BACKGROUND
With almost 100 years of history, DoubleMint is a gum brand with long heritage. It’s also one of the few brands that entered China early – 27 years ago in fact. With the widest distribution and highest top of mind, you can buy a piece of classic DoubleMint Gum on any street in China and everyone knows the brand.
Unfortunately, such a long heritage can have a negative effect too. Today the brand is losing many of its young consumers with recent statistics showing that the brand is losing penetration as well as relevancy with youth. It was time to take serious action. But we decided to do something silly
OBJECTIVE
We had to rejuvenate DoubleMint, recreate an emotional bond with young consumers and make the brand popular again.
INSIGHT
So we took inspiration from popular internet culture and noticed how often it’s the meaningless content that creates the most resonance, providing young people with a moments of silliness to connect with each other.
What would happen if we leveraged this spirit of light-hearted togetherness and made it uniquely DoubleMint?
IDEA
Be Silly Together was an invitation to young internet-savvy consumers to enjoy a moment of meaningless fun.
Doublemint would show that being silly isn’t a bad thing but the best way to enjoy uncomplicated happiness together in a simple expression of friendship and closeness.
HOW
Instead of delivering this message from a brand’s perspective, we explored existing behaviors of youth and naturally blended in our message. Leveraging the popular music group – Mayday, who appear on the TVC, our 3-wave activation generated content from real consumers and allowed us to gain massive reach.
For each wave we selected topics for content creation: classmates, travel companions, and co-workers. All of these were identified as most relevant to our target audience and being real moments of togetherness.
Define what’s silly with Brand Created Contents
First, we created fun and catchy “micro-posters” illustrating various “silly fun togetherness” moments and seeded then on Sina Weibo (China’s biggest micro-blog), enabling youngsters to quickly grasp the campaign spirit. These posters were designed to be easily to read on PC and mobile as well as instantly shareable on Weibo.
Show how to be silly with Brand Curated Contents
Secondly we partnered with media platforms Youku, Todou and Douban, to seek out existing content from real consumers that fitted our theme. With a little branding and re-packaging we reposted this for further impact and sharing.
Be Silly together with User Generated Content
On our owned platform – the official Sina Weibo, we created simple engagements for youth to further participate and share their own “silly fun together” moments. All this was aggregated on the official Weibo page for everyone to view and share.
In these 3 waves we were able to guarantee large amount of contents for young people to consume and share, but more importantly, provide content that was authentic, highly relevant and entertaining.
RESULTS
After the 3 month campaign the results were encouraging.
Through Paid Media, we reached 25% of our target audience.
Even without media support, there were over 1.5 million Unique Visitors to the branded Sina Weibo Tab Page, with over 110,000 retweets of the micro-posters we’ve created.
Curated content on Youku and Douban helped us attract almost 1.9 million Unique Visitors generating 19 million content views.
Being silly brought a breath of fresh air to how a 100-year-old brand told its closeness story, helping Doublemint Gum regain its popularity and reconnect with young consumers.
Let’s Be Silly Together!
