Lays do us a flavour

Insight

OMD's challenge was to create an emotional connection and commitment to the Lay's brand with Lay's target of 25-34 year olds, where they were losing penetration. The agency knew they had to engage the target beyond a campaign, in a way that would bring real value and currency to this younger generation.

3 key insights provided foundation for their communication:

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America's love affair with Lay's is long-standing: Lay's has been America's favourite potato chip for decades. It is a truly iconic brand that has been a central part of the US culture. It had the 'right' to engage the masses in a large scale consumer engagement effort.

Everybody loved it but younger snackers weren't connecting with it: However, competition was nipping at Lay's heels, and the brand wasn't emotionally connecting with the younger generation. The target needed a reason to stop and take notice of Lay's, a reason to engage with the brand. Lay's had to become relevant to them through a compelling and meaningful experience that felt "worth their time."

Elevating a consumer promotion to an engagement phenomenon: The "Do Us A Flavour" promotion was executed in global markets with much success, but not in several years. This programme needed to be launched in a fresh way, a way that would engage their target through a meaningful experience that would give them a reason to emotionally connect to the Lay's brand, and leverage social influence and personal relevance to reinvent the promotion.

Strategy

Lay's immersed themselves in the world of their consumers and identified 3 key drivers of American culture that were largely influenced by Millennials (who represent a significant portion of our 25-34 target):

Desire for self-expression - No longer does a one-size-fits-all approach work. A strong sense of individuality and need to express it as a bigger sense of self is of growing importance to Americans today.

Desire for authenticity - Brands no longer make brands, people make brands. The strongest endorsement doesn't come from industry experts but instead from our social circle; real experiences over claims, and real people.

Desire for recognition - Today, Americans want to be part of the cultural conversation and believe that their opinions are worth being heard. Consumers know that now, more than ever, they have the ability to make a real-time impact on the world around them and they crave recognition.

Armed with true insight about its consumers' relationships with brands and with one another, Lay's embarked on a Social Participation strategy, and specifically Facebook, as the platform for DUAF reinvention.

The brand tapped into their target's desire to create, to share and to get recognized, and social media's ability to drive that. In their world - social, digital and personal- Lay's could show them (not just tell them) that their voice mattered to the brand. Lay's needed to become the brand that engaged them and gave them a platform to create and be recognized in their own, unique, individual way.

Execution

Reinventing DUAF and Making it Social

OMD tapped into Lay's snackers' social world and asked them to come up with the next great Lay's potato chip flavour. Dream it up, name it, share it and tell us about it. We will pick three to make and ask America to vote. The winner gets instant fame in the snack aisle, a whole lot of bragging rights and... potentially one million bucks or 1% of their winning flavour's sales.

To drive meaningful participation, OMD created an easy-to-use Facebook application that was completely centred around the user and their circle of friends, and gave them something worth sharing.

After all, if you see that your friend is doing something, you're much more likely to do it yourself.

The agency made submitting a new flavour as quick, simple and social as possible - a 3-step process that took less than a minute. Name the flavour, potential ingredients and inspiration, and at the end of the process they gave people a brilliant way to show off their new flavour creation - an image of their own personalized Lay's bag complete with customized food photography.

People who needed a little extra inspiration could get help from "Chef Symon's Flavourizer" - an innovative way to get flavour suggestions based on their social profile.

Once a flavour was created, the campaign gave people the tools to easily show off their new Lay's flavour, and added an "I'd Eat That" button so users could easily broadcast to the world the flavours they would eat.

Results

The programme had a positive impact on sales, on engagement, and was the most successful Do Us A Flavour in history, with over 3.62 million flavour submissions in 12 weeks, blowing away Lay's original goal of 1.3mm!!!

The results on sales were huge:

a +1% increase in HH penetration, and a +2% increase in HH Penetration among the target audience, Millennials. Lay's is a $2.8BN business in the US, so this is huge! This was particularly amazing since Lay's had had declining penetration for the last 6 years, to prove they could reverse the trend.

Lay's proved social media works!

Facebook media and search were the second highest growth drivers with 2.2% of growth attributed to digital spend, proving out the effectiveness of social media in driving purchase and sales!

The results on reach were incredibly strong and engagement blew the brand away!

• Over 1.2 million new US Facebook fans were added during the DUAF campaign
• The Lay's Facebook page has had high growth among key demographics: 25-34 and 35-44 year olds
• US Engagement with the Lay's Facebook Page has increased 4500% year over year
• The Lay's Facebook page averaged 25K people per day talking about it