Insight
How can Walls Cornetto – China’s ice-cream market leader – maintain its leadership position? With over 50% market penetration, 80% + total brand awareness, Walls Cornetto’s 2014 goal in 2014 was to build its brand appeal, preference and purchase frequency to maintain its leadership position.
Ice-cream is a highly competitive category with Cornetto battling for the attention of China’s post 90 generation, side by side, Yili, Meng Niu and Nestle. But this generation’s attention is all focused on their mobile devices. Clearly the challenge was how could Cornetto reach and engage this generation on their mobile devices and get a ‘bite’ of their attention – that could help the brand maintain its leadership position.
The struggles of young love combined with this audience’s embrace of mobile, presented fresh opportunities for Cornetto to build on its 'Dive Into Love' online content platform - increasing the brands engagement with teens and building on its market leadership in China.
This campaign used mobile to not just extend the reach of the 2014 campaign but also to engage teens using mobile branded assets that inspired them to express their love through mobile social channels.
Strategy
Love is complicated for the 90’s generation, who have grown up to be single children and lacked real life social interactions. They often stumble when it comes to expressing love. This is the age when love is in the air and celebrities, video dramas and their social apps on their mobile are their key source of inspiration and expression.
They are also China’s first truly mobile generation, with over 85% owning a smart phone and penetration of mobile internet higher than TV (source: CNRS 2013). Soaking in up to 72 minutes of time everyday, multiple times in a day.
With the goal to reach and have the right impact, Cornetto partnered with China’s biggest and most used video and social platforms, who have both strong presence on PC and mobile – Tencent, Youtu, Sohu, iQiyi, Baidu, renren for massive reach of the three micro drama films, and with Tencent Weishi Mobile App to drive engagement exclusively via mobile. The cross media, cross mobile integration that included display, hero app screen blocks, drama films, pre-rolls, in-store activities this summer ensured phenomenal success.
Execution
Using the latest mobile social technology as a catalyst, Cornetto created three online films starring top Chinese celebrities, Kai Ko, Bolin Chen, Ariel Lin in a story of a modern day love triangle inspired by the idea of “If you had only 8 seconds left before the end of the world, how would you express your love?” The 8 seconds idea matches Weixin (China’s leading mobile social app) new Weishi functionality where users can send / post short 8 second videos to the platform.
The campaign was designed to inspire Chinese teens to be brave and express their love on May 20th, China’s Love Day. Using the films’ “Last 8 second” theme Cornetto seamlessly integrated shared branded assets and invitations for consumers to post their own 8 second proclamation of love using the Vine of China - Tencent's Weishi – to allows users to create and share 8 second videos with friends. In a first of its kind innovation for China using the 8 second video app functionality, Cornetto created 26 Weishi video invitations from the films’ cast encouraging teens to videos create their own 8 second expression of love.
Results
The films generated 250 million+ video views (online, mobile and social).
Cornetto’s own “Last 8 second” Weishi videos inspired over 70,000 consumer generate love proclamations being viewed over 9 million times on Cornetto’s Weishi page.
Branded assets, including watermarks, music, heart designs to add to their 8 second films and share in their social feeds. With over 6.5 million branded assets downloaded, Cornetto extended its reach to tens of millions of teens.
Unaided Awareness increased + 10%, and big shifts in key brand attributes:
- Delicious from first bite to last bite + 20%
- Brand that helps me express love +10%.