How Carambar generated a full year of communication for free

With one billion candy bars sold every year, Carambar is an institution in France, where it has reached iconic status, because of its famous jokes.

The jokes, printed in the inside of the candy wrappers, are so typical that they have become an entire sub-category of French humor.

For a couple of years, the brand has been losing its iconic edge – and its market share. Our objective was to reverse this trend: improve the share of market, sales and the brand’s image – all this with limited media investment.

So, to remind an entire nation why they love Carambar, we played the first social-media-powered joke… on an entire country.

Pretexting studies that indicated an increasing worry of parents for their kid’s education, we announced that Carambar would replace its iconic jokes with math, grammar and geography exercises.

It put the entire nation in an uproar, which remembered why and how much they love Carambar – and how sad a world without their jokes would be.

With nothing but a PR kit sent to 100 influencers, we got all the main national media covering the story. In a typical French way, people that used to criticize the quality of Carambar jokes now started petitioning to defend them, as if they were endangered species…

Less than a week later, the giant prank ended up, when we posted a video called #itwasajoke. The video revealed the planning and the making of the nationwide hoax, as seen from backstage. And it underlined Carambar’s commitment to keep entertaining France with its goofy jokes.

In only 5 days, we created one of the most successful buzz campaigns ever done in France . We reached 70% of French families and generated the equivalent of a full year of communication … without a penny invested in media. We also revitalized the brand equity, which translated into record-breaking sales, after the campaign (+20%), but also for the entire year (+10%) .