In general, salaried workers in Japan feel uncomfortable speaking their minds in front of others. To work off their daily stresses, they often drink canned coffee. In fact, the canned coffee market in Japan is massive. Roots was not a very visible brand so the “Go with Roots!” campaign was developed to make Roots a familiar brand among our target and to promote sales. The strategy was simple: To let Japanese salaried workers speak their minds. Roots was to provide them with an opportunity to do so and thus make Roots a familiar brand to salaried workers.

The core of this campaign was the “Sing with Roots” website. Visitors to this site just input what was on their minds. The computer then automatically generated a singing voice to create a song. With the website, salaried workers could comfortably speak their minds and relieve their stresses. A Japanese research organization developed this technology and this singing voice sounds natural. Additionally, its lyric automatically finishes with the line “anyway, Go with Roots!” Thus, all songs then become our commercial songs.

To support the website, we also created TV commercials and posters that spoke up on behalf of salaried workers’. Especially, the posters showed the location-specific stressful situations. For example, we created the poster for the crowded platform showing the copy “Just going to my office is hard work”. It appeared only at the crowded platform. As many as 603 different versions of posters were made.

As a result, 84.3% of our target favoured the Roots brand. In the first two months, over 120,000 TV commercial songs were made, which means that a new song was created every 40 seconds. Additionally, through their e-mail, blog, and TV commercials, Roots made the voices of 120,000 salaried workers heard throughout Japan. As a result of making the engagement towards ROOTS brand stronger, nearly 500 million cans of Roots were sold in just one year.