Spikes Asia

Say It With Pepsi

VMLY&R, Shanghai / PEPSICO / 2022

Presentation Image
Case Film
Presentation Image

Overview

Entries

Credits

Overview

Background

Background

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 or significantly limited hence this has caused major drop in consumption and sales for the category.

Challenge

With a smaller demand, how can Pepsi rise above more than 600 beverage brands in China to be top of mind and gain most of that market share during this festive period when media is extra expensive and brands traditionally spend a lot money to outdo each other?

Objective

To drive sales during an emotional time of the year by creating an experience that makes the brand culturally relevant.

Idea

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.

While most brands will launch with an expensive online film, we chose to enter the space where most well-wishes happen – WeChat messaging.

In partnership with WeChat, we took well-wishing to the next level by gamifying it with a first-ever interactive feature on their chat.

Whenever someone used our product name to wish another well, it triggered little product icons to fill the screen and amongst the products were lucky red money bags that hid various money gifts just like the tradition of receiving red packets during the Lunar New Year.

People redeemed their money gifts in the form of Pepsi product discounts with eComm partners immediately and seamlessly on WeChat.

Strategy

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 money bags more intelligent, customizing the discounts based on consumers’ demographics, interest preferences and online behaviors. On top of product-led money 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 money bags that created a rewarding and relevant experience for our wide audience.

Execution

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 eComm 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.

Outcome

Over 1.2 billion engagements in just seven days

Engaged over 400 million people (one third of China population)

More than 2 million new members recruited for our WeChat community

325x more mentions than other competitor brands

Generated 19% in sales transacted during the campaign period and continued to grow beyond the Lunar New Year festivities

Similar Campaigns

12 items

Starbucks Dolce Misto relaunch in Vietnam

MVV SNP, Hanoi

Starbucks Dolce Misto relaunch in Vietnam

2024, STARBUCKS

(opens in a new tab)