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Viral branding & Cultural branding
This presentation will introduce and explain viral and cultural branding strategies for our yogurt brand “U”.
About Us
“U” is a yogurt brand located in Auckland. Our brand's value proposition consists of our brand name and the logo's pattern, which means our yogurt product provides a unique experience and is full of love and care. We aim at offering nutritious, fresh, and healthy yogurt products to our customers.
Market situation & Our challenge
Let's move to the current yogurt market and look at what our major competitors are doing. Both Meadow Fresh and Fresh 'n' Fruity use gifting activities to encourage consumers to either notice their new attributes or buy their yogurts. However, once the activity is over, the effects it brings might also go away. Meanwhile, The Collective is trying to attract consumers by constantly developing new flavours, which are functional branding strategies. The challenge for us is building brand awareness in this market with many well-established brands, and a viral branding strategy that none of them is using can help us overcome the challenge.
Consumer insight
The information we found on how to make children grow up well indicates that children need to grow both physically and emotionally in the early child development period. Healthy foods provide the energy and nutrients they need to grow physically. However, while kids are spending more and more time on screen, ensuring healthy content that is educational and instructive is more demanding and essential.
The consumer insights behind are:
Firstly, kids often learn from superheroes.
Secondly, parents want to monitor the content their kids watch, and they prefer to use educational cartoons to help kids have healthy emotional learning and development.
The Big Idea (The key message we try to seed)
The key message we intend to go viral is that our brand cares about children's physical health as well as their mental health, which aligns with our values of care and love.
Our idea is to seed the message by promoting various important life lessons to children in an interesting way, including learning how to communicate and socialise.
Bring idea to life
There will be two stages in our actual campaign.
In the first stage, we create contagious content that includes our key message. We will make a cartoon series that is educational while entertaining for kids, named "U are superkids". The main characters would be a little girl and a little boy. They have a magic yogurt which is our brand. Every time they drink the yogurt, they will become super kids. In each episode, super kids help other kids and teach them different life lessons, such as standing up by themselves every time they tumble. Our cartoon also helps children learn about thinking and problem-solving skills, teaches them that helping others is good quality, and make friends properly. Superkids will be a friend and a role model for young children.
Moreover, the two adorable main characters in the cartoon will wear clothes with our brand name in front after they drink our yogurt and turn into super kids. The image on this slide is an illustration. The image of super kids will also be printed on some of our yogurt packages.
Finally, according to the survey done by Pacific Media Watch, the most popular video site that New Zealand kids watch is YouTube. So we will start to post our cartoons on this platform.
The purpose of stage two is to use different types of Word of Mouth to raise the awareness of our cartoon among parents.
We will hire selected influencers on social media to help us introduce and recommend the cartoon to their audiences. / These influencers will include New Zealand YouTube channels and Instagrammers that share their parenting experiences. For example, the most viewed parenting channel in New Zealand: "How to Dad", as illustrated in the image, he also has accounts on Facebook and Instagram. They will help us spread our cartoon to their audiences, mainly younger parents who use more social media.
We will also use paid media online such as Stuff NZ and NZ Herald to report our brand creating an educating cartoon, targeting parents who do not usually go to popular social media and trust new media more.
When parents check out our cartoon when they hear from the above channels, they are likely to share our educating cartoon with other parents in the community. This is because the cartoon is the "when we care, we share" contagious emotion content, parents care about giving their children the educating but fun cartoon to watch.
Moreover, we also target the children to parents network as we will post our cartoon on the platforms that New Zealand kids like to use. When they find our cartoon fun to watch and view superkids as their role models, they will want to drink the same yogurt superkids drink. When they see our yogurt with superkids images, they will tell their parents they want to drink our yogurt. Parents would be willing to buy, since our yogurt is fresh and healthy food that is good for children's physical development.
Kids who drink our yogurt might try to learn from the superkids and help others. Parents would become more willing to buy our yogurt for their children and recommend our cartoon again to other parents. Therefore, our sales will increase, and there will be organic traffic too.
However, there are some limitations.
Firstly, while sharing is a key part of viral marketing, you have no control over how people interact with your information.
Also, No one can predict perfectly about whether the campaign will be good enough to go viral and have the desired effect.
Secondly, parents will worry about their children's eyesight problems because of watching cartoons for a long time.
Now let’s move to cultural branding strategy.
Cultural branding
Market situation & our challenge:
Let's look at the market situation first, about what other major competitors are doing to attract consumers. Meadow Fresh is promoting themselves as being more environmental friendly; Fresh ‘n’ Fruity has an ad where their personified yogurt is using sign language to communicate about a new attribute of theirs; The Collective is donating the funds raised through the sale of a special series of yogurt to a charity that supports vulnerable New Zealand families. They are all involved, in different ways, in issues that some consumers care about. However, none of them has a proper cultural branding strategy.
Therefore, considering consumers nowadays, especially the millennials, really want to avoid seeing traditional advertisements, one way to communicate and reach them is to use cultural branding strategy. Since consumers now use consumption to express their individuality, value, and attitude towards certain social issues, our brand can connect with target customers by becoming the champion of the cultural issue they care about.
Target audience
The target audiences for our cultural branding strategy are people living in New Zealand, who are concerned about the social issues around body shaming and body image anxiety, and who use consumption as social commentary. Therefore they would call for brands to engage in this social issue.
Challenge
Here, the challenge is to encourage people to reconsider the definition of 'ideal' body shape.
Consumer insight
According to the insight report from Auckland Young Women's Association (2020), one important insight is that Negative body image can be both mentally and physically harmful.
The Big Idea
Our brand wants to reduce the implicit bias about imperfect body shapes and encourage people to love their true self and live in a positive and healthy way. As everyone has unique beauty
Next, I will pass to Mason to talk about how to execute our culture branding strategy.
eliminate the excessive behaviours for the pursuit of an ‘ideal’ body shape
Bring idea to life + Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy + Limitation
Campaign
‘U' will launch a campaign by inviting a group of people of different ages and genders that have different types of body shapes to participate in an interview. We will show some thin and fit body images that some people posted on social media and ask what they think about these pictures? Have they ever felt unhappy about their body shape? Did they try to use extreme actions to change their body shape? At this stage, Some guests will answer that they think they are not beautiful enough or have been body shamed before. They want to look like those perfect body shapes posted on social media as they think most people like those slim and figures.
After that, We will show them many comparison photos of perfect images compared to real life photos. The comparison shows how the camera posing in a particular way can dramatically alter people’s appearance.(1) We want to convey the rationale to the invited guests that most contrasting images served in social media are fake. No one is perfect. It's normal to have flaws, and they should never compare themselves with others. We will also put our brand's yogurt into various package shapes. But the millilitre of yogurt is the same. We will ask the invited guest what they think about the yogurt? Which one would be more valuable? This action aims to convey the meaning to the guests that difference in body shapes or imperfect body shapes does not mean that they are not beautiful or of lower value than others. Just like our yoghurt, even though it's packed into different shapes, they are still healthy yogurts. Therefore, there is no need to feel ashamed of your body, and no need to use extreme action to shape your body figure. Everyone has their beauty, as long as they have a healthy lifestyle, they should learn to accept and love their true self.
Orthodoxy VS Heterodoxy
-Dominant culture:
The purpose of our culture branding strategy is to redefine the current awareness of the beauty body shape culture in the society, which is: People are toward slim, perfect body shapes, and consider the perfect body shape will get more love from others and higher their value.
-Heterodoxy:
Our branding strategy aims at breaking the inherent impression of body shape. And convey that everyone has their own beauty no matter what their body shape is. Stop body shaming others and yourself, learn to accept and love yourself and encourage others to do the same.
We also Encourage people to be confident with themselves. Live with a positive and healthy lifestyles is the best way to show their beauty.
Lastly, there are a limitation about culture branding
Cultural branding is more virtual and can be difficult to resonate with everyone. If the customers misunderstood what we wanted to express to them, it would have a negative effect on our brand.