Challenge
Tesco was having incredible success with their own label energy drink KX; they were selling over a million units a week. These sales were generated mainly through great distribution, a great product and a great price, but they wanted to create a brand that would rival the top brands in the sector. This meant we needed to work with Tesco to create a completely new brand as well as a marketing campaign that would activate the new brand’s proposition.
The energy drink sector is very active and to get any form of cut through with our audience we needed to be smart. We couldn’t just sponsor extreme sports, or music festivals as this was being done and to a great degree of success by competitors. We needed to talk to the audience about energy but through different means.
Insight
After extensive research, looking at what the competition were doing, what we wanted our brand to say and what our audience were most engaged with, we found three sectors which gave us the best chance of cut through: film, games and motorsports.
Deliverables
With these three sectors in mind we created three different activities that all fell under the campaign proposition of ‘high octane fun’.
POS activation
The new brand had a new can design, so it was very important that everyone who used to buy KX knew about the new design and continued to place it in their basket. We invested heavily in POS activity to make sure old customers continued to buy the product, the normal range of shelf wobblers, basket media and ends were adopted as well as more innovative media with ATM branding, fuel pump media and even half a dozen truck sides!
Urban Thrills
This was a five city trials bike competition and sampling activity. Six of the UK’s best trials bike riders travelled around the country taking part in a tournament to see who would be crowned the inaugural KX Urban Thrills champion. With heavy investment in video production, this was as much about creating great content for our content hungry Facebook and YouTube audience as it was about reaching the people on the streets with a great day of fun and a free can of KX or two.
Fast Five Partnership
In a first of its kind partnership, we gave consumers the opportunity to buy the Fast Five DVD and get a KX 6-pack for half price. For the first time, KX was sold alongside the DVD in the Tesco entertainment section and the DVD was sold in the soft drink aisle. Fast Five was the perfect product to do this with as we knew our audience were huge fans of the franchise and it also fitted perfectly into the “High Octane fun” campaign.
Trials EVOLUTION partnership
The biggest selling game on Xbox LIVE arcade is Trials HD, it is a game about Trial bikes (a sport we have heavily endorsed through our Urban Thrills event) so when RedLynx (the guys who made the game) told us they were creating a sequel, Trials EVOLUTION, we immediately knew we had to be involved. At the time of writing we are unable to talk about the detail of this partnership but as soon as we can we will update this page.
Social under pinning everything
Along with the above initiatives, we created two main social media focal points that pulled everything together: namely our Facebook page and YouTube channel. Using media to gain us critical mass and by creating a compelling and considered conversational calendar we grew the audience dramatically, from zero to over 70,000 Facebook fans in under 3 months, and 500,000 video views on YouTube.
Results
Confidentiality agreements prevent us from shouting about our substantial achievements for this campaign but we can say we dramatically increased sales, and massively outperformed industry and sector trends. The real results are demonstrated by the fact that we are currently planning next year’s activities.
