For the majority of Australians, bubble tea is an alien concept, with seven in every ten unaware of its existence.
Chatime’s growth opportunity sits within the hedonist segment. These 13–24 year old folks share a truth in standing out from the crowd, being creative and embracing their oddness. In short, they’re unpredictable!
And unlike most beverage brands, Chatime is also unpredictable. You want iced tea with lime green boba balls and frosted mousse on top? Sure! The Satisfy Your Strange campaign that now underpins the brand is the encapsulation of this; it’s an invitation to try something unusual, giving you permission to be odd.
And where is the home of the unpredictable? The digital epicentre of 13–24 year old hedonists seeking oddness? Let us show you how we got hedonists across Australia to satisfy their strange, via a social campaign that became Chatime’s most successful ever.
“The Satisfy Your Strange TikTok campaign blew up the brand in a way we’ve never seen.” CMO Chatime, Jo Robinson
THE IDEA
The brief; ‘blow s*@t up!’ by increasing brand awareness by 5% amongst the 13–24 year old target in eight weeks.
But to ‘blow s*@t up!’, you first need to focus your ammunition.
The usual diet of Facebook and Instagram just wasn’t cutting it. Limited functionality and organic reach, a dwindling 13–24 base and rising CPMs meant we had to look elsewhere to achieve our goal.
So we focused our ammunition on one channel that’s home to 6 million+ unpredictable 13–24 year old hedonists seeking strange content; TikTok.
‘Strange says, satisfy your strange by…’
We had a universe of strange characters at our disposal. A worm that squirts Chatime through its teats — that’s the level of strangeness we’re working with. Initially, people found them unnerving, with many questioning if Chatime’s marketers had lost their minds. But we were confident that people would love them if they could interact with their strangeness.
Our idea was to position the characters as the masters of strange tasks, bringing them to life via a TikTok filter and Strange Says #Challenge.
The first task? Strange says, satisfy your strange by becoming a boba ball in the strangest place possible.
And the bounty for satisfying your strange? 1000’s of free Chatimes, unique merch and a grand prize of a lifetimes supply of Chatime.
With 72,000 filter interactions, 399,000 engagements and hundreds of challenge entries coming in, even our experienced and hardened community managers weren’t ready for the levels of strangeness our Hedonists responded with. Bouncy castles, hospitals, schools, cars, bikes, shopping centres and gyms all became settings for the #Challenge.
And how did we decide who gets what bounty? We created the strange scale; curiously strange gets a free Chatime; Satisfyingly strange gets merch; strange satisfied gets a lifetime supply.
To further establish the Chatime strange universe, we created a series of stories for each of the seven characters across digital. We planned to have them pop up in random places, at random times giving clues about their personality traits. This gave the community a chance to meet and understand them, and an opportunity to name them — with 1,000s of name entries to date (Remember the worm that squirts Chatime through its teats? Our Hedonists christened it Chateats!).
THE RESULTS
Brand awareness amongst 13–24 year olds exceeded our 5% objective, increasing 48% to 53.4%
“The Satisfy Your Strange TikTok campaign blew up the brand in a way we’ve never seen.” CMO Chatime, Jo Robinson
Results across the eight-week campaign:
- 4.08 million 13–24s reached (3.8M target)
- 49% increase in brand searches (30% target)
- 26.1 #challenge video views (15M target)
- 399K #challenge engagements (150K Target)
- 72K filter interactions (60K Target)
- 598 #challenge videos
And who’s the strangest of them all? A 69-year-old grandma received this honour, winning a lifetimes supply of Chatime for climbing into the boot of her car and curling up like a boba ball.
Strange satisfied!
Originally published at https://thewiredagency.com.au on June 9, 2022.
