #PepsiLime. They developed a launch plan to get food lovers involved and get them talking about #PepsiLime. Since 85% of time spent on Twitter is on mobile, instead of desktop, the strategy and execution was more mobile-centric.

Describe the strategy

Pepsi targeted Thai food enthusiasts on Twitter. These people would be found very actively tweeting about cafe and food reviews non-stop on the platform through unified hashtags such as #CafeReview and #รีวิวอร่อย. The up-to-date social networks of foodies who religiously keep track of such hashtags use it to discover new food and drinks. These are people who are passionate about the act of drinking and eating, and would be willing ambassadors of new, innovative and good things that they can gobble up. Promotions and offers are some of the main motivators on why they visit certain food establishments and buy certain items over other things. To boost awareness of this new line of cola and increase its association as something that pairs well with food, Pepsi partnered with a variety of well-known food vendors, and paired their online-redeemable promotion codes and mobile coupons with #PepsiLime.

Describe the execution

Pepsi fully engaged Twitter for this campaign. The two-phase approach first generated hype and excitement around the launch, before driving deeper engagement through post-launch conversations with the innovative use of auto-responses. In phase one, Pepsi used Promoted Trend for a takeover of Twitter top trend list. This created buzz around #PepsiLime and drive mass awareness on launch day. Pepsi supercharged the conversation with a custom emoji, which appeared every time audiences Tweeted #PepsiLime. This propelled #PepsiLime to the center of social F&B conversations. Phase two drove engagement by using auto-response technologies. The ‘Heart for Surprise’ feature automatically served people a mobile-redeemable #PepsiLime promotion when they liked a campaign Tweet. The 'Emoji Auto Response' feature urged audiences to Tweet the #PepsiLime hashtag along with one of the five designated food-related emoji (🍗, 🛵, 🍕, 🍿, 🥓) in order to receive a special mobile promotion linked to one of Pepsi’s restaurant partners.

List the results

Thanks to an innovative phased approach, Pepsi maximized the impact of the #PepsiLime launch, achieving a total of 35 million impressions for the campaign. Conversations around Pepsi and #PepsiLime soared with a staggering 6.9 million mentions across Twitter Thailand. The campaign resulted in significant sales impact, with Pepsi outperforming sales volume targets by 109% through mobile coupon and code redemptions, and gaining an additional 1% market share versus the same period the previous year. Pepsi saw an increase in the Brand Health Score, especially for the ‘Goes Well With Food’ attribute. Pepsi was the first brand in Thailand to use the ‘Heart for Surprise’ feature, which helped them automatically engage with users on a deeper level. Pepsi leveraged on the interactive aspects of social media to show that besides direct response (DR) formats, branding-type formats can drive sales on social media and mobile if you connect with your audience’s interests.