Insight
How can you get people to believe in a brand trapped in rumours? Wyeth Gold suffered from an UNPROVEN MYTH of “causing infant constipation”, which had been circulating in parenting communities. The myth stopped new mums from trying!
To maintain and grow, Wyeth needed to turn negative word-of-mouth around.
To change parents’ perception the brand needed more than just data and scientific proof – it needed to move away from brand-speak! It was critical to convince the skeptics with genuine consumer experience and turn them into advocates.
Strategy
You know how rumours spread. It starts with a storyteller who tells a version of his/her story to another. Another then relays the story to others, adding his own interpretation and understanding upon the original expression. Distortion typically accumulate in the retellings, so the message received by the receiver could differ significantly from the one told by the first.
So how could OMD bust the myth? It needed stories that are BOLD and PROVOCATIVE.
Creating “busting the Chinese whisper”, the agency stirred up the hype by SPREADING THE MYTH EVEN FURTHER, fuelling conversation through social media and invited criticism. It added talk value to the campaign and incited reaction by expanding the discussion into different forms across multi-media platform, even created a viral video to heat things up!
The idea was controversial enough to provoke real Wyeth users to speak for the brand! Leveraging OMD’s Facebook Advocate Map, the agency created an army of its own, leveraging their social power to convince more HK parents, completely changing the context of discussions from rumours to advocacy!
Execution
OMD sparked the fire by asking HK mums possible causes of infant constipation via celebrity interviews and online polling. As the discussion began, it started to see negative comments posted on social media, suggesting Wyeth Gold as one of the possible causes. But this is not enough – it needed something even more CONTROVERSY and OUTRAGEOUS. So the agency created a viral video featuring comedian Sandra Ng, who challenged HK Mum’s knowledge in a provocative yet humourous manner.
As the debate got more intense, more and more fingers pointed at Wyeth without any proof, enraging real Wyeth Users who stood up and defend for the brand! So OMD gathered them on a Facebook Advocate map where they could endorse the brand with their own experience, creating a parenting community of ORIGINAL STORYTELLERS! With a customised search strategy, OMD was able to reach infant-constipation baffled mums, inviting them to visualise the whole parenting community and testify the rumour by joining the trial programme.
Once the momentum hit the climax, the conversation spread from social media to news headline and even become the most searched content on Yahoo! Hong Kong!
Results
At the end of the day, Wyeth Gold managed to change the conversation completely, from Constipation, Rumours and Myth to Experience, Advocacy and Sharing! As the debate heated up, the campaign featured on Yahoo! HotBuzz for 30 days, equivalent to 22M free branded impressions! Also with over 300K views on relevant content created by media partners, the campaign has gained over HKD 1.6M ($206m) in free PR!
On the advocate map, it gathered over 2,600 Wyeth endorsers who helped engage over 4,000 new mums, creating a parenting community of over 6,500 parents! Leverage on their social power, OMD immediately improved imagery as post campaign research showed that Wyeth’s attribute score on “Not Causing infant Constipation” improved by 12%. It also enhanced the brand’s likability as Facebook likes boosted 21 times from 1K to over 21K!
Most importantly, the campaign addressed a business challenge by inducing over 4,000 trials, 780% of monthly average with new users grew by 12%!
Not every brand trapped in rumours had a good ending…fortunately, Wyeth Gold did.