Nestlé KitKat Gained 25 Million Users On Twitter By Leveraging Social Media Marketing

About Nestlé KitKat

KitKat, a chocolate-covered wafer biscuit bar confection, was originally created by Rowntree’s of York, England. The product’s earlier official title was “Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp” and it was renamed as”KitKat Chocolate Crisp” in 1937. KitKat became successful in the United Kingdom and in 1940’s, the company started exporting its products to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland.

When Nestlé, a leading multinational company, acquired Rowntree in 1988, KitKat brand became a part of Nestle’s worldwide group with presence in all major areas except in the US.  KitKat is now Nestlé’s leading confectionery brand and the favourite chocolate biscuit bar. KitKat bars are now manufactured in Brazil, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Russia, Japan, China, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Bulgaria by Nestlé. In the United States, the KitKat bars are produced under license by The Hershey Company due to prior licensing agreement that Nestlé had with Rowntree when Nestlé bought out this company. Nestlé claims that KitKat contains no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives and is a perfect snack to be included in a balanced diet.

The first KitKat advertisement was aired on TV in 1957 and the first colour advertisement was aired in 1967. KitKat brand’s popular advertising slogans such as the ‘Dancing Panda’ and the ‘Have a Break’ were introduced in 1987 and in 1990, respectively.

KitKat bar consists of three layered wafer fingers with its outer layer covered by chocolate. Each bar has two or four fingers and the larger size KitKat Chunky is a single block with three sections in it. KitKat brand became popular when it came out with one of its most memorable slogan – Have a break, Have a Kitkat. This brand has made a strong presence on Twitter network with its campaign #RichBreak.

When the Kitkat brand gained popularity, chocolate turned out to be a social snack among different age group of people from different parts of the world. KitKat is the first chocolate brand that gained a global following. Even after many decades of its existence, KitKat continues to be a global obsession. Google announced in 2013 that its new Android operating system would be known as “KitKat”. This shows the kind of brand awareness KitKat enjoys worldwide.

Nestlé KitKat ‘s Business Objectives

Twitter is widely used by corporate India in brand building and product awareness campaign because Twitter is more interactive so we get a response quicker than from any other social media channels. KitKat received tremendous response from the participants and fulfill the brand objective.

KitKat India organized a #RickBreak campaign contest in July 2014 for the first time. The second #RickBreak campaign started on 04^th August 2014 from 10 am and continued till 6 pm. In this campaign, a few hours before the scheduled time, participants were invited via Twitter and the contest details were shared to them.

The fundamental objective of this campaign was to spread awareness about the brand among all age group people in India via Twitter. This campaign’s main focus was to leverage on its popular brand slogan “Have a break. Have a KitKat.”

Approach / Strategy Adopted By Nestlé KitKat

In this contest, Nestlé formed a tie-up with Flipkart to reward winners of the contest. To participate in this content, Twitter users have to follow the KitKat India handle and include #RichBreak hashtag for every entry they make in the contest. Participants were asked so many witty questions by the KitKat and asked the participants to post their spontaneous entry contest. Questions asked by KitKat go something like this.

“When KITKAT went to Goa to take a #RichBreak, what did one finger say to the other?

“When a two of us took this #RichBreak, what did one KITKAT finger say to the other?

6 participants were selected as winners based on their entries and each one of them was rewarded with a Flipkart.com shopping voucher worth Rs. 1000. The grand prize offered in this contest was a trip to Goa. The contest was appealed to a large number of Twitter users, so the brand received a good response from all its participants. Contestants promoted the hashtag on Twitter and used this golden opportunity to show their creativity by answering questions asked during the campaign and win rewards.

KitKat received huge awareness through this campaign. Look at the graphs generated with the help of Talwalker’s new social media monitoring tool.

Here we can see that participant count has gone up consistently since the contest began on 04^th August due to the participation of many influencers. Interestingly, it is noticed that the men participated more actively in this contest compared to females, though both men and women crave for chocolates. Out of the total number of participants 64.4% were men against the rest of total 35.6%  were women. Studies show that women’s crave for chocolates is more than that of men and this campaign received an absolute reverse result which was unexpected. It appears like the grand prize offered in this contest-a trip to Goa- was the major attraction for men at large and received more participation from them. Influencers played a major role in this campaign and added tremendous value to its success.

Results Achieved By Nestlé KitKat

So many questions were asked by KitKat and a lot of tweets were poured by the participants. The most witty and spontaneous answers has won the contest and rewarded. This campaign was able to reach around 25 million Twitter users and the total number of tweets received with the hashtag #Rickbreak has crossed 5500 mark.

Learnings

KitKat succeeded in involving a large section of people in this campaign. A large number of men took part in this contest than women participants, despite the fact that women relish chocolate quite often than men. This case study shows that a campaign which display strong and catchy slogans would invite more participation from people. Besides this, offering rewards to the best entries will enhance the possibilities of getting more involvement from people. This case study also shows that the kind of rewards offered to winners would play a crucial role in deciding the demographic distribution of participants.

Image Source: Google