Situation

Swiggy with its fleet of 120,000+ delivery personnel across 100+ cities, 30 million orders per month and 3.3 billion dollar valuation is the poster-child of India’s online food-delivery market. Swiggy’s competitors like Uber Eats are fighting it for market share, especially among 18-35 y/olds. Brands understand that their relationship with this age cohort is critical to long-term growth. Its never been more important for Swiggy to be the preferred choice for an increasingly hard-to-reach target.

Brief

A typical customer orders from Swiggy twice a week and it is one among the many brands they think about when they're hungry. Create an idea that drives brand engagement and evoke hunger using social media.

Objectives

Increase preference of Brand Swiggy among its core user-base (18-35 y/olds)

Increase engagement with Swiggy’s online community through a one-of-a-kind experience

Increase fan-base on Instagram

Create memorable experiences around the brand that aid visits to Swiggy

Swiggy’s Voice Of Hunger Challenge - Recreate hilarious food shapes using voice notes on Instagram, win a year's worth of food from Swiggy.

This December, Instagram launched the voice note feature in Direct Messages & unlike WhatsApp and other platforms, voice notes on Instagram created visual waveforms that closely resembled all kinds of food shapes – kebab skewers, pizzas, fish, birthday cakes, etc.

Participants had to show-case their creativity by capturing wacky sounds from various sources and ever so often, they went overboard. Think cats. Think pressure-cookers. Think motor cycles.

An entire eco-system of social activity was created around the challenge. Other brands started participating. Restaurants printed voice hacks on order deliveries. How-to videos did the rounds on social. Swiggy then converted winning sounds into hilarious coupon codes for a year’s worth of food. Who knew beautiful looking food could be created by hilarious voice notes?

In a discount friendly & price sensitive category like food delivery, there is frequent shift in loyalty between platforms. The primary audience (21-35 y/o, urban) is also an internet-first one: the quickest to adopt new social platform features. If we wanted to communicate with this age cohort, we had to get creative with their favourite platforms.

But then again, 67% of consumer interaction on social media are customer service related. Instagram’s comparatively friendlier personality combined with the direct element of messaging was an ideal combination for the brand to ease into fun customer engagement, atypical to usual social media.

With voice notes, we noticed that Instagram inbox features could also be hacked to hold amusing direct conversations – a welcome change. The intention was for a collaborative interaction & the idea of using wacky sounds to create even wackier food shapes matched Swiggy’s personality.

Bluueeblaahhhbleehhhblueeblahblehblue: an odd gibberish tweet from one of India’s biggest brands.

While Twitter-verse was trolling us for our tweet, little did they know that they were helping launch our biggest social media campaign ever. Fans were soon introduced to five films featuring hilariously innovative ways to get their voice-notes to resemble food shapes & win a year’s worth of food.

Over 100 Comedians, musicians, rappers, actors and RJs formed the core team of influencers driving voice and sound experiments for the campaign. Behind-the-scene videos were instrumental in upping the crazy, resulting in even more UGC and traffic to Swiggy’s handle. We featured unique creations and replied in real-time with either text or voice. Reaction & making-of videos went live from Swiggy HQ through unique partnerships with popular radio stations like BigFM, and young publishers like Scoopwhoop.

All this, while Instagram blocked us 11 times giving the campaign an unexpected PR-push.

The campaign generated 16 million+ Social Impressions and over 150,000 voice notes filled our inbox.

During that time, Swiggy witnessed a 40% rise in Instagram followers resulting in over 40,000+ new 18-35 y/olds joining our Instagram community.

The nature of the campaign resulted in 1165% growth in brand interactions.

The brag-factor of creating a perfect voice note meant users organically ended up sharing their creations and as a result, Swiggy’s Instagram reach went up 7700%.

The campaign crossed borders, receiving entries from Italy, Japan, Thailand and Canada – countries Swiggy didn’t even deliver to.

We turned winning voice notes into hilarious coupon codes, giving users their ticket to a year's worth of free food!

Swiggy amassed a 2100% spike in traffic to its platform from Instagram.

A totally unintentional 24% average increase in orders for food resembling our most popular voice note creations.