Have a Break! How Kit Kat’s creative marketing keeps their slogan fresh
Thursday: Gorillas of Guerilla Marketing
One of the greatest things you can get from Guerrilla Marketing is the interaction you gain with your target audience.
Aside from that, it’s exciting, unconventional, and not necessarily expensive.
It allows you to take on challenges in a creative and interesting way!
As an independent professional, learning from these campaigns will help you to think creatively for your brand, especially if you want to have variety in your marketing strategies.
A lot of Guerrilla Marketing campaigns can be searched online, and they exist to inspire you!
Keep reading to learn how this chocolate wafer brand’s creative campaigns helped keep their slogan fresh.
I hope you find this week’s company spotlight interesting and fun.
Miles Everson
CEO, MBO Partners
Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute
Wow… it’s been quite a week for everyone.
A lot of people experience grinding work weeks with all sorts of obstacles and challenges in their way.
Fortunately, there’s one company that acknowledges the struggles of everyday life…
Kit Kat.
Instead of pushing through a hard week without stopping, Kit Kat encourages consumers to “Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat.”
This slogan has been a forerunner in successful marketing for years. Once Kit Kat started building their marketing campaigns around it, they were able to elevate their brand!
It helped turn Kit Kat into a household name, becoming one of the world’s most popular snacks.
The best part about the slogan is its versatility and relatability. It enables different ways to market the product to different kinds of people. They also focused on what the customer already loved about the wafer bar: its look, its taste, and the “breaking” sound.
Among these campaigns was a successful and creative foray into guerrilla marketing by introducing various versions of their specially branded benches.
In 2014, they installed metal benches on billboards and offered a challenge to people who sit on it for a certain amount of time to get a chance to win a free Google Nexus 7 tablet.
The campaign was done in the cities of Amsterdam and Utrecht in the Netherlands, and was successful in promoting Kit Kat and the Nexus 7 (which used an operating system named after the candy bar itself).
In 2016, Kit Kat launched a guerilla marketing campaign in the Philippines.
For their campaign in the Philippines, they placed 500 specially-designed Kit Kat Breaker benches in different cities. They designed these benches to look like the famous wafer bar.
These benches were also strategically placed in one of the busiest districts in the country to attract attention and generate more buzz.
Other than looking like the iconic wafer bars, some benches were fitted with some special functions and accessories. These included benches with piano keys and guitars, an inflatable bench, a seesaw bench, and even one placed on top of a rock climbing wall!
Along with having them placed in key locations, people can find these benches by visiting the KitKat.ph website or by using the navigation app, Waze.
The strategic placement of the benches were greatly beneficial as more people were able to sit and interact with them. This led to a large number of users sharing pictures and videos of the benches on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, greatly spreading the word to fellow users.
Overall, the campaign was a viral success, generating over 6.9 million views on Facebook and YouTube, along with 262 million impressions across various social media platforms.
The campaign also won a number of advertising awards as well, winning bronze in the 2016 Warc Prize for Asian Strategy, a Bronze Spike in Spikes Asia, and 3 medals (1 silver, 2 bronze) at the 2016 Asian Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy (AMES) Awards.
Over the years, Kit Kat has been able to make use of their famous slogan to create some of the most creative marketing campaigns around.
They have been able to keep their campaigns fresh, which greatly strengthens their branding and keep Kit Kat as one of the best-selling wafer bars worldwide.
Their guerrilla marketing campaigns allow them to catch people’s attention and create conversations across digital platforms and through word-of-mouth.
If you’re looking to get your brand out there through unconventional means, following Kit Kat’s approach to guerrilla marketing might just be what you need!
Hope you’ve found this week’s guerrilla marketing insight interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next Thursday’s Gorillas of Guerrilla!
