April 6, 2010
Another Easter over and once again too much chocolate has been consumed in my household! Along with Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and other seasonal celebrations, Easter is a key time for brands to invest in their marketing activities.
With an increasing number of social media, mobile and other digital platforms available to talk to potential chocoholics, I decided to look at what a few of the main chocolate brands did this year in digital, and how successful they were.
Lindt chose to make its first foray into the digital space with an online game fronted by the famous Gold Bunny. A bit too simple but nonetheless cute, the hunt for the gold bunny game challenges you to find six golden bunnies to be in with a chance of winning a 1kg chocolate gold bunny. Tabs encourage you to share the game with friends and sign up for the Lindt newsletter.
Although Lindt has a following of nearly 500,000 fans on the Lindt Facebook page, there doesn’t seem to be a single link to the game posted in the run-up to Easter. Surely this would have been one of the best ways to encourage proven fans of the brand to shout about and share the game? I’d be interested to hear how Lindt promoted this other than via the main website and how many people played it.
Thorntons choose to centre its Easter activity on a dancing elves style application hosted on the brand’s Facebook page. Once fans have created their Boogie Bunnies video, they can choose to supply their email address to enter a prize draw to win a year’s supply of chocolate. In addition to the Boogie Bunnies game, Thorntons posted regular Facebook updates in the lead-up to Easter offering vouchers, discounts and various chocolate related prizes.
Despite having a fun application and good interaction with fans on Facebook, I’d question the reach of this campaign. The Thorntons Facebook page only has 3,438 fans and they don’t appear to promote Boogie Bunnies on the Thorntons website. A quick Google search for ‘Boogie Bunnies’ also brings up very little related coverage or links. It seems a shame that Thorntons didn’t capitalise more on this asset for Easter with some blog seeding etc.
Cadbury’s is a favourite of mine when it comes to Easter and I always look forward to the Creme Egg ads. There are multiple elements to the Creme Egg digital offering for Easter 2010. A mini-site ‘Creme Egg Goo’ contains a comic-strip style animation, various interactive games, videos of the advertising campaign and lots more.
Taking their innovative ideas to the mobile space, Cadbury also released a ‘Splat-plication’ for the iPhone – an app which lets you goo you own Creme Eggs.
With one-click sharing via Facebook and Twitter as well as an option to register for updates, Cadbury have successfully integrated fun and dynamic content with all of their social media estates to ensure that the Creme Egg brand gains some great word of mouth within the right communities over Easter.
This brief analysis shows the importance of an integrated approach to digital campaigns. The web is a hugely crowded space and it’s no longer enough to just have great content. Brands need to utilise all of the assets they have available and social media is an great way to promote and share their content.