Established by Franklin Clarence Mars in 1911, Mars, Incorporated is a multinational company manufacturing food products including confectionery and pet food.
Established by Franklin Clarence Mars in 1911, Mars, Incorporated is a multinational company manufacturing food products including confectionery and pet food. Pedigree Petfoods is a subsidiary of Mars specializing in pet food, with the sales network in over 100 countries. The successful campaign of Pedigree Petfoods the benchmark of Social Touch in the pet food industry
The Challenge
As the first pet food producer entering the Chinese market, Mars provides great-quality product and service and has earned a great reputation in China. However, due to the fierce competition in recent years, the online sales of Mars were as high as expected. The challenge was to drive online sales by the increase of brand awareness and popularity
The Solution
We adopted the celebrity endorsement strategy. Huang Xuan, a well-known movie actor with a positive image was chosen to be the spokesperson of Pedigree. We created a mini-movie named “a story of Huang Xuan and his beloved dog” to convey the core message: the more we care the dog, the better life we will earn
• We held a live broadcast of the film making process on MiaoPai, a popular platform of short videoes. At the same time, we made a couple of short viral videos to further spread the core message. At the same time, we captured the interesting moments of the film making process and posted on social media to initiate the audience’s discussion
• We allied with the fans club of Huang Xuan to increase the popularity of the mini-film and created a couple of movie-related emojis to increase the audience engagement
• On May 20th - an unofficial Chinese Valentine’s Day, Huang Xuan posted a message expressing his love to his dog on Weibo, and directed his followers to watch the mini-movie. We then chose several leading KOLs to retweet Huang Xuan’s Weibo message to attract more attention. The movie attracted thousands of hundreds of followers on Weibo and successfully gained popularity in China. Pedigree’s official Weibo account also posted a couple of pictures showing the love story of Huang Xuan and his dog, as a metaphor for mocking “single dogs” in a way of “giving dog foods”. (“Single dog” is an essential vocabulary for the unattached in China)
The Achievement
The live streaming of shooting scenes was played 400,000 times on the day it was released on Miao Pao and was liked by nearly 15,000 fans
Gained 8,540,000 Weibo views and 44,000 interactions
Gained 162,000 WeChat views
Gained 510,000 views of the official mini-movie, and 192,000 views of movie tidbits
