Snickers has been warning people about the consequences of hunger for many years. It's been constantly telling people, ‘you’re not you when you’re hungry’ and to grab a Snickers to prevent hunger blunders. But what can we do when people have already made mistakes due to hunger? We decided to evolve the global campaign from preventing hungry mistakes to actually doing something to solve them.
Describe the strategy
Snickers played the role of a semi-real insurance company that covers you for hunger blunders and pays you out in chocolate. We acted not like a chocolate brand but an insurance company, whilst being outside the category. The aim was to cover people for mistakes that warrant sympathy but weren’t serious enough to need ‘real’ insurance coverage. The gap identified in the market: Trivial Everyday Blunders. Since ‘blunders’ was a broad category, we focused on pillars that were most relevant to our audience: tech, social, school & work, grooming, and home-related blunders.
With our key audience being the broad 16 to 30 year old demographic, we identified several key opportunities:
* They are less likely to have insurance, but also more likely to make a blunder.
* The claims mechanism resonates with their media behaviours
* They are our source of growth from a sales POV
Describe the execution
Just like any insurance, we kicked things off with an infomercial-style video, which asked people to make a claim for their hunger blunders. Testimonial films, social, audio ads and outdoor also drove our noble cause. To make a claim, people had to visit the website, speak to a chatbot, provide a few details of their hunger blunder, and receive a coupon for a payout of SNICKERS® bars redeemable at Circle K stores.
We worked with underwriters to develop an algorithm to assess claims –factoring in things like time of day, mood, location, frequency and severity of the blunder. This data was fed into a bespoke AI chatbot which analyzed thousands of keywords linked to hundreds of hunger-related incidents. All factors added up to a unique payout amount for each individual claim. The bigger the blunder, the bigger the chocolate payout. From 2X all the way up to 50X SNICKERS.
List the results
The promo had a very direct and positive result not only for SNICKERS sales figures but also for brand health.
SNICKERS also built a strong collaborative relationship with a key retail partner that would usually be uninterested in executing such equity building activities.
21% increase in foot traffic at retail outlets
18% increase in weekly sales during the campaign period
30% increase in brand association with hunger