Western food and beverage brands used to have it easy in China; consumers favored them simply because they were foreign. In the last few years, this dramatically changed with over 71% saying that they prefer to support local brands. To turn things around, Nestlé had to act to reinforce its image with consumers as the leader in the field of nutrition, health and wellness – the brand values that distinguish Nestlé from its local competitors.

At the same time, there was not much room for expensive image campaigns: Aggressive and big-spending local players had 12 -14x the paid media spend of Nestlé. Nestlé knew that traditional initiatives like image campaigns would not work in the face of the competition. Instead, it had to find uncommon, smart ways to make an impact. Tangible tech would turn out to be what helped the Nestlé corporate brand breakthrough in China.

Introducing the world’s first smart home nutrition assistant: XiaoAi.

The idea came to life in many forms:?

• As content in over 1,000,000 DingDong smart home devices that had already been sold on JD.com

• As a physical smart home device that was sold on JD.com

• As an asset in our PR event and paid media campaign about XiaoAi, which showcased Nestlé’s commitment to creating a healthier future.

We teamed up with China’s biggest smart home device developer: DingDong, who already had over 1,000,000 devices in the market. Alongside DingDong and Nestlé’s nutrition, health and wellness experts, we developed huge amounts of content that would answer the most frequently asked questions about nutrition, health and wellness.

Answers were given to questions such as:

• What kinds of breakfasts are nutritionally balanced??

• How much water should I drink on a daily basis?

• What are the pros and cons of drinking coffee?

This “knowledge” was uploaded into the cloud of all 1,000,000 already sold devices. When asking questions that were related to any of our answers, customers would hear the answer with our sound branding “provided by Nestlé” at the end of the answer.

Next, we developed a Nestlé packaged and branded edition of the device, called “XiaoAi”, that was sold on JD.com. The device was activated by using saying “Nestlé Nestlé” instead of “DingDong DingDong”. When launching XiaoAi on JD.com, we invited press from across China to our big launch event. Being the first food & beverage company treading new ground in AI, we secured media coverage in mainstream media such as China Daily, tech magazines and food & beverage related media.

Additionally, we introduced XiaoAi to a wider audience through our OTV.