Flavor Face Off:  2016 DMA Echo Award Winner - Best Use of Social Media

Sparkling Ice’s loyal base continues to be the starting point for much of the marketing activity for the brand.  The fans LOVE to share their favorite flavors, share where they find new ones, and their obsession over the product in general. And more importantly, they love to recognized by the brand when they do. So we asked, “Could that loyalty be harnessed, through social media, using the prospect of ‘fame-preciation’, to move the needle on sales? 

Yes, it can.  Social can move cases. 

The Flavor Face Off program idea was simple:  Reward the fans for what they already do so well,and unleash all that love to build trial and awareness, organically. The incentive?  Getting your face on the bottle for the ultimate bragging rights and entire years’ worth of Sparkling Ice. By giving them the chance to be the face of their favorite flavor, we would galvanize the Sparkling Ice fan base to compete against each other to see who was truly the biggest fan. 

All that customers had to do was show off their love for Sparkling Ice.  That’s it.  Every time they posted, registrants earned points towards the ultimate prize.

Flavor Face Off harnessed our consumer’s love of self-expression through social media.  By targeting our biggest fans and followers, we were able to activate them as content creators throughout the campaign as our most authentic source of pictures and videos with the Sparkling Ice product as a native part of the contest. 

The campaign was a success because of the strong value exchange provided between the brand and the consumer – which focused on celebrating and re-distributing the best content from Sparkling Ice fans - combined with awareness-driving paid media and in-store activations to broaden the overall campaign reach.

RESULTS

Javelin's Analytics team reviewed several data related to Sparkling Ice Flavor Face Off promotion during Summer 2015 and quantified the impact of social media activity on sales.

The data included content posted on owned media properties of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SparklinIce.com and Flavorfaceoff.com, as well as user-generated content related to a sweepstakes promoting the contest.  Additionally, the analysis added data activity from registrations at SparklingIce.com and overall sales volume. 

Every visit to the website generated:

·      over $15.00 in sales

·      a positive and strong correlation (53%) between website visits and registration

·      a 60% correlation between a user generated posts and SparklinIce sales

Overall the campaign generated:

·      83% of participants connected at least one social account

·      442,182 pieces of user generated content

·      Traffic to SparklingICE.com 500% higher during the campaign

SIGNIFICANCE OF CAMPAIGN

By using social media to increase buy rate, measurably impacting Sparkling Ice sales volume by combining a love for the brand with our target audience’s love for self-expression – we were able to not only positively impact brand perception and generate some great posts, but move product. 

Social media is no longer an addendum to marketing efforts – but rather the starting point.  The targeting capabilities of Facebook and other social platforms are unparalleled and well documented – but using a social media campaign to drive bottom line sales is soon to be an expected metric.

The success of Flavor Face Off has brought a welcome shift in marketing dollars from traditional advertising to digital and social for Sparkling ICE.  Flavor Face Off is now the new benchmark for the brand when looking to leverage digital marketing and media to impact case volume while driving invaluable customer engagement.