The health drink Boost has been the mantra to excel in sports for years,so much so that four generations of cricketers have endorsed the brand on the same platform. Mindshare at the Emvies 2009 case study judging round,presented its case for Boost in the Best Media Innovation – TV and Best Integrated Campaign categories.
They came up with the finding that the problem for Boost last year was that ‘energy’ was becoming a generic category benefit, with direct competitors as well as indirect categories such as biscuits which were singing the same tune. However, the bigger problem for Boost was that children today have less play time, and even that is hijacked by TV: about 90 per cent of a child’s leisure time is spent on TV, while the remaining 10 per cent is what he spends outdoors.
There are just few organised games to hold the interest of the children and this as a result make a lower relevance of active sports in their life . As a result of this 14 per cent of children in India are obese. While experimenting with how to get children to partake in physical sports, and hence get healthier (Boost’s proposition), the couch potato syndrome had to be attacked by disrupting them.
Therefore the benefits of physical activities had to be highlighted and Boost chose its own enemy – the television set – to do that precisely. The brand tied up with kids’ channel Nick to launch an initiative on TV, called Let’s Just Play. The channel, on September 27, 2008, went blank for 30 minutes during the evening at peak play time.
Prior promos across Viacom 18 channels, coverage by 182 publications and 17 websites, and on-ground activities developed a curiosity in children about what was going to happen on Nick that day. 18 celebrities including Priya Dutt and Smriti Irani energised this activity.
As a result of this, the energy quotient awareness went up by 30 per cent in kids, while mothers, too, were influenced to get their kids to move out: their awareness quotient went up by 45 per cent. About 25,000 children engaged in active sports on that day. Further, Boost obtained a 20 per cent higher sales growth as against the same period in the previous year.