Since its inception in 2013, the M360 Award has successfully selected 10,000+ excellent cases of 2000+ enterprises, and this year is the 10th anniversary of the M360 Award.
The market in 2023 is a new examination paper, the digital bell is spreading at an immeasurable speed, the slowdown of economic growth brings new issues, and the change of media brings new opportunities and challenges. How do we find a new course in a fast-moving market?
M360 hopes to tap the innovation of the industry through the award and jointly create a positive development of the industry ecology. Truly compete for the present with timeliness and win-win the future with foresight. In this issue, M360 conducted an in-depth interview with the dentsu Nestlé team to jointly decode the communication paradigm between brands and young people, and how to create a new brand memory in new media and new people.
Q
Please share the concept, origin, and behind the solution
Creative ideas.
Nescafe has a wide audience in China, and its main product is Nescafe's powdered coffee. Nescafe's share of the Chinese market once exceeded 50%, but as the parent brand aged, young people's preferences gradually weakened, resulting in a downward trend in sales performance. The Nestlé brand is facing the dual challenges of sinking market and rejuvenation issues, and our marketing is based on this background.
To address these challenges, Nestlé developed a new brand positioning and go-to-market strategy. First of all, the brand decided to focus on the young people, trying to reposition itself as the preferred coffee brand in the minds of young people. The goal of this strategy is to increase sales and enhance brand recognition by digging deeper into the youth market.
To achieve this, Nestlé has adopted a series of well-designed strategies. First of all, the brand has found an entry point for the life needs of young people. With an in-depth understanding of the college entrance examination scene and the needs of young people, Nestlé reformulated its brand positioning and built its entire market strategy based on it. At the same time, the brand also took full advantage of the trend of home learning during the epidemic and found the contradiction of young people's needs in this context.
At the executive level, Nestlé has adopted a strategy of online interaction. The brand has established a virtual brand study room on the Bilibili platform to accompany students to prepare for the exam in the form of cloud live broadcast, providing them with an interactive platform for communication and learning. In addition, the brand introduced Blue V as a bridge and conducted a 7x17-hour live broadcast on Station B, maintaining continuous interaction with young people.
In order to increase user engagement, Nestlé offers a diverse range of interactive content. They have designed different virtual study room themes, such as Harry Potter, sci-fi, and antiquity, to increase the stickiness of users. Through interactive quizzes and discussions, Nestlé has successfully increased user retention. The brand has looked for six different types of B station up masters, including subject teachers, seniors and champions. Every week, these up masters conduct live broadcasts, covering content such as exam preparation knowledge, mindset adjustment, and answering skills. Through the cooperation with these UP masters, the brand successfully diverted traffic from the UP main end to its own virtual study room, and guided user traffic to the brand's private domain mini program, realizing the precipitation of traffic.
In the face of market challenges, the Nestlé brand has adopted an innovative strategy by focusing on the young market and using the college entrance examination preparation scenario to build a platform for interaction with young people and enhance the brand's awareness. Through the cooperation with the up master of station B, the brand has not only expanded its influence, but also successfully coped with the challenges of youth and sinking, and won a competitive advantage in the market.
Q
What is the background of this marketing?
What are the challenges?
Nestlé faced two major marketing challenges: first, how to accurately segment young people and find potential conversion targets? Different from emerging Internet coffee brands such as Luckin that focus on new white-collar workers, Nestlé needs to find its own group path among young people, establish two-way dialogue with young people, actively interact with young people, lay the foundation for brand interaction, and create more opportunities for brand development.
Secondly, in the context of the epidemic, how to effectively reach young students has become a challenge. Because brand marketing and communication were restricted during this period. In the midst of the pandemic, brands need to innovate communication methods and engage meaningfully with their target demographics, and Nestlé strives to go beyond a single exposure and achieve experiential resonance through interaction.
Q
Goal setting: What goals does the brand set?
What are the considerations behind this?
The primary consideration is to ensure that in our communication and exposure activities, our crowd is focused on the younger demographic, and that we avoid churn. This is a hard indicator. We hope that through this marketing campaign, the proportion of young people in the consumer portrait will be improved, and we have finally achieved this goal.
Secondly, our goal is to encourage user-generated content (UGC) in a way that enables young people to actively participate and interact with brands in both directions, rather than relying solely on one-way hard exposure of brands. As a result, the number of UGC interactions has also become an important measure.
We have been working with Nestlé customers for two to three years, and for us, how to help our customers make the most of their media resources, especially those that are more preferred by young people, to show the uniqueness of the brand, and how to stimulate innovation are all in the scope of consideration.
Q
What kind of communication strategy was adopted for this marketing campaign
And the way of layout?
In order to help brands carry out long-term media management and upgrading, we continue to lock in Bilibili this year, take Bilibili as our core matrix, and deepen, innovate and upgrade on the basis of last year's media marketing. Helped Nescafe realize the long-term IP icon of Nestlé's "Red Cup Study Room", and in addition, we introduced some innovative points in our strategy.
1. The strategic direction centered on station B
We regard Bilibili as the core platform, with IP as the theme, and cultivate an IP image on Bilibili. Our goal is to direct traffic on Bilibili to the brand's private domain platform to build deeper interaction and association. But we also didn't just stop at Station B, but also explored other interaction scenarios with consumers. However, these scenarios still have a very high correlation with Bilibili, thus maintaining the consistency of the strategy.
Bilibili has always been characterized by the supremacy of user experience, and the form of commercial cooperation is relatively conservative. Our strategy has successfully used the resources of Bilibili and created a new cooperation model with Bilibili. The media partners of Bilibili also actively cooperated with this attempt, and in the end, this cooperation also brought a very positive evaluation to the brand.
2. Be the "gold father" who knows the user best
(1) Content: Through a more in-depth insight into the college entrance examination nodes and the changes in the mentality of candidates, a live broadcast content chain from "knowledge dry goods" to "decompression and cheering" is formulated to deeply stimulate the resonance of candidates.
(2) Barrage: In order to make better use of the characteristics of Station B, we have obtained some commercialization opportunities through negotiations with Station B. We made a customized barrage for the up main live broadcast room, so that the brand became the first gold master father to chat with the candidates in the language of the B-station barrage.
We also created a meme called "Baikao Chengka" and combined it with a barrage. This allows college entrance examination candidates to cheer each other on each other in the live broadcast room of the up master, express their emotions, and closely link these information related to the college entrance examination with the Nescafe brand.
(3) Virtual icon image: Turn the brand's red coffee cup into a custom icon icon. This idea created a brainwashing and visual impact effect in the live broadcast room of the up master, which aroused the interaction and resonance of the college entrance examination candidates.
(4) Blue V account: For the first time, it created an online live broadcast as a brand blue V, bringing the red cup study room to the college entrance examination students. By engaging up the UP owners to help with the drainage and platform, we successfully increased the number of followers from 300 to more than 10,000. This shows that we have succeeded in guiding user interaction and attention, and at the same time, it also strengthens the brand's presence on the Bilibili platform.
(5) Topic expansion: Create a brand topic #My2022Youth Dare to Rush# to successfully stimulate the college entrance examination candidates' desire to share, and obtain a large number of long video submissions to precipitate content assets for the brand.
(6) AR interaction: Expand the scene upgrade, use Alipay to create AR interaction, compared with last year, so that the college entrance examination activities can be more socialized.
Our strategy is to take Bilibili as the core matrix, and through IP and traffic guidance, the introduction of innovation points and the commercial cooperation with Bilibili, we have successfully triggered the interaction and resonance of young users on the Bilibili platform, and enhanced the influence and popularity of the brand.
Q
Who is the target audience for this campaign?
How to help brands achieve breakthrough and attract new customers?
Our target group is the young group, and we reach out to them from all dimensions. In terms of media selection, we deliberately selected a media platform with the highest concentration of young people, Bilibili, as our marketing channel. The features of this media platform allow us to reach the target groups we want to reach more precisely.
Through this marketing campaign, we hope to break out of Nestlé's own circle and truly integrate into the circle of young people's lives. To this end, we have focused our marketing on the special node of the college entrance examination, because the college entrance examination has a special meaning for high school students and their parents. Positioning the campaign in this natural scene allows us to target the target group more precisely.
By selecting topics related to the Gaokao node, we succeeded in breaking down the barriers between the brand and the target group. This strategy not only helps to strengthen the connection between the brand and young people, but also allows us to enter the topic of discussion among young people, injecting more vivid elements into the brand image.
In order to further introduce brand traffic, we made full use of the traffic and popularity of a group of popular up masters. In our strategy, we direct the traffic of these up hosts to our own live broadcast room, and then from the live broadcast room to the brand's private domain. This real-time traffic conversion mechanism enables us to quickly accumulate traffic in the brand's private domain.
We cleverly used the special node of the college entrance examination as a natural scene, accurately selected a media platform with a high concentration of young people, and converted its traffic into brand traffic by cooperating with up owners. The combination of these strategies has enabled us to successfully introduce the brand to young people and bring significant success to Nestlé's marketing campaigns.
Q
How to rate this marketing campaign
What is the value of brand building and business operation?
We hope to introduce more UGC content by cooperating with talents, hoping to have a visual impact in the live broadcast room of the up master, and our results far exceed expectations. Especially on the topic of the college entrance examination story, the number of views on station B has exceeded 10 million, and the number of discussions has exceeded 12,000. Many college entrance examination candidates also spontaneously made videos related to the college entrance examination under this topic, showing their preparation mood and even the process of breaking their own records. The brand topic #My2022YouthDare to Rush #has been viewed more than 9.25 million times, and more than 550 videos have been submitted to UGC. The overall project exposure was 157 million, bringing more than 38.54 million spillover exposures to the brand.
We leveraged Alipay's AR technology to bring a new interactive experience to this marketing campaign. For college entrance examination candidates, the word "test" can be seen everywhere on the notebook test paper around him, and then our whole call idea is "sweeping the test into a coffee", the starting point of this idea is to use new technology to have more interaction with young people, integrate learning and entertainment, and make the scene of the college entrance examination more interesting and lively. Through this AR technology, college entrance examination candidates can use Alipay to scan anything related to the test words to get coffee or rewards.
We partnered with Alipay to combine this AR technology with the college entrance examination season, and Alipay provided a professional AR team to help us develop the mini-game and provide drainage resources on the site. Through the UP master's demo and social communication, we successfully attracted the participation of college entrance examination candidates, allowing them to achieve users entering the store and instant conversion by obtaining coffee coupons or directly linking them with Taobao accounts.
Our strategy has achieved satisfactory results in the natural scenario of the college entrance examination season. By choosing the right media platform, bringing in young people, using up main traffic to drive brand traffic, and innovatively using AR technology, we have successfully connected with young people and injected more vivid elements into Nestlé's brand image. These measures successfully drove the percentage of younger consumers to increase by 2%, offline sales increased by 16% year-on-year, and 610,000 e-commerce visits, an increase of 641% year-on-year. In the second year of deep cultivation of the college entrance examination scene, we brought the red cup study room to help the brand break through against the trend, upgrade the IP, and continue to IP.
Q
How do you feel about the event?
Can you share some behind-the-scenes stories that you'll never forget?
I think the most impressive thing is the commercial cooperation with Station B, but this time it can be said that it is perfect from the process to the result. It also demonstrates our responsibility and mission as a media agency. I firmly believe that agencies should innovate with brands to play a leading role in the industry.
In the process of cooperating with Bilibili, we started communication and preparation as early as a few months before the official start of the project. Especially since the event involves the college entrance examination season, we even started communicating with Bilibili in December of the previous year, aiming to invest more time to make the most of this resource. This stage is not easy, and we need to work with different teams, including sales department, content team, etc. We tried hard to introduce new resources, and gradually developed from a small point to a long-term resource that can be used for a long time.
It wasn't all smooth sailing along the way. There may be some difficulties and arguments, but the negotiation process is tangible and requires continuous effort and effective communication. In addition to the strategic side of the work, dentsu's procurement and negotiation teams also played a key role.
Q
Do you think our team is on the marketing side of the brand?
What are some of the different values and advantages?
Our team is very young, which makes us more innovative and bold when working with FMCG brands and brands with strong communication needs from young people. We can dare to imagine and dare to innovate. This rejuvenation helps us better understand our target audience, respond more quickly to change, and provide more creative solutions. The strengths of the young team are reflected in the service provided to the customers.
At the same time, the flat atmosphere of the team allows us to listen openly and openly to all the fresh ideas, and we are willing to help our interns and young junior members of the team to put their real feelings and creative ideas into practice as long as they meet the needs of the project.
Our team members are also self-motivated, pursuing innovation and industry benchmarks to deliver unique value to our customers. We have a consensus that everyone hopes that what they do is the most creative and undone by others, and we hope that the cases we have experienced can become industry benchmarks. We spontaneously want to bring different value to our brand customers.
At the same time, we have a very strong understanding and trust with our customers. Some customers may need to put in considerable effort when trying to leverage new resources, but it may be difficult for customers to believe in the effectiveness of this new approach due to a lack of relevant data or success stories. But our customers are very open and trust our team, and that level of trust is critical to our collaboration.
Q
Please share us about this marketing campaign
Extracted methodology.
Our methodology has always been user-oriented. Whether it's on a media platform or when looking for innovative resources, we always build our strategy around the core behavioral insights of our users. We emphasize putting users at the center of media resources and platforms for more effective communication and dissemination. When developing our solutions, we emphasize breaking the traditional routine, especially in today's fragmented and dusty environment. We believe that the advertising industry needs more innovative, highly insightful forms of communication to capture the attention and impress of your target demographic. The team works together with customers in the pursuit of innovation and passion. Customers such as Nestlé inject the energy of young people into marketing, inspiring more inspiration and creativity. Despite the upturn in the economy, it is still crucial to maintain passion and enthusiasm in the advertising industry.
In today's dusty environment, many traditional methodologies have become ineffective. Each media outlet comes up with its own ecological methodology, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach. This is an important revelation that a customized and personalized approach can be better adapted to the characteristics and environments of different brands. In this day and age, one-size-fits-all strategies are no longer fit for purpose, and a more flexible and personalized approach is needed to meet the needs of customers.