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Skittles Rainbow
Back in 2009, with media budgets on the slide, Skittles were faced with two options: running the same TV spots at a lower weight, or taking a totally new approach. We opted for the latter, building an online community through a highly engaging game promoted through Facebook. From a standing start Skittles Skuffle helped to amass over six hundred thousand fans. Within the first three weeks it became the most successful Facebook campaign in Europe ever.
But we wanted more. We had a new positioning that had broader audience appeal and we needed this audience to get on board quickly. We would welcome our existing fans to “The Rainbow” and take them on a journey. It would increase the level of interaction that fans were having with the brand and as a result, grow our fan base significantly. The importance of this transition was such that all budgets were digitally focused.
Introducing the Rainbow
From October 2010, we detonated the colourful, wonderfully odd thing we call “The Rainbow” through Facebook and out over the internet. We wanted to ignite conversations everywhere, but most importantly, we would encourage the British fans of Skittles to be advocates of The Rainbow.
Proving the power of the Rainbow
The six-week campaign kicked off when a handsome martial arts expert called David Phoenix challenged The Rainbow. This chap reckoned he could take on anything the Rainbow could throw at him. So we challenged him to be submerged in Skittles. We mobilised our (then) 1.2 million fans and got them to act as a kind of bizarre Rainbow army whose weapons were little colourful sweets. By clicking through to the live event on Facebook each fan added 15 Skittles to be showered on Phoenix. Check out how our fans unleashed The Rainbow on this fool.
Such was the reaction of our fans that we defeated David Phoenix in a mere 10 hours (we had allowed 24 but as more and more people viewed the event, interest spread exponentially). News of the event reached over two hundred thousand twitter accounts, fan page views increased by 1126% and interactions increased by 736%. With the help of the event, we had welcomed an extra 245,000 fans to The Rainbow in three weeks.
A Facebook First
But things were just about to get serious. Two weeks after the Phoenix event, we launched something called the Skittles Super Mega Updater. From a mystery location inside The Rainbow we delivered a Facebook first: a real time video updater service so that the (then) 1.5m UK fans could Rainbowfy their everyday Facebook experience. Fans would log onto the Updater, give us their update, and within minutes we would turn it into a video and send it back to their wall. It would then appear in newsfeeds and people could share it across the web with mates. Live for two weeks, we handed over sole creative power to our online community. An opportunity they grabbed with both hands.
We had built a call centre especially to handle the requests of our fans, and as you would expect, the staff in our call centre weren’t your average call handlers. They had been through the Skittles school of customer service. During the two weeks they collectively produced over 20,000 video updates, which have been viewed over 400,000 times on YouTube (and counting). Check out the responses here. The most liked update (as voted for by the community) will be immortalised as hundreds of years of similarly important achievements have – with an oil on canvas portrait.
Has it worked?
Since we started in October we have grown our fan base over 50%. The current total now stands at over 1.93 million – outstripping the organic growth model by over 500,000 and making Skittles the largest UK confectionary brand on Facebook. Double-digit sales growth shows this is paying back more than TV ever did, with econometrics telling us new fans are a very significant part of delivering incremental sales. You know when you’ve created something special, when an ‘under the radar’ social campaign is opted into by so many of your target audience that you begin to challenge the might of a mass-media broadcast campaign.
Welcome to The Rainbow.
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