With Centrum’s launch of their new Vitamin C, we were tasked to not only enter an extremely saturated market, but also to grab the attention of busy PMEBs and families – an audience whose spending power subjects them to an excessive myriad of advertising activities.
With a plethora of well-established Vitamin C brands out there for consumers to choose from and being a new player in this mature landscape, how do we then create a striking impact to capture the mindshare of these overexposed consumers, and to ultimately influence them to choose us from the rest when they are in stores purchasing their next Vitamin C?
You and I, and practically the whole world, know that Vitamin C is a key ingredient to strong immunity. But often times, we leave it in our drawers, only allowing it to see the light of day when we feel a cold coming on, or if we’re paranoid enough, every time a colleague sneezes. Because to us, eating Vitamin C is a humdrum activity that we often forget about until the eleventh hour. So if Vitamin C is such an important key to immunity, why do we only take it during the “last minute”?
Just like how it is our natural instinct to eat, we wanted consumers to have the instinct to take Vitamin C daily too.
So why not start a trend by packaging Centrum Vitamin C as an ingredient rather than a supplement? We decided to come up with novel ways to consume Centrum Vitamin C to break away from the traditional way of consuming a supplement, and inject fun into something as banal as eating.
And if we were going to be dabbling with consumables, we needed a way to get these onto the taste buds of our target audience. Sampling came to our minds. It was the way to go.
Since we identified that sampling was a key strategy in our campaign, how could we then get these samples into the hands of our target audiences in a manner that differentiates us from the rest? The mundane direct marketing tactics of promoters handing out sample cups to people on the streets or in supermarkets have created a phenomenon in Singapore where consumers generally go out of their way to avoid promoters like the plague. We needed to overcome that.
And for the sampling activation to be more holistic, we also needed a carrot to draw nearby traffic to our activation and capture the willing attention of passers-by.
Basically, we wanted to demonstrate that consuming Centrum Vitamin C could be fun and interesting.
