BACKGROUND:

In India, Pepsi, ThumsUp, Coca Cola are three heavyweights battling it out in the cola category. Coke’s communication ‘Taste the Feeling’ took the audience to a happy place, Thums Up is a world of energized action and adventure (‘Taste the Thunder’). Pepsi’s a challenger brand, pivoting around irrepressibility of youth – whose swag cannot be stifled by the world. Known for forging connections with the youth, Pepsi enjoys good brand awareness. Amidst tough competition, Pepsi gained sales volume momentum in 2019 and were looking to capitalize on these gains early in 2020.

BRANDS BITTEN BY LOVE-BUG COME FEBRUARY. OUR CHALLENGE: The month of February brings an early opportunity for all brands, (especially youth marketers) to connect with young India on Valentine’s Day. But every marketer is on Valentine’s Day love bandwagon. To truly connect and be meaningful we had to rise above this clutter in quintessential Pepsi style

Audience:

Single brave hearts subjected to judgments and societal pressure just because they were not in a relationship.

Media Planning, Approach:

Capture the audience on their most preferred media platform, digital. Create a mobile & social media first campaign to emphasise the idea.

Built anticipation initially around the ‘Counter POV’ before the release of the anthem across social media, and by activating digital PR.

Leveraged platforms with the highest reach and time spent; YouTube and Facebook/Instagram. Introduced the anthem on the T-series YouTube channel (world’s largest YouTube channel), and on the Instagram handle of India’s most popular & eligible single, Salman Khan; him being the flagbearer of the movement made the celebration appropriate and resonated brilliantly with the stated audience.

This was followed up with #challenge activation on the most popular social platform, TikTok. Multiple macro and micro influencers were roped in to participate, thus ensuring the scale.

Influence the masses by co-creating the anthem with the movie industry’s finest entertainers: Composed by rising star Tanishq Bagchi, directed by ace choreographer Remo D’Souza, starring Bollywood superstar Salman Khan – this was cause-marketing in its foot-tapping best!

Collaborating with the world’s largest YouTube channel, T-Series: Launched for mobile viewing this was the celebratory soundtrack of a singleton’s life directly streamed to 120Mn subscribers

Disrupt social media with a viral challenge on TikTok via interactive filters: Kickstarted by Salman Khan and popularised by 200 micro-influencers Pepsi instigated singles to be unapologetic about their relationship status on social media. Our influencers spread the narrative of self-love by wearing the badge of being solo with pride with ‘Swag Se Solo’ profile display filters. Launched as a mobile-optimized video-sharing challenge on Tiktok, a three-day Pepsi #SwagStepChallenge dared the unattached Indian to say it out loud with a cool social media dance challenge

Valentine’s Day became truly inclusive - society & media celebrated the unattached!

•With 99% positive sentiment and over 130 million views, Pepsi’s #SwagSeSolo was:

1.Most viewed music video of Valentine’s Day

2.Top 3 on YouTube Music during Valentine’s Week

3.One of YouTube’s biggest branded music of the Year 2020

•Within just 4 days the TikTok social challenge got 5.4 billion views! As thousands of people published UGC videos celebrating singlehood

•Fastest branded hashtag challenge globally averaging 540 videos uploaded/hour (9 videos per minute)

•Attracted 200+ earned media stories achieving 6,30,000 USD PR Value (INR 45.3 Million). Most importantly generated more than 150,000 conversations around this issue

Pepsi becomes ‘Choice of the Young Generation’:

•Overshot operating Sales Volume target in the month of Feb-20 by 1.3x vs a year earlier.

•Beats Coke on key KPIs of youth (Q1’20 vs Q1’19) with a positive movement of 10 points