Recruiting Brand Advocates : Part 1: Kellogg's Krave

Kellogg's have recently launched a new teen-target breakfast cereal called Krave, grain-based puffs full of hazelnutty chocolatey filling. One serving will give you 10% of your RDA of sugar in one hit. Your dentist and your waistline might not like it but who cares when you are 14....

Everyone knows that teens are hyper-connected, living their lives online, avid sharers and creators of content be it a constant stream of Facebook status updates or videos and photos cataloguing their lives.  The Kellogg's marketing team have therefore very smartly tapped into this with an attempt to harness this very natural behaviour to good effect and broaden influential peer to peer reach for the brand.

How?  By creating the Choc Exchange.  Run across the Krave website and a brand page on Facebook, inter-connected via Facebook Connect.

The mechanic?

1) Create a currency  (choc chunks) earned via brand advocacy in social spaces and participation in brand activities.

2) Create a range of time-limited appealing prizes that you can bid for using your choc chunks
(there's currently a very groovy micro Muvi camcorder up for auction, but I've seen gig tickets and all sorts over the last week or so)

3) Further incentivise you to recruit your mates as additional advocates by facilitating sharing, pooling or donation of chunks.  Nothing worse than being outbid cos you are a few chunks short when your mate can spare a few hundred......

Completing different tasks gains you different number of points.  I'd love to know who came up with the figures and how though.  Completing a photo task will gain you 9867 chunks.  Attempting to recruit a friend on Facebook will earn you 1854 chunks and if they accept you'll get an additional 3894. Nice round numbers. Not. Maybe it's a GCSE Maths improvement exercise at the same time.  As I write this the Muvi camcorder has a highest bid of 51164 chunks against it. Some ball park maths equates that to using a sign up bonus of 1400 chunks, plus another one for staying in the programme for another week (free points per week for staying on board, smart thinking again), completing a photo task, and recruiting 7 of your mates on Facebook and you are more or less there!

Currently the fan base on Fasebook stands at 42,348.  Good or bad?

As with many of these things, hard to say yay or nay to that, I've not seen any additional specific traffic driving activity on Facebook, but I'm out of target audience demographic by just a smudge(!).  It feels like a pretty robust number to me, and because their ongoing interaction with the brand means the message is being spread around Facebook (and beyond) and it earns points, and points mean prizes, that feels like a brand:consumer win win to me. Brand mentions and messages being diffused by the consumer for little over and above the norm effort, in return for the chance to win some cool stuff.  Smart: Creating OTT (Opportunities to talk), your consumers are your new GRP's.  A few gadgets and tickets, and some social media admin time are going to cost the marketing budget a lot less than lots of traditional media spend.

Nice to see the website and Facebook working hard together to drive traffic for the sampling campaign too:  you can check if / when the sampling team are coming to a place near you, and if you go, get one, take part and then tag yourself in a photo taken at the sampling event you are already more chunks in credit.

There's also been TV advertising with a drive to site URL on the end, and there's clearly been some sort of MSN (probably display ad) activity (which I missed, but which also makes a huge amount of sense given the number of teens that use MSN IM avidly and log in every day) because the Krave team were tweeting about it.

We'll award them some marks for search - they have bought Krave as a paid search term but no gold stars as they didn't think beyond the obvious...

Search for chocolate cereal and Nestle's Shreddies Facebook page wins on paid search and Nestle Nesquick or Kellogg's own Frosties beat them to natural results.  I'd like to think that was a Kellogg's portfolio management decision but I'd bet £5 it wasn't. There are still far too many clients who've got their head around category management instore but not in digital spaces.

Overall on the surface it seems like a well thought out and well executed campaign derived from some smart insight about the behaviour of the target audience.  Good stuff. Nice to see.  I wiill keep my eyes peeled for any results releases and will be interested to see whether they've been smart enough to plan beyond the launch phase, when the auctions finish mid-May.  Having rustled up that many fans it would be sense-less not to have an ongoing communications strategy to continue to engage with them.

Top of my current smart ongoing conversation strategies are Walkers Crisps who have done a good job (IMHO) leveraging the significant momentum gained during the "Do us a flavour" campaign last year, and are building that at the minute with an amplification of the flavour-voting idea to include 15 new limited edition flavours, but more on that another day.

Post script:
Friday 16th April: Just saw this Krave polling ad on Facebook's home page. Not sure how long it's been running but they seem to have added another 3k fans since Wednesday. I love the polling ads, makes it hard to resist clicking when someone asks you a question.  Hot air ballooning is the current vote leader.