In Japan, only women give gifts to men on Valentine’s Day, and giving Godiva is considered premium and polite. This posed a problem, because Valentine’s Day had become ritualized and rather formal, lacking emotion and romance.

While Godiva is well-known and respected, consumers had lost the meaning of the love and emotion the brand was meant to represent. In addition, it is not common to see overt physical displays of affection in public places, where kissing or even hugging is not as common a greeting as it is in the West. For Valentine’s Day 2013, Godiva wanted to bring emotion back to the act of giving, and encourage women to express their love more openly and freely, both physically and online.

The thought process behind the campaign is simple: Make the participation component irresistible. It breaks through the cultural status quo of Valentine gift giving in Japan in a playful way and encourages people to actively participate in the real world and online. There was an opportunity to inject some unexpected emotional value into Valentine’s Day by asking women to express their feelings in a physical way, by hugging the mannequin in public and sharing their experience via social media. This campaign reflected the emotional brand values Godiva wanted to achieve and impacted popular culture in a fun and unusual way.

- Over 6,300 women hugged the dummy, far exceeding the target of 600, with over 60% of participants sharing their experience online.

- Awareness of Godiva LOVE&HUG Facebook was astounding: an engagement rate of 130%, 6x the amount of other Food & Beverages pages.

- 34,000 users created and shared an online story, resulting in 3.5m unique Facebook users viewing content.

- Despite only being a 3 week campaign, we received over 7,000 Facebook Likes, with over 5,000 Google search results.

- The press loved Godiva LOVE&HUG too, with high rating TV shows, web news and blogs picking up the Love & Hug story, earning $1.5m in unpaid media exposure.

- Sales increased by 8.5% despite a stagnant market.