How Bibigo made me enjoy 12 hours of advertising and what we can learn from it.

Photo by Portuguese Gravity on Unsplash

I recently binge-watched all 12 episodes of the K-drama Business Proposal over a weekend. If you’ve watched this series on Netflix, you’ve probably noticed its not-so-subtle plugs for the Korean packaged food brand Bibigo. Yet I came away with more affection towards the brand than before, and even ended up cooking up a package of their frozen dumplings to prolong the enjoyment I got from the show. How did they manage to succeed in winning viewers over, when most product placement comes off awkwardly bumbling, or ends up entirely overlooked?

Awkward product placements? I thought they were meant to be invisible?
If you’ve watched any K-dramas in the last decade or so, you know what I mean: the coffee candy break. The outdoor camping scene. The sub sandwich franchise. Taken as individual placements, they might have passed as character quirks, perhaps a statement about a character’s love for the outdoors, despite their busy lifestyle sustained by fast food and coffee candy. Considered collectively, they’ve become somewhat of an in-joke k-drama aficionados wink and nod at.

Such product sponsorships might not feel as intrusive as an ad break, but viewers know these scenes are not going to be advancing the story or revealing anything important about the character, and hence can be taken at surface value, with little attention paid to them. The brands involved come out of the deal with maybe a little more brand recall, but what people remember of them, and how they feel towards the brand, is anyone’s guess.

So what’s so great about Business Proposal and Bibigo?
There’s nothing “invisible” about this partnership. The story is centered around the employees of a fictional corporation named “GO food”. Yet by leveraging this conceit, the production is able to bypass the usual product placement scenes centered around usage or consumption, and work Bibigo’s products into refreshing scenes that draw the user’s interest.

We never see any of the characters eating Bibigo products themselves, or commenting about its taste and functional benefits. Instead, we’re led to understand that “GO food” is responsible for producing Bibigo products when their CEO Kang Tae Moo (played by Ahn Hyo-Seop) draws our attention to the unique shape of Bibigo’s kimchi jars, telling us how it’s an homage to traditional earthen kimchi pots.

We see, throughout the show, Shin Ha-ri’s (played by Kim Se-Jeong) work ethic and passion as a food researcher, when it comes to inventing delicious packaged food to be mass produced (presumably under the Bibigo brand…). She even tells us of the inspiration behind this passion in one of the show’s episodes: mass-produced frozen food had provided a welcome respite for her busy parents as she was growing up, and it’s become her motivation to create delicious frozen food that can delight ordinary citizens, since it’s not like everyone can eat at Michelin restaurants everyday.

That’s a brand mission statement if I’ve ever heard one! “We create delicious frozen food so time-pressed ordinary people can enjoy Michelin-level delicacies from the comfort of their home”.

We know it’s working when we see reactions like this tweet:

So, what can any of us marketers working on brands learn from Business Proposal?

1. Ditch the formulas.
   Just as K-drama viewers have become numb to camping scenes that feature fancy tents, is the way you’re communicating your brand getting ignored? Experiment with new ways of delivering the message to get noticed by your audience.
2. Give people a reason to REALLY believe — with their hearts.
   With some storytelling sleight of hand, Bibigo convinced viewers of the heart that goes into the creation of all their products. You can list a million reasons why your product or service is functionally better than your competitors, and it won’t sway your customers unless they’re emotionally engaged.
3. Embrace your “why”.
   All too often, the brand’s mission and purpose statement is intensely wordsmithed in the beginning of the brand building process, before being immortalised in a brand book and left to languish there. What if it was communicated to your customer instead, as a promise of the standards you dare to be judged against?