Jul 06, 2016 Mobile Marketing 0 comment

BENGAY: Championing Movement in the Moment

BENGAY used mobile fitness technology to connect with active Millennials by rewarding them for physical achievements, thus creating awareness and brand affinity among younger consumers.

STRATEGY

Objective and Context:

BENGAY is a topical pain reliever that has been around for more than 100 years. As its core consumer base aged, the brand needed to attract a younger audience to ensure it stayed relevant. Prior to this campaign BENGAY was stigmatized as “the old man cream,” and the brand’s share was declining in a category that was growing. “Championing Movement in the Moment” sought to connect with active Millennials and position the brand as the “Champion of Movement” to drive purchase and loyalty.

Target Audience:

The intended audience included prospective BENGAY users during their fitness routines, particularly focusing on the elusive Millennial audience. Smartphones have become the preferred health and fitness device of today’s active athletic consumers. BENGAY knew mobile could not only reach its target audience at the precise moment of brand relevance, but help connect with consumers in ways not possible with other media.

Creative Strategy:

The brand participated in mobile moments of personal fitness achievements, providing small rewards (such as a free Amazon MP3 download) and words of encouragement for finishing a run or workout session. This strategy sought to position BENGAY as the solution to relieving post-workout soreness. This was BENGAY’s first mobile campaign, as BENGAY traditionally focused primarily on TV. In 2012, BENGAY tested an Xbox Kinect program to reach a younger audience and exemplify the brand as a champion of movement. But, with media budgets decreasing, the brand needed to find an innovative way to attract a younger audience while driving business at a more cost-effective scale.

EXECUTION

Overall Campaign Execution:

BENGAY allocated 4 percent of the overall media budget toward mobile, which is substantial as it was the brand’s first mobile campaign and viewed as a way to test media innovation. The brand partnered with a mobile rewards platform to reach over 1.8 million users of over 28 different smartphone workout apps. The partnership created a unique achievement-targeting model that allowed BENGAY to celebrate each user’s accomplishments within popular exercise apps like Map My Fitness, Endomondo, 7-Minute Workout, Simply Yoga, and 10K Trainer.

Mobile Execution:

For BENGAY, this approach enabled the brand to reach existing, highly relevant audience segments and be part of their “natural habitat,” rather than attempting to build up its own fitness audience or disrupt consumers mid-workout with conventional advertising tactics.

In just two months, the campaign delivered more than 1.8 million BENGAY-branded congratulatory messages and over 100,000 reward redemptions — over one reward redeemed every minute during the entire campaign. The results solidified BENGAY as a brand that can speak to the mobile-savvy audience, giving the brand more room to innovate and utilize technology in the future.

RESULTS (INCLUDING CONTEXT, EVALUATION, AND MARKET IMPACT)

The impact on the market was significant, shattering previous CPG mobile advertising benchmarks:

70 percent increase in ad awareness, 24 times higher than CPG benchmarks
39 percent higher message association, 20 times higher than benchmarks
32 percent lift in brand favorability, 16 times higher than benchmarks
38 percent increase in purchase intent, 19 times higher than benchmarks