What I Did
I was co-president of our student-run class that functioned as an ad agency. I managed and collaborated with our team of 12 marketing and graphic communications students who were hand selected for the class. Although I scheduled, led, and contributed to most aspects of the campaign-building process, I took special interest in the research and strategy of our campaign.
Below are some details on the research and insights we found, as well as an overview on our campaign. We pitched our campaign in April to an panel of experts and company leadership in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Challenge
The National Student Advertising Competition is an annual challenge put on by the American Advertising Federation that gives college students the chance to develop a campaign for a real client. The 2015-2016 NSAC client was Snapple, and the challenge was to grow sales volume using different strategies for the heartland (Northeast US) and non-heartland regions.
The Insight
We conducted interviews, taste tests, surveys, and focus groups to better understand our market and customer. We compiled a few key takeaways:
- Snapple has grown irrelevant in a heavily saturated ready-to-drink tea market
- In blind taste tests, people loved the taste of Snapple compared to competitors
- Competitors are mostly positioned as super healthy (HonesTea) or super weird (Brisk), there's no in-between
We realized that Snapple could easily occupy a niche in the market that no other ready-to-drink tea brands have taken advantage of: the middle-ground. We then began to draw multiple parallels between Snapple and Samuel Adams Brewing, such as the variety, authenticity, and focus on flavor, which led to our "a-ha" moment. People drink Snapple for the same reason they drink beer: for the flavor and the feeling. This insight served as the line that we built the rest of our campaign upon. We wanted to position Snapple as an experiential brand that challenges the idea that says your beverage has to be super healthy and uptight or super unhealthy and uncomfortably weird.
Our campaign was called Snap to Your Happy Place and our recipe for success was to:
- Anchor the campaign with broad-reaching national and local sponsors.
- Supplement our wide-reaching sponsorships with an on-brand pop culture brand persona and relevant outreach.
- Synchronize the campaign with eye-catching and innovative point-of-purchase displays that inspire and drive in-store awareness.
- Top it all off by building great content that works in both national and local markets.