Insight
Established candy and confectionary brands have a stranglehold on the Swedish market and new brands, even from traditional candy makers, have a tough time entering the market. Ahlgrens bilar (“Ahlgren’s cars”) is one of Sweden’s oldest candy brands and built alongside the strong connection that Swedes have with automobiles. Its newest candy is called The Fruit Hatchback but was faced with intense competition and increased price pressure from the recent market recession, making the goal of standing out from the crowd even tougher.
Starcom MediaVest's task was to create a pre-launch campaign that garnered enough interest to gain the new flavour a foothold in the stores and make it competitive in the fiercely contested and traditionally conservative Swedish candy market. Swedes like to stick with what they know, and while they know cars, they don’t know what a Fruit Hatchback is. The challenge was how to create buzz and involvement around a low interest product with a very limited budget – SEK 1,000,000 ($156,000) including production costs.
Strategy
Generations of Swedes have taken great pride in the fact that a small country like Sweden has produced two world-class car manufacturers: Saab and Volvo. But with the former bankrupt and the latter sold to China, the national automotive ego had taken a bit of a battering in the 2000s. Not only that but gearheads’ favorite program, “Trafikmagasinet” (“Traffic Magazine”; equivalent of Top Gear), went off the air as its creator, Carl-Ingemar Perstad and its network faced a series of infamous legal and budget woes.
With Swede’s automobile pride at its lowest point, Starcom wondered if it could give them a little bit of good news and excitement. Starcom knew it couldn’t market Fruit Hatchback as just another new flavor of a well-known sweet. Which got them thinking… What if it could inject some good news (and humour) into the Swede’s dismal automotive sector, by introducing a new Swedish car! It wanted to sell the Fruit Hatchback, not as a candy, but as a new, “real” car.
Execution
When “Trafikmagasinet” went off the air, its finale was so abrupt that fans received no closure and created a cult following that only grew as time went by. The idea was to bring the format, the host and the passion back to Swedish consumers by launching the updated “Bilmagasinet” (the Car Magazine) and have Mr. Perstad “leak” the news of a new Swedish car – The Fruit Hatchback.
As the first of four shows aired on YouTube, the speculation from Twitter and blogs like automotorsport.se and vk.se immediately started as to what this new vehicle could be. Simultaneously they recruited “test drivers” for the new car via Facebook and even arranged for an official unveiling of the “Fruit Hatchback” at the Stockholm Lifestyle Motor Show! And finally news spread about the new Swedish car – Fruit Hatchback – on digital screens in all central stations in Sweden.
Results
The car magazine topped the ‘Unruly Viral Chart Sweden’ in February 2013 and got 524,000 views on YouTube – remarkable for a country as small as Sweden. The limited test driver spots (10,000) were quickly booked with each driver rewarded with a sample bag.
As the fourth part of “Bilmagasinet” aired, and the cat was out of the bag, Ahlgrens bilar’s Facebook page became one of Sweden’s fastest growing, with a fan base growth of 65%. As the campaign culminated, Ahlgrens bilar became the most talked about fast moving consumable brand on Swedish Facebook and achieved a “talking about this” percentage of an astonishing 31% - a great measure of how deeply involved people became in the campaign.
The true success of this campaign however was shown when the subsequent store introduction surpassed any previous Ahlgrens introduction. Fruit Hatchback has become the third most popular candy in Swedish service stores and has taken the number six spot in grocery stores.
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