Why is this work relevant for Direct?

Nescafe GOLD collection relaunch campaign is majorly deputed on social media to communicate with celebrity admires, and ultimately Gen Z. The goal is to increase GOLD collection coffee awareness and consumption among younger generation. By using Weibo as main battle ground, we successfully boosted Nescafe GOLD's presence and overall sales.

Background

Nescafe GOLD collection, Nescafe's premium brand, plans to relaunch 3 of their major products as well as one new product in Q4, Y2021, however faces several obstacles going forward. Overshadowed by its mother brand, Nescafe, GOLD collection lack recognition among younger audience and struggles to shake away the “instant coffee” image Nescafe has already set in people’s mind. Brand team aim to leverage this relaunch as an opportunity to rejuvenate its communication with younger target, to gain their preference through celebrity endorsement campaign, and ultimately increase product sales online and offline.

Describe the creative idea (30% of vote)

The story primarily revolves around celebrities and are tailored specially for their fans. We created videos where young male celebrities are given characters in viewers‘ life, i.e. neighbor next door/classmate nearby/coworker/childhood friend. In the video, they interact with the camera as if it is viewer’s first perspective. Video plots are designed to feel like the beginnings of love stories and the product appear as celebrities’ day-to-day carrying as well as the plot developer. By creating this immersive experience, we communicate with out audience that GOLD collection can be the “pick-me-up” factor in life when they need some spirit support, just like how celebrities helped them, showing them care and love by making them a cup of coffee and sharing good time with them.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Fandom goes as one of the mainstream cultures among younger generation. We selected four stars from a pop idol group to endorse four products, and attract younger consumers. We find pop idol fans are similar to otome game players in terms of behavioral patterns:  1. Desire interaction with stars 2. Pursue fictional "love experience"  3. Willing to spend money to show support 4. Passionate on collecting merch Therefore, we created a real-world immersive "otome game" experience for fans. First, we created four "first-person perspective" TVC similar to the plot of the Otome game. Each story binded the product items to the characters for romantic reasons. Then we launched four star-cobranding gift boxes, each aligning with one video, and guided fans to place orders. We also placed random merch collection in the gift box, and stimulate fans to buy multiple times to collect the full set.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

Day1 Released warm-up posters through Weibo to guide fans to guess and accumulated popularity for follow-up events Day3  Unveiled the major TVCs and the gift boxes simultaneously. the videos were released on all social channels, and the gift boxes were launched on multiple e-commerce and offline channels Day3-Day7  E-commerce live broadcast and offline in-store interaction to enhance consumer shopping experience Day4-Day7  Released behind-the-screen videos to stimulate continuous discussion among fans on social medias, in a way similar to game DLC, and released traditional star testimonies as well as detailed analysis of gift boxes to further promote gift boxes. On the Double 11 Shopping Festival, launched social ads, and continued to promote the sales of each product after gift boxes had been sold out.

List the results (30% of vote)

1.Two gift boxes sold out on the first day of release; market share of a single star product increased by 5%+ in the following month, the proportion of young consumers in the online store traffic increased significantly 2. Weibo topic, RED posts' and DouYin videos' conversion rate reached 1.05%, 0.98% and 2.11%. Organic views on RED and DouYin all reached over 180% vs plan. All advertising click-through rates exceeded industry benchmarks. 3. Fans spontaneously posted more than 4,000+ discussion on social platforms "Douban" and "Bilibili", where the brand has not posted any content; more than 90% of which were positive. 4. In the absence of guidance, passionate fans created a large number of ad related fandom work and helped on promoting the products organicly 5. On the launch day, #Nescafe Zhenxiang# got 30.6 million exposure, and the non-commercial subtopic #xxx Nestle Gold Coffee Ambassador# accumulated more than 23.23 million views