Chinese New Year is the most important commercial period of the year for most brands in China. However, following government's 'stay put' policy against the pandemic, gatherings are not permitted hence this has caused major impact to the category.

Challenge

How can Pepsi rise above more than 1100 beverage brands with over 15,000 products in China and gain most market share during this festive period when media is extra expensive, and brands traditionally spend a lot to outdo each other?

Objective

To drive sales by creating an experience that makes the brand culturally relevant.

Culture

Sending auspicious greetings during Chinese New Year is a must-do for everyone. Most are also looking for innovative ways to send greetings but this time we've made this experience more rewarding for the sender. In our new experience, we rewarded the well-wisher with a surprise lucky red bag on WeChat.

To be culturally relevant in a way that Pepsi can own, we leveraged our product names which happen to carry auspicious meanings and tapped on a behaviour everyone does a lot during this festive moment – well-wishing.

Introducing "Wish it with Pepsi" – We turned Pepsi to the hottest way to greet this New year.

In partnership with WeChat, we took well-wishing to the next level by gamifying it.

Whenever someone used our product name to wish another well, it triggered little icons to fill the screen and amongst the products were lucky red bags that hid money gifts just like the tradition of receiving red packets during the Lunar New Year. This will lead to a mini site where people can redeemed their money gifts in the form of Pepsi product discounts with e-Comm partners immediately and seamlessly on WeChat.

With 78% of people in China aged 16-64 (Pepsi's wide range of consumers) using WeChat and over 200 million bank cards used in China linked to the WeChat Pay, we set out to create an end-to-end experience on this platform.

It's also the perfect platform to bring this idea to life because most festive greetings happen here and people are already used to sending and receiving digital e-red packets now instead of the physical envelopes.

We elevate this experience by leveraging data to make our lucky bags more intelligent, customizing the discounts based on consumers' demographics, interest preferences and online behaviors. On top of product-led lucky bags, online game enthusiasts received game tokens while movie lovers get food and drink discounts at the cinemas near their location. The user data led to more than 100 different lucky bags that created a rewarding and relevant experience for our wide audience.

Given all retailers are on WeChat, scaling this activation was easy.

We teamed up with all our retailers for online to offline fulfilment in every major city in China and seamlessly linked the activation to our e-Comm partners who also promoted the campaign.

The true traffic generator was the users themselves through their own festive-wishing. As they were not expecting the experience, those who discovered the feature, shared it immediately with all their friends and family.

The WeChat development of this new feature took less than a month and with the success of this activation, this feature continues to be available for Pepsi to run every Lunar New Year as our products have become part of people's festive vernacular.

Over 500 million engagements in just seven days, making Pepsi the most culturally relevant brand during the festive period.

Engaged over 324 million people (one third of China population)

More than 4.5 million new members recruited for our WeChat community.

Generated 13.4% in sales transacted during the campaign period and continued to grow beyond the Lunar New Year festivities.

61 times more brand mentions than key competitors.

Making this Lunar New Year an auspicious one for us too.