Ion Water, the sub-brand of Pocari-Sweat, the leading sport drink brand in Japan, had faced the situation in need of blue-oceanic new market development to further growth in its competitive sports drink market. Through the market research, we found that a sauna experience, along with Japanese bathing culture, was getting popular, especially among business executives for its diverse positive effects on their productivity by lessening stresses and health improvements. We came to target those who are into the sauna movement – “saunners” so-called - to establish the Ion Water brand as “the drink for saunners”, and implemented holistic approach towards the market such as SNS campaigns, collaboration with the named sauna facility, launching user participation type campaign in collaboration with consumer-generated media for saunners, and so on.

Rather than trying to promote and introduce ion water directly into the sauna facility, the campaign targeted to cerebrate the sauna culture and drive sauna fans to recognize Ion Water as as a brand for sauna fans, and eventally the sauna facility falls into a situation that the facility cannot ignore the voice of its customer to introduce the Ion Water. In order to make the campaign work, we carefully designed the campaign very keen to attracting sauna fans, such as a campaign that took up the passion of the fans and collaboration with a facility called the mecca of sauna.

Referring to the annual sales data, it was found that sales are concentrated in the summer when more hydration is needed, and that a purchasing motivation is generated due to a sweating moment. Therefore, we decided to find and target sweating moments so that we could expect stable purchase amount not affected by seasonal factors. In addition, the client's market data shows that vending machines installed in the sauna facility are significantly more sold than those installed elsewhere, thus we hypothesized that the sauna facility functions as a powerful sales channel. The hypothesis was right, by implementing measures targeted at sauna fans, the Ion Water brand was established among sauna fans, creating a situation in which each sauna facility could not ignore it and made them eager to introduce Ion Water to their customers.

The camapaign developed goods that collaborated with Shikiji, a sacred place among sauna fans, and sent goods to 50 sauna-related influencers without prior notification, with a message from the daughter of Shikiji who is also an influencer. When a certain degree of engagement occurs on SNS through shares generated by those 50 sauna- related influencers, we launched a gift campaign that presents those Shikiji collaborated goods in a lottery by tweeting a love and passion to the sauna on Twitter. Campaign information was announced at 588 sauna facilities nationwide. In addition, we also collaborated with the sauna information media, and conduct multiple campaigns that Ion Water is presented in a lottery when users post a history of visited saunas. Brought over 80,000 sauna experience posts and 12,800 Twitter posts.

The effect of the campaign was phenomenal. After the implementation of the campaign, the number of sauna facilities that have introduced Ion Water has increased dramatically, from 61 to 595. Sales increased significantly due to an increase in sales channels, particularly in the target demographic, middle-aged male by 141%. Besides, after the campaign, Ion Water was officially approved as "the official sauna drink" by Japan Spa & Sauna association. In addition, since the implementation of the campaign, saunas have become a big trend in Japan as it frequently featured on various news media, even TV drama series that set saunas as its main theme was created and aired on the national TV network. Those trends were never seen before the campaign and none of the campaigns were featured before ours, clearly showing that the campaign has greatly contributed to fostering domestic sauna trends.