Case Study

#PEPSIxBLACKPINK Thailand campaign delivers brand love and full-funnel growth

Key Results

178.7M
impressions

+44%
campaign awareness*

+10%
purchase intent**

The opportunity

Pop culture is a great way to connect with your audience. In fact, cultural relevance makes up 23% of a purchase decision1 and has a 73% correlation with a brand’s revenue2, so it’s no wonder Pepsi Thailand (@PepsiThailand) decided to tap into the power of Thailand’s second most-liked music genre3, K-pop, to reach the broader Thai market.

To increase awareness and build brand love for two of its iconic products Pepsi Max and Pepsi, @PepsiThailand partnered with popular K-pop girl band, BLACKPINK. And since the country ranks #2 globally for Tweeting about K-pop4 (after Korea itself), Twitter was the obvious platform of choice. @PepsiThailand created PEPSIxBLACKPINK soda cans, custom emojis, amongst other merchandise, and to ensure the widest reach possible, the brand kicked off an offline-to-online (O2O) campaign across Bangkok’s BTS train stations.

The strategy

Through social listening, @PepsiThailand learnt that trending topics, exclusive contents, K-pop idol interactions, and merchandise giveaways are key to revving up fan excitement, so they were all incorporated into the five-month long campaign. 

Increasing brand engagement and improving brand metrics across the full funnel were @PepsiThailand's goals, so they applied Twitter’s proven framework: Tease, Reveal, and Reinforce for each of the two products.

Below, take a closer look at how the Pepsi Max campaign was rolled out:

Tease phase

In the lead-up to the big reveal, @PepsiThailand built anticipation using a 15-second Video Ad that featured Pepsi’s logo transitioning into BLACKPINK's colour scheme. Excitement grew as people guessed what was about to drop.

Reveal phase

@PepsiThailand then kicked off a three-consecutive-day-long Trend Takeover and Timeline Takeover to drive mass awareness and engagement for the big BLACKPINK ambassadorship reveal. And to supercharge the conversation, branded hashtag #PEPSIxBLACKPINK was introduced, much to the delight of fans.

Reinforce phase

Lastly, @PepsiThailand gamified the experience by unlocking a different BLACKPINK can design featuring a different band member whenever this Tweet hit 5K.

Separately, an O2O segment of the campaign revealed surprise locations of PEPSIxBLACKPINK billboards that were secretly planted at various BTS stations. Fans were prompted to Tweet their pictures with the billboards and answers questions with the mention of #PEPSIxBLACKPINKStation to win coveted prizes and merchandise.

At the end of the nearly four-month long Pepsi Max campaign, the second campaign for Pepsi kicked off with a similar five-second teaser. This second time around, the brand also created a first-in-market Live event, the “Pepsi Summer Virtual Show,” consisting of BLACKPINK-themed games and merchandise giveaways. To rally excitement for the Live event, Branded Notifications were sent to remind fans to tune in.

Tags
  • CPG
  • Asia Pacific

01

Achieve mass awareness with multiple Takeover products.

By casting a wide net, brands can expect higher awareness and engagement. @PepsiThailand launched their campaign with multiple premium Takeover products consecutively, alongside eye-catching Branded Hashtags. They not only captured the nation’s attention, but also engaged them in fun and memorable ways.

 

02

 

Keep audiences engaged by gamifying it.

Exclusive reveals and prize giveaways are great, positive ways to incentivise audiences to engage with your brand. Brands can use features such as Image Ads and Video Ads to get fans excited and to encourage more people to participate in your campaign activities. In the case of @PepsiThailand, the ads helped drive both engagement and cultural relevance.

 

03

 

Go Live with a virtual show.

Through a dedicated Twitter Live event page, @PepsiThailand broadcasted a live stream that garnered real-time interactions with their consumers and local BLACKPINK fans. Fans were reminded of the event through Branded Notifications, which also gave the brand a chance for more intimate one-on-one conversations with the audience at scale.

 

The Success

The campaign could not have gone off better, with @PepsiThailand enjoying extraordinary success and featured as part of Campaign Asia’s Twitter's Top 10. The brand campaign achieved 178.7M impressions, 2.5M engagements, and 34.3M video views throughout the campaign duration.

Engagement averaged 14.6% across the Takeover products products and hit a whopping 82.6% for promoted Tweets, outperforming the category benchmark in Thailand. Brand conversations also grew 5.35x compared to the previous period.

A brand lift study revealed significant growth across the full funnels.

Upper funnel lifts included a +51% growth in Tweet Recall amongst those who engaged with the ad and a +44% hike in Campaign Awareness for those who engaged with the ad. 

Similarly, the brand saw a +20% increase in message association for those who engaged with the ad at mid funnel.

And finally, a +11% jump in purchase intent amongst those who either engaged with the ad or viewed a video and a +10% lift for brand preference for those who viewed a video meant that the rise occurred at every stage of the funnel — all pointing to an exceedingly successful campaign in every way.

We believe Twitter is the most suitable platform for the clutter-breaking teaser of our PEPSIxBLACKPINK collaboration and for the campaign launch. Here, we expect to achieve results we have never seen before, especially from tapping into passion points and interest in K-pop culture. We are very confident that this campaign will become iconic and we’ve already seen the benefits of engaging Blinks and connecting to the K-pop community to help Pepsi break out of the category bubble. It’s been a very ownable approach.

Pundarik Hanyanant, Group Product Manager – Cola at Suntory PepsiCo Beverage Thailand

Footnote:
*amongst those who saw and engaged with the ad
**amongst those who saw and either (1) engaged or (2) viewed a video

Source:
1Kantar & Twitter Study, 2019
2Magna x Twitter, “The impact of culture”, US, 2019
3Global Web Index Q1-Q4 2020
4#KpopTwitter, Internal Data, 2019-2020 (Link)

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