People associate Lemonaid products with a lot of good things. Values that one likes to adorn oneself with. That's what Lidl thought, too. In the summer of 2018, Lidl simply launched a copy of Lemonaid on the market. Same look – completely different ingredients. No organic, no fair trade, instead lots of sugar, colorings and acidifiers. And the main ingredient was still missing: the good cause. A lawsuit against Europe's largest food discounter with a gross turnover of almost 24 billion euros a year? Far too expensive and hopeless. An appeal to morality and custom is needed.

Lidl copies Lemonaid. Instead of just complaining about this audacious copy Lemonaid is taking advantage of it. The copy serves as a hook for communicate effectively Lemonaid’s brand story to a wide audience.

Lemonaid writes an open letter to the Lidl CEO Jesper Hoyer. At the same time, a high-coverage medium gets the information exclusively. In addition to the letter, Lemonaid launches a social media campaign with catchy images.

Lemonaid sends the open letter to Lidl CEO Jesper Hoyer. At the same time, the popular German magazine Stern receives the letter exclusively. The magazine investigates thoroughly and asks Lidl for an official statement. As Lidl doesn’t respond in the given time, the article goes online and Lemonaid starts its social media campaign.

Countless people joined immediately Lemonaids fight “David against Goliath”. Lemonaid´s brand story is shared a thousand times and reaches more than 7 billion media impressions in only three days. But the more important thing: Lidl removes its poor imitation from the shelves. Fighting back has an impact.

Moreover, you could measure the huge impact of the campaign on the general awareness for the actually quite small brand Lemonaid from its very beginning. Just the initial facebook post reached 179,400 people and over 8,000 clicks on Lemonaid’s website. The number of website users in general rised up to10,000 users at day one of the campaign. For comparison: The figures were still close to zero only one day before. The blog article on the issue got nearly 18,000 page views during the first days of the campaign.