Aimia Foods were launching the No Fear Extreme Energy (NFEE) drink brand onto the UK market and had two main objectives associated with the launch. Their marketing budget is tiny compared with competitors such as Red Bull and Relentless. The objective is to drive enough awareness of this brand to gain retailer listings and drive purchases.

Target Audience: Males aged between 16-24

Strategy

Juice recommended  that, in budgetary terms, NFEE would be unable to gain any significant share of voice using ‘traditional’ marketing channels. But, due to the heavy social media usage of the target demographic, an effective social media campaign could be effective.

We aimed to create a community of extreme young men. This community would be loyal to the brand and spread the word amongst their peers, virally growing brand recognition and driving sales.

Implementation

Firstly a  web 2.0 site was created. A WordPress platform was chosen to enable simple refreshment of content and ease of upload of user-generated content. The aim, over time, is that 80% of the site content would be user generated and therefore updated constantly. Facebook, Youtube and Flickr were used as the ‘engine’ of the site – ie, users upload their content there which is then pulled as a feed into the site. The principle is to go to where the audience already is, rather than expecting them to always find you.  We targeted the target audience’s social sphere effectively.  We looked at their interests and habits and found where the largest communities were. Their interests include  high octane sports, music, girls and an anti-establishment feel in general.  Appropriate chanels were used with promotional messaging to gather an audience and generate buzz.    A social media hub was created focussing on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter – The SM channels most popular with this target audience.

• Facebook This is the main channel to host UGC. Uploads are encouraged through posting interesting content of our own, running competitions with branded merchandise as prizes, conducting polls and running the popular weekly No Fear girl of the week competition. Facebook ‘champions’ have been recruited from the online lads’ mags community.
• Twitter There are daily updates and strong interactions with the audience, mainly about relevant events and activities which match the audience’s interests.  As @drinknofear we are able to directly communicate with a savvy young male audience about their passion and drive promotions and buzz about the product effectively. We actively encourage engagement and RTs
• Flickr is used as a backup to Facebook for user upload of pictures relevant to Drink No Fear. Showing themselves drinking it at festivals, sports events, parties etc
• YouTube This is a core engine for the site hosting videos of people doing extreme sports, videos of the No Fear Girls at music awards handing out the drinks and general video content appealing to the audience. All content is tagged and SEO’d as much as possible to exploit the search advantages of YouTube.
• Bloggers Influential bloggers have been identified, engaged with and sent product and appropriate web content for review.

Results

In less than 3 months, No Fear Extreme Energy has already overtaken competitor thisistheorder in share of online voice. It has gained recognition in the social media realm and now has a highly engaged audience and has consistently shown comparative week on week gains in strength and popularity in comparison to other brands including Red Bull and Monster Energy. Already listings have been achieved the independents, convenience stores, forecourts, food service outlets, and cash and carries like  Costco, Booker, Bestway, Palmer and Harvey. From a standing start 10,000 cases were sold in June alone.