Background

Valentine’s Day is nowadays still skewed toward couples, but it has evolved into universal love. There are many ways to express love, and we've observed that Gen Z looks to personas or idols for inspiration, influencing their expressions of affection. The challenge is how to transcend conventional Valentine's Day clichés, redefine modern love, and maintain the brand’s ethos, all while resonating with Gen Z, driving engagement, and remaining distinctive within our brand imagery. The primary goal was to build relevance and innovate, enhance top-of-mind awareness, and boost engagement among the Gen-Z audience around Valentine’s Day, as well as to drive purchases of KitKat’s limited-edition variant on this day. 

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, WE GAVE ‘BREAK’, A BREAK. We made Valentine’s Day into a full season of love, celebrating close relationships with KitKat. Aligning with the global directive of ‘Let Love Be Love.’ For the first time ever, we gave KitKat’s iconic ‘break’, a break - and added love instead. We launched ‘Ada Cinta Ada KitKat’ to steer away from stereotypes and normalise the idea that Valentine’s Day is for everyone looking to celebrate love. Where there is love, there’s KitKat. 

The Indonesian Gen-Zs aged 18-24 living in urban and suburban areas, support a more accepting world where love deserve for everyone and personally having their own gesture to express their love. 

In connecting with Indonesian Gen Zs, who are less accessible through traditional media channels like TV and print, we recognise that their peer groups heavily influence their cultural references. They also tend to trust influencers, who inspire and guide their lifestyles. For brands like KitKat, understanding and leveraging these insights is crucial for developing an impactful marketing strategy. 

Execution

Clutter-breaking influencer campaign with the limited-edition Valentine’s Day KitKat pack:  

Understanding the evolving consumer behaviour and preferences, we were able to match data with qualitative insights and leverage digital media as an opportunity to increase brand consideration as well as relevance and drive product usage. We have effectively and efficiently utilised our budget for maximum influencer engagement and brand experience.  

We drove engagement with popular and unlikely ‘pairs’ like, Sakhansaaa, Fadil Jaidi, Desta & Vincent, Jonathan Abe, Vellania, and Gemabaw and more, for our snack-able video content on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, celebrating relationships within various cohorts like fathers and best friends, partners and more.  

For an even more immersive brand experience, KitKat created its own branded AR filter with TikTok that connected their love expressions into KitKat packaging represented by several influencers. This resulted in impressive video views and audience interactions. In fact, we realised that a huge number of the audience watched the content multiple times. On Twitter, the hashtag #AdaCintaAdaKitKat managed to stay on the trending homepage for a whole week and garnered curiosity about the limited-edition pack.

Results

Valentine’s Day is crucial for KitKat as it contributes 21% to KitKat’s total business and brings in higher performance compared to any other festive seasons in Indonesia. In the past years, KitKat’s growth has exceeded the chocolate category, achieving the highest performance the brand has seen in the past three years. Therefore, KitKat sees Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to further grow its business and gain market share in the chocolate category against over-indexing competitors. 

With the campaign release, we knew we had made it a mega celebration. The entire collaboration resulted in approximately 26 million impressions and views and 20 million reaches across key social media platforms.  

This campaign was divided into two phases: Teaser and Reveal. During the teaser phase, KOLs posted unbranded content. The goal was to make the content more organic and help garner more views. The content showcased KOLs engaging in their favorite activities and unique moments such as surprising their family, enjoying a picnic, doing makeup together, reuniting with long-time friends, listening to love songs or doing karaoke, and creating a DIY fine dining experience with their special ones. In the reveal phase, the KOLs shared the limited-edition Valentine’s packs of KitKat along with exciting promotional offers for their audience.   

Data awareness and engagement:  

• Media plan + KOL: Total Results (including boosted): 377.5M impressions (+42% vs. LY) 
• Engagement Rate: 1.75% 
• TikTok Hashtag Challenge: 99M impressions 
• Press conference KitKat: Total PR Value: 8.74 billion IDR  
• Highlight: Collaboration with Wonderful Indonesia and local UMKM to encourage youth to love Indonesian products, sold out in 52 seconds with the strong message "Sebarkan Cinta Produk Indonesia," represented by Gen Z in a fashion show.  

Awards

• Finalist at Marketing Excellence Awards 2023 - Excellence in Influencer / KOLs Marketing 
• Finalist at MMA Smarties2023 – Impact Media: Creator / Influencer / Celebrity Marketing