Nestle Cremora is one of South Africa’s best loved coffee creamers – it always has been since it’s iconic ad in the 80’s where it’s catchphrase “it’s not inside, it’s on top” had become a part of the national vocabulary.

The problem was that the brand had become stuck in a category-wide stalemate – using the same above-the-line media to speak to an older, conventional market. We needed to be distinctive to gain a new market with a new media approach.

To command a premium, we needed to amplify our emotional differentiation and resonance to recruit a younger, aspirational market by positioning the brand as more modern and relevant.

We remade our iconic ad (catch-phrase included) with multiple iterations to better reflect a modern, multidimensional South Africa – raising the curtain to our new brand platform of #everyonesincluded.

We breathed new life into our old catchphrase with a TikiTok challenge. Now, our youth market could remake the iconic ad where they could be the lead role, reinventing our old catchphrase on a very new media, speaking the same language as our new market.

All while celebrating the joy of diversity along the way.

Through social listening, we learned that our youth was still using our iconic catchphrase from the 1980s, even though we hadn’t used that communication in over 2 decades. We also learned that inclusivity was one of the main factors that brought joy to our youth market. We also learned that the media channels we were using weren’t the ones our youth were using at all. We decided to reach and play in the same spaces they were.

We launched with a burst campaign – showcasing our content pieces with inclusion heroes. We started seeding the campaign with with a large group of influencers. They recreated our iconic ad on TikTok with provided audio overlay. The challenge then went viral to the public, who took it on organically and with gusto – sharing their remakes and tagging the brand.

We were first in category compared to our competitors, fighting hard as a creamer to take our place shoulder to shoulder with more youth-orientated brands with results of:

• 19 million views on TikTok

• Over 11 million impressions

• 250% increase of joyful sentiment

• 91% increase in brand mentions

• A whole lot of voices to be heard.

Because the campaign used new media, we grew the product exponentially in the minds and hearts of consumers, as well as a continuous and incremental growth in value share, penetration, brand equity, awareness, consideration and loyalty. All in all, a phenomenally impressive result in a growing economy where online engagement is a luxury.