Summary
QUITTING IS WINNING WITH NICO- a first-of-its-kind personal user interface that will guide you to end your struggle with smoking. A friendly chat bot that will be a one-stop shop for enabling a smoker to quit smoking, which is usually a lonely, yet important journey in a user's life, by being present to answer all their questions about dosage, cravings, how to use, and how to stay motivated throughout this difficult path of quitting smoking.
Challenge
Nicotex, the market leader in the smoking cessation category, always struggled to retain users in terms of repeat purchases. After researching and surveying users we found it was total because of a lack of awareness of the technique/methodology in which the product is supposed to consume. Users were not simply aware of the “12-week Nicotine Replacement therapy” and “How to Use” parts. Also finding a smoker on digital with a limited digital footprint was always a challenge faced by the brand.
Objective
Nicotex identified the problem and decided to launch an interactive platform for the users, where they can come up with any queries related to smoking or quitting smoking and find an easy solution. To make this even grand, the interactive platform named “Nico” was launched on World No Tobacco Day, celebrated across the globe on 31st May 2022. This is the first year of the campaign where we launched Nico chatbot & with communication that focused on how Nico can be helpful in your quitting smoking journey, the campaign achieved exceptional performance in terms of primary KPI planned to drive clicks on the website and achieved 2X the engagement on chatbot as compared to the benchmark.
Strategy
Facebook & Influencers on Instagram were the highest reach platform since as per the GWI survey our TG had a high affinity towards the use of social media and 90% of our audiences consumed mobile device content with an average time spent on the platform is more than 2-3 hours. Robust Remarketing was done at the below stages to reach out to users with different communication (a) Someone who has viewed the video ad only for 5 secs (b) someone who has viewed the complete video ad (c) Someone who has come on the website but didn’t take any action (d) someone who has visited website & spent more than 15sec
Data
As per GWI insights, our TG leaned towards sports, news, and content consumption, and their buying behavior was swayed by credible industry personalities, hence Influencers from Sports/Fitness backgrounds with a PAN India extensive reach became an integral part of the campaign. Finding a smoker on digital becomes difficult with a limited digital footprint, the media strategy then became to capture audiences through surrogate interest targeting, which led us to create 4 major cohorts for the campaign namely Sports, Smokers, Alcohols & Party, and News. A ComScore insight gave us the top media vehicles through which we could reach our audience. We identified platforms with high% Reach and high% Affinity in our TG – Times of India, NDTV, Cricbuzz, and CricInfo were a few of the top publishers on the list. Influencers like Dinesh Karthik, Shivoham, Vishal Dadlani, Aditi Surana & Mickey Mehta were roped in to launch the Nico chatbot. Content articles in English & Hindi around the launch of Nico and its uses went live in the TOI & reposted the Influencer videos on their social media platforms giving us extra reach over and above the influencer’s followers.
Solution
Brand Insight & primary survey suggested that more than 60% of smokers start smoking while they are young and in many cases influenced by looking at their colleagues/friends. The brand film focuses on a group of friends who are playing cricket which also resonated with our insight that our TG was indexed towards Sports as an interest and helped create relevancy, also the film mentions that they started smoking together at an early age but only one of them walks the difficult & lonely path of quitting smoking. The film was created keeping in mind the users have a short time attention span before skipping the ad, hence the message of using Nico was brought in the first 30 secs of the video with a continuous ticker throughout the video at the bottom. The end slate had a clear call to action to drive traffic to the website. The chatbot on the website was enabled with the Nico icon and a pop-up message as soon as the user lands on the website. The film highlighted how Nico – A friendly chat-bot who will be one stop shop for enabling a smoker to quit smoking, which is usually lonely, yet important journey of a user’s life by being present to answer all their queries related to dosage, cravings, direction to use and continuously keep them motivated through this difficult path of quitting smoking. Remarketing became an essential leg for this campaign as it helped build frequency and ad recall for the film.
Results
Nicotex always had a market share of more than 90% and is a market leader in the smoking cessation category, but has always struggled to retain users in terms of repeat purchases/avg. time spent on the website (~ 50 sec) and traffic. By launching a new service which is the interactive chatbot, we were benchmarking the results against the industry standards. • Achieved 100.7 MN impressions from the campaign and 33.55 MN engagement on the video. The campaign reached 14.8 MN users across our Target Audience which was 2X the planned reach. • The campaign achieved a total of 568K clicks which were 4X the planned clicks. Achieved a total of 635K completed views for the film. • The campaign received 204K visitors from the campaign of which 88.79% of the users were new users as per the Google Analytics report. • The visitor to chatbot user ratio was 0.69% which is 2X the industry benchmarks and 60% of the user completed the entire chatbot flow. A total of 33.7k messages was exchanged with an avg. chatbot interaction time of 2 min 30 sec. We collected to close 1.8K first-party user data from the campaign which can be re-marketed for our future campaigns. • This has now become a part of always-on approach to nurture the users and help them on their road to quitting smoking
