Insight
Chipsy has grown significantly over the years in the potato chips market, as currently it’s not only Egypt’s single potato chips heritage brand, but the only brand that offers international quality. However, in order for Chipsy to retain its international quality, prices had to increase to ensure sustaining its premium potato chip quality. But, Chipsy’s place on the potato chip throne has started to slip over the past couple of years, as a rising number of smaller local competitors entered the market. Suddenly, Chipsy found itself head to head with smaller local brands amidst a pricing war.
With objectives and marketing challenges clear, OMD needed to look at the consumer. What seemed to be the core to all their issues was their mental state. Ranking number five in the country misery index, it was no secret that Egyptians were on a low. The smile that they were once renowned for had slowly disappeared and replaced by frowns and worried eyes.
So why not offer them an “intangible” prize that could be the key/catalyst to taking them out of their new found misery. The agency's task was to answer a simple question, what is the simplest thing that makes people happy? And that was a smile; the true essence of happiness.
It was as simple as that; the mission was to bring Egyptians out of their misery by giving them what they lacked and in turn needed most… a smile.
Strategy
OMD needed to make sure that this smile would be instant and guaranteed, so knowing that Chipsy is Egypt’s most distributed product, with about five million packs sent across all regions of Egypt on a daily basis; it used the pack itself as the vehicle of offering.
The agency put a smile on every pack; and instantly created Egypt’s first emotional promotion where the consumer was not only guaranteed a prize but instantly received it at purchase point. It was speaking to an entire nation so couldn’t merely place a few generic smiles; knowing that the population of Egypt was 90 million, OMD went down in the street and shot 90 different real Egyptian smiles; from the farmer to the doctor to the mother to the fisherman, you name it.
OMD did not want the campaign to be static, therefore to ensure it would be dynamic and appeal to the consumer it designed the pack to be used interactively; placed the smiling faces on the top half segment of the potato chips bag, in order for consumers to be able to place the pack on their face, and instantly be seen smiling!
The purpose of the campaign was born; it wanted all Egyptians to smile again, so kicked off with a teaser that premiered all 90 different smiles that called on consumers to “Pay the Smile Forward”. It wanted Egyptians to buy the pack to and give it to the unhappy ones to smile again, or to even take a selfie of it and share the smile to a loved one, and so on.
Execution
The campaign kicked off with commercial starring Egyptian super star Ahmed Helmy, before finally ending with a call to action to upload your picture and galvanize social media users to create the trend. While Facebook was used primarily for reach, the strategy on Instagram was to create a platform for the people, with heavy moderation, reposting and creating/igniting the conversation. A hashtag was developed to collect all of the images and prompt the call-to-action to Smile with Chipsy. Influencers were used to announce the platform using the Arabic translation of #DontStopSmiling, encouraging users to spread the smile.
Taking control of the conversation was key; Egypt is home to a very creative and diverse internet population and the agency anticipated the slew of user generated memes, images and videos that the Egyptian internet would create. Accordingly, it developed a guerrilla social media plan and reached out to internet conversation starters (such as Egyptian Memes and Egyptian Sarcasm Society) to push these jokes to solidify the trend. When other brands started to take part, it knew had a movement. Toothpaste giants Close-Up, promised to make Chipsy smiles brighter and shared the message with its fans.
A CSR quotient was necessary to solidify its success. Since this was a campaign that centered on smiles, Chipsy would distribute packs of chips – and smiles! – across the country. The hashtag was changed from #DontStopSmiling to #DontStopGiving and pushed on social assets to encourage people to not only smile, but also pay it forward.
Results
• Sales increased by 16%, with a target of 5%
• The Ahmed Helmy main brand copy became one of the most watched videos in Egypt in 2015 with 5,000,000+ views on YouTube
• Reached 91,615,871 impressions reached across social and digital assets versus a target of 10 million
• Generated 210,000 interactions on Facebook versus an objective of 150,000
• 10,000 submissions from users on the hashtag on Instagram; 15,000+ Instagram picture and video submissions
• 3,000 followers on Instagram page in three days
• 21,547 users logged on to the Facebook Application and uploaded 62,745 pictures
• Earned media not only skyrocketed in terms of users, with offline and online sources reaching 2.5 million Egyptian pounds ($281,528) worth of PR.