To get the teenagers, we needed to anchor ourselves into their pop-culture, at a moment when the hunger satisfaction promise of Snickers products would matter to them. We found the perfect occasion in the Chinese College Exam season. Every year in early June, China comes to a standstill as more than nine million high school students take the “Gaokao”. Literally translated as the “higher examination”, the Gaokao is an extremely important milestone for every Chinese kid, as the culmination of years of schooling, memorization and stress in the difficult national education system.

What if we could take on Gaokao, something that’s dreaded by the youth… A common enemy that could help strengthen the bond between Snickers and the young Chinese customers.

Snickers Vs. Gaokao – The big Snickers battle to take on exams.

We identified the top 3 exam enemies… We called them the Hunger monsters. And to beat these hunger monsters we recruited our 3 fighters – TF Boys, China’s leading boy band. Their leading singer was also writing the exam.

We leveraged on one of young China’s leading passions – Gaming and created gaming style videos where TF Boys battled the Hunger Monsters.

We created a H5 page on QZone, a platform popular amongst the teenagers. They could do daily check-ins, trap the hunger monsters and of course beat them to redeem limited edition merchandize.

We created social posts that lead students to unearth ‘Gaokao Battle Packs’ on jd.com and t-mall.com, the biggest online shopping destinations in the world.

We also created 3 different limited edition battle packs featuring different members of the boy band. Their fans could cheer them on even individually when they battled the hunger monsters.

Snickers brand linkage to the exam season uplifted from 4th most associated brand to 1st in the FMCG category. We successfully reached our KPI, with the level of co-mentions going from 4.4% to 46% during the campaign, way ahead of the second best linkage, which was Red Bull at 2.6%.

Teenagers engaged straight away with the campaign, with 57% of the 200 million video views coming from earned media.

We successfully reached our KPIs that were to regain positive off-take growth as well as value share for Q2 2016. Indeed, the campaign marked the beginning of a renewed growth for Snickers.

Furthermore, e-commerce contributed way beyond expectations to the business turn around. Snickers flagship store on T-Mall achieved USD 432 000 sales in only two days, which equals to Snickers past year’s sales value on this platform.