Brand's Chicken Essence: Brain Age

Warc Prize for Asian Strategy Entrant, 2011

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Brand's Chicken Essence: Brain Age Warc Prize for Asian Strategy Entrant, 2011

Brand's Chicken Essence: Brain Age

The Warc Prize for Asian Strategy is the first Asian competition set up to reward brilliant strategic thinking in marketing. Marketers and agencies across Asia (excluding the Pacific region) were asked to submit case studies that demonstrated how insight and strategy had solved a business problem. The cases had to show what the problem was, the strategy that was developed, how that strategy was brought to life and the results it delivered. The prize was judged by a panel of senior clients and agency-side strategy experts, using the following weighting: quality of insight (15% of marks); quality of strategic thinking (40%); implementation (15%); performance against objectives (20%); lessons learned (10%). For more information on this annual prize, please visit www.warc.com/asiaprize. Campaign Details Advertiser: Cerebos Pacific Ltd Agency: OgilvyOne, Taipei Brand: Brands Campaign duration: July 2010-September 2011 Country: Taiwan Media budget (USD): $5m-$10m Channels used: Internet display, internet microsites, internet search, public relations, social media

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Brands Chicken Essence, an OTC food supplement, faced a problem: Taiwanese consumers were not engaging with its promise of offering increased mental clarity. The resulting campaign promoted the idea of brain age, an indication of the level of a person's mental activity and clarity. The brand released news reports that Taiwanese white-collar workers, on average, had a brain age that was 20 years older than their actual age, without knowing it. This prompted consumers to visit the campaignmicrositetotakeabrainagetest.Nearly21%ofvisitorscompletedthetest 10 times higher than industry benchmark (2%). Furthermore, 11.49% of them checked out product information about Brand's Chicken Essence, 23 times more than Brands previous experiences (0.5%).

MARKET BACKGROUND AND BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

In Taiwan, awareness of Brands Chicken Essence is extremely high, and it has dominated the market. When it comes to purchasing and consumption of chicken essence, 99% of consumers automatically think about Brands. However, the brand itself is not relevant to white-collar workers between the ages of 30 and 45. The functional benefit of enhancing ones mental
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clarity is not attractive to them because they do not think they need to improve it. Therefore, our task was to make them aware of their needs.

INSIGHT AND STRATEGIC THINKING

Although mental clarity is very important to most Taiwanese white-collarworkers,theydonotperceiveastrongneedto improveit.Why?Becausetheydonotrealisetheyhaveaproblem.Wedecidedtodiscussmentalclaritybyusingsomething concrete and easy to evaluate. We promoted the idea of Brain Age, which is a quotient scoring ones mental clarity. In addition,weinvitedconsumerstotakeanonlinebrainagetest,therebymakingthemrealisethattheirmentalclaritywas deficient and worse than they expected. To make the test persuasive, we worked with an American institute to develop academically respectable results.

IMPLEMENTATION
Toencourageconsumerstofocusattentionontheissueofbrainage,weusedaprovocativePRtopic Taiwanese whitecollar workers, on average, have a brain age that is 20 years older than their actual age, without knowing it. This fact was reported in the news and the issue aroused consumersattention. On social media, we encouraged web surfers to discuss these news reports. In addition, we drove them to take our brain age test (evaluations that have been proven to be trustworthy byscholars)ataneventsite,wheretheirmentalclaritywas challenged. They soon realised their mental clarity did not perform as well as they expected. We had achieved our goal of make people aware of their brain age needs.

PERFORMANCE AGAINST OBJECTIVES

The issue of brain age attracted the attention of white-collar workers. Almost 21% (20.98%) of visitors to the website completedthebrainagetest.Thiswas10timeshigherthanourbenchmark(2%).Theaveragevisitorspentmorethanthree minutes (higher then the benchmark of one minute) on the website and viewed more than three pages (higher than the benchmark of one web page). In addition, 11.49% of website visitors checked out product information, which is 23 times more than the brands previous campaigns. By demonstrating they might be deficient in mental clarity, we had encouragedconsumerstodiscovermoreaboutourproducts benefits.

LESSONS LEARNED
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Testing can be an effective approach to evoke needs. Quantities can make something abstract easier to perceive. Academicevidencemadethetestmorepersuasiveandcredible.

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