The marketing challenge of Snickers exam campaign is always related to the Gao Kao (College Entrance Exam) policies in China. In 2022, China has reformed its college entrance policies such as a new admission model and more flexible tested subjects. Also, due to massive lockdowns in 2022, the examinees cannot meet up in schools for exam preparation as before.

With new exam preparation strategies because of isolations and policy reform, Snickers must quickly re-evaluate the opportunities of examinees’ preparation journey and pain points, and come up with a new solution for the objects below:

· Re-engage young shoppers especially the segment of examinees and drive growth of youth penetration (-0.3pts vs. 2019) and brand sales.

· Keep strong relevance with exam occasion to dynamic college entrance exam changes.

Isolated exam preparation and the first year of policy reform made exam preparation more complex and difficult. Beyond daily study, students need to put effort into collecting information to understand new changes of policy reform. Search index of policy reform increased over 200% vs last year.

Snickers well understood the “information barrier”: students are more separated with limited opportunity of F2F communication, while online policy information collection channels are also scattered.

Therefore, Snickers identified “make exam information flow again” as our communication opportunity to College Entrance Examinees, and developed our core idea #备考扛饿101#, which means 101 Tips in Exam Preparation.

#101 Tips in Exam Preparation#

Facing students’ needs for policy information and communication between peers, we’ve transformed from a chocolate bar to an “agent” providing exam tips, hunger-solution and support for them to better prepare for exams.

Break loneliness and information barriers by providing a platform to students to openly exchange tips of preparing exams via engaging mechanisms. By doing this, we hope students could better adapt to new exam policy reform and it did.

Partner with Top.1 youth platform Bilibili and its most impactful project “Bilibili College Entrance Exam Season” to attract young examinees precisely and build strong relevance with exam occasion. As the first FMCG brand, Snickers co-created diversified engagement mechanisms with Bilibili to trigger students to discuss and share information, and maximize peers’ communication during exam preparation period.

Cooperated with top penetrated platforms among teenagers, Weibo & Youdao, as sub-platforms to encourage students' participation and enhance relevance.

Snickers co-created diversified engagement mechanisms in “Bilibili College Exam Entrance Exam Season”:

1. Customized Tips Collection Challenge: Encouraged students to share tips via video, to enrich exam preparation tips exchange.

2. Deeply bonding with “Exam Season”: Innovatively provided engagement opportunities in every module, which bonded with integrated exam preparation journey:

1) Information collection: Influencers tips sharing video insertion with creative “bullet comments” to trigger engagement.

2) Study Online: Students studied together in online study rooms and shared plans via customized curriculum schedules with Snickers elements.

3) Online mock exam: an H5 covering real exam questions, not only attracted current examinees, but also recalled memories of previous examinees and stimulated social discussions. Snickers was available as a “special tip” to provide one more chance.

We further amplified the engagement mechanisms on Weibo and Youdao, to attract more students to share tips/experiences. Snickers always shows a supportive role in exam preparation journey.

Snickers successfully achieved relevance to examinees and exam occasion: 512M total impressions with 60% examinees precisely reached and gained over 14.7k UGC by deeply engaging with examinees (3-4 times higher vs. platforms’ benchmark).

Snickers also won significant sales boost (vs. LY) on ecommerce platforms during campaign period, JD +28%, Tmall +20% and PDD+10% respectively.