The INSIGHT that drove our idea and strategy

For years, South Africa was isolated through embargoes and suffered massive delays before experiencing what the rest of the world had to offer.

As a result, we hate waiting for things.

So, when we launched Dunkin’ Donuts - a brand the rest of the world had had forever - we didn’t want to keep South Africa waiting.

We gave South Africans the power to bring the launch of Dunkin’ Donuts sooner through challenges. When South Africans engaged with the challenges, they directly moved the launch sooner.

With a limited budget this campaign was only ever going to succeed through a clever media approach. Two elements helped pull the campaign together.

1. KFM Radio and local morning deejay Ryan 'o Connor. Kfm drove the challenges everyday, used their activation team on the ground to interact with the studio and provide content on challenges that we could then distribute back through KFM and Dunkin Channels

2. DDPD - Dunkin' - Donuts Police. Police and Donuts! We created a quirky police department that we could use to facilitate the activities and would be a great source of viral content that we desperately needed.

The two elements then worked in tandem as we arrested influencers, including Ryan for drinking bad coffee - we filmed and shared this wonderful content.

Timeline

Challenges 26 Sep 2016 - 8 Oct 2016

Date forward announcement - 8-12 Oct 2016

Store opens 13 October 2016

Results

South Africa loved Dunkin', the DDPD and the challengeswesetthem.

They responded emphatically

Dunkin’ launched 8 days early.

KFM Radio had a collective reach of 402000 on social posts

•Incredibly almost 100 000 donuts were sold over launch weekend

•This opening broke the global Dunkin’ record with a longest launch queue ever globally-26hours

•The store had launch queues for 3 weeks

•We were the 2nd highest trending Google search nationally for local store launch

•Only $109k spent on media with $356k (ROI 3,2:1) in media value and $400k in earned media (ROI 38).

•45% of total impressions were organic

Given the low spend and the high pressure on a successful launch the results speak for themselves. A large part of the success was tapping into a very well known truth about SA culture and leverage this cleverly to drive campaign engagement and success for the brand.