Baby and toddler food brand Kiddylicious has created a new version of its popular online game, Wafer Wipeout, with new graphics, ingredients and prizes. The Candy Crush-style game was originally launched last year to raise awareness of the brand’s range of Wafer products amongst parents of young babies.

Wafer Wipeout challenges players to smash through rows and columns of Wafer packs and ingredients. For a period following the launch of the updated app, those who manage to hit the magic number of 1,000 points in 60 seconds could enter their details for the chance to win a range of prizes, including high chairs, plate sets and weaning kits.

Kiddylicious Wafers are designed to be the ideal first solid food for babies. Each Wafer is the perfect size for little hands to hold, and are crumb-free, which makes them a great weaning snack for little ones. They come in four flavours – strawberry, blueberry, carrot and banana – and contain no allergens, added preservatives or artificial colours.

The agency behind the campaign is Bath-based Ready, specialists in promotional and tactical campaigns for consumer brands.

Ready’s creative director Jake Xu says: “We had brilliant feedback from parents on the original Wafer Wipeout game. So it seemed only natural to give it a makeover and offer a fresh range of great prizes to be won. With several new parents in the Ready office, we know first-hand how great Wafers are during the weaning stage. On that front, we are also working with Kiddylicious on a range of informative content to support parents during the weaning stage. So we’re excited to reveal this very soon.”

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It may be roasting outside, but for marketers, Christmas is just around the corner. Maddie Cullen of Ready Agency provides some tips on targeting consumers during the festive period

Christmas. The busiest time of year for marketers. But it doesn’t start as the nights are drawing in; most people are already planning ahead for the festive season.

Christmas is a time for increased sales, but also for increased competition. Brands fight tooth and nail to be one of the items wrapped up in a bow, stuffed in a stocking or served up for Christmas treats.

Here are a few ways brands can make sure they’re the ones under the Christmas tree this year.

Even Rudolf has one

It should come as no surprise that mobile is the top focus for brands this year. People are increasingly having ‘micro moments’, which are the quick searches and checks on their phones, giving consumers instant information at the swipe of a finger.

It’s these minutes/seconds that brands should be slotting themselves into. If a brand can be a solution to a mobile user’s query, that can be the first step on the journey to purchase.

In the last few years 42% of people planned to do all of their Christmas shopping on mobile. Brands should make sure they’ve optimised for mobile and their site is user-friendly, otherwise a busy Christmas shopper could give up and try somewhere else.

However, it’s good news for those brands that do capture the attention of an eager shopper. Research shows that people are happiest online when shopping! So customers are going to be in a good mood and therefore likely to spend more and treat themselves or others.

But it’s not just during the lead up to Christmas that brands need to be on phones. Christmas Day is actually one of the busiest mobile shopping days of the year. People may have cash burning a hole in their pockets, or a bad present to replace, but either way, they’re actively buying on Christmas day.

Like Father Christmas, be everywhere

But not everyone is doing all of their shopping on mobile – for some people the journey goes on for much longer than that.

More and more consumers are researching reviews, images and videos before buying gifts. This can take them from a product website to their Facebook chat to a celebrities Instagram account and anywhere else they can find.

People increasingly start an order in one place and finish it at another, whether that’s changing from browser to app or from desktop to phone. Omnichannel should be the word on every brand’s lips this year.

Consumers are also splitting up their shopping techniques. Some people research online and buy in-store, and some research in-store and buy online. Brands must make sure that they can accommodate both types by making it easy to buy and providing essential information at every touchpoint. Whether this is on their website or social media or on the packaging, make sure that consumers have no excuse to put the product back on the shelf! (Digital or otherwise).

In the festive season people are out and about more. Socialising takes over sitting in front of the TV or browsing on a laptop – but they’re still on their phone. This is what connects all the research consumers are doing in-store and online.

The success of the strategy can be seen when brands that aren’t embracing an omnichannel approach like Next are failing to engage. Having a nice shop front means very little if your online presence is non-existent. Like consumers, be connected.

You don’t know The Ice Queen?

If there’s one thing we’ve learn from the last year, it’s that influencers aren’t going away anytime soon.

In the winter months they have all the same benefits as usual but amplified. Christmas is the perfect time of year for influencers because people are ready to be, well, influenced. Consumers are constantly on the lookout for inspiration for gifts, decorations, food and anything they can buy to make this Christmas ‘the best one yet’.

Influencers are also great at breaking through the noise and reaching consumers that otherwise wouldn’t be aware of what a brand is selling. This is especially important at the most competitive time of the year!

One in five YouTube views are instigated by a search. This means that those viewers have a ‘lean-in’ mindset. They’re the perfect people to reach with YT pre-roll and brand partnerships. A lot of these people are actively looking for information. A carefully selected influencer can start that journey to purchase for them.

Amazon used influencers well with their Prime campaign last year. They teamed up with a few YouTubers to show how useful the service can be in the lead up to the big day. Ingrid Nilsen assembled a box of goodies for her best friend and her dog and Alex Wassabi collected gifts for his girlfriend. Each of the influencers did something personal and real and showed their millions of followers why Amazon Prime works so well, especially when Christmas shopping.

Utilising content creators generates an added advantage for those brands that do it well at Christmas.

Let’s serve dessert before mains

This year, be different.

John Lewis have set a standard for Christmas advertising to create an emotional, entertaining story. The majority of major supermarkets follow suit. But unless the copycats have a clear enough branding, people will just associate the memory of an emotional ad with John Lewis. The brands that break the mould this year will capture much more attention. Amazon’s ad last year that focused on products actually rated higher for likability than the John Lewis monster story.

That isn’t to say don’t be emotional. Christmas celebrations are rooted in feelings. Brands that lose sight of this risk offending people – as Poundland has learnt from their Elf behaving badly campaign. You can joke about Christmas but don’t go too far as to make a mockery of it. Most people love and enjoy celebrating the holiday and don’t want that feeling dragged through the dirt.

A brand that did this well was H&M, with its ad directed by Wes Anderson. It told an emotional story, but still featured a cast of characters decked out in H&M attire. The story was fun, but the brand message was clear enough that when people thought back, there wasn’t any mistaking the brand.

But remember, what worked one year isn’t guaranteed to succeed the next. People and trends change. Christmas is close to the New Year and summing up the finished year – customers want familiarity, but they want something exciting too. (As we all know from the disappointment of opening up a pair of socks again – thanks grandma!)

Brands need to keep a strong presence online but shouldn’t lack in traditional areas either. At Christmas, every touchpoint counts. Techniques that work at other times of the year, like influencers, still work at Christmas. The difference is, everything needs to be rooted in emotion.

Even if some people eat Christmas dinner after presents, we’re all still human.

Maddie Cullen is Marketing Assistant at Ready, a multi-disciplined creative agency specialising in breakthrough promotional and tactical marketing campaigns. Clients include Soap & Glory, Kiddylicious, Burt’s Bees and Molton Brown.

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Quidco, the UK’s leading online cashback website, has launched a football-themed digital promotion to drive brand awareness this summer.

Players of ‘Quidgoal’, hosted on the brand’s site, must complete a footballing challenge for the chance to win instant cash prizes.

There are three challenges in total: taking penalty kicks, saving penalty kicks and evading tackles. Players are assigned one at random, and must complete it to stand a chance of winning a share of the £25,000 prize pot.

Repeat plays are unlimited, meaning users can increase their chances of winning by playing multiple times.

Users must be signed up to Quidco’s free service before they can participate, as winnings are deposited directly into their Quidco accounts.

The Quidgoal experience can be played on both desktop and mobile devices. A dedicated campaign to drive traffic to it will incorporate email, social media and word-of-mouth.

Quidco partnered with creative agency Ready on the campaign. Ready has previously helped Quidco use gamification to drive awareness of its service around seasonal events including Easter and Christmas.

Ready’s creative director Jake Xu said: “Creating a highly addictive game that offers instant cash prizes is the perfect way to showcase just how simple it is to earn cashback by shopping online through Quidco.”

The campaign, which launched this week, will run for three weeks.

It is sponsored by several of Quidco’s retail partners including Littlewoods, Microsoft and Paddy Power, generating exposure for each brand and encouraging members to earn cashback by purchasing from their ecommerce sites.

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Digital sampling may sound like a contradiction – but there can be major advantages to injecting a digital element into the process of getting samples into people’s hands, says Dave Corlett of Ready

It’s universally accepted that experiential sampling campaigns are highly effective at introducing consumers to new products and variants.

But there can be disadvantages to this tactic. Brand ambassadors often have no idea who they’ve just handed a sample to, and can only target people at a select number of locations. Their options are also limited when it comes to continuing the conversation.

Using samples as prizes, rewards or gifts in online promotional campaigns has the potential to address all of these issues. But it’s not necessarily the right approach for every brand or occasion.

So who should be thinking about swapping streets for screens? And how can those who do, make sure they achieve the best results?

When to consider going digital

The first rule of thumb is that the higher the value of your sample, the more relevant a digital approach becomes.

Consumers simply aren’t going to spend precious time handing over their details for a mini can of Coke Zero, and probably won’t feel comfortable doing so. But if the value exchange is more substantial, the chances of persuading them to provide personal data increases exponentially.

This tactic also works well for brands that only have a limited number of samples. In this case, it’s vital to make each one work harder. One way to do this is to create an online game or challenge, offering those who complete it the chance to win one of the samples (as well as a grand prize, of course).

Research shows that competitions become more attractive when a range of smaller and larger prizes are offered, and when participants are instantly notified of success or failure. Using samples as the smaller prizes kills both these birds with one stone.

What are the key benefits?

The most pertinent advantage over experiential sampling is audience targeting. With a physical campaign, it’s true that this can be reasonably sophisticated, especially in environments such as shopping centres; but ultimately, it’s still something of a scattergun approach once the activity commences. And in many instances, that’s absolutely fine.

But with a digital campaign, a pot of media spend can be allocated to targeting precisely the right customer. Moreover, those who win a prize and submit their details are more likely to fit your core customer, as they have chosen to participate rather than simply having a product thrust at them in the street.

In addition, a digital approach has the potential to reach anyone, anywhere. It isn’t restricted to a handful of locations. And although some sampling campaigns do involve an element of data capture, integrating this into a digital activation is seamless, easy and almost instant.

Just remember to make sure it’s all GDPR-compliant!

The drawbacks?

There are certainly a few considerations to take into account.

First up, logistics. There are fulfilment processes to arrange, which add a layer of complexity to the activity. They also add costs to it, as does the requisite digital development. But it could be argued that these are offset by the absence of the logistical and staffing costs that come with a physical sampling campaign.

Secondly, how big are the samples you will be sending out? Any larger than the average letterbox, and sending them out becomes too much of an inconvenience for the recipient. Not every food and drink samples is suitable either, for obvious freshness-related reasons.

If this is the case, but the digital angle still appeals, then why not switch samples for coupons? This eliminates the ‘snail mail’ element entirely. But it does mean less products in people’s hands, as not everyone will redeem their coupon.

You could add in a prize promotion element (like we did for client Soap & Glory – see picture), making the allocation of money-off coupons random, and encouraging multiple or unlimited entries to provide more chance of winning (and more chance of getting high quality data). However, you can’t give everybody an identical coupon and call it a ‘prize’ – that’s against the CAP Code. You can still give everyone who participates a coupon, you just have to call it a reward or a gift.

Not all brands or products are suitable for digital sampling, as mentioned above; lower-value FMCG products may be just as loved by consumers as higher-value ones, but the value and size of their samples means that compelling people to jump through extra hoops can make using digital tricky.

You may be best to stick to the streets for these folks.

To sum up…

There are huge benefits to physical sampling, and I’m certainly not suggesting otherwise – or that every brand that does it should scrap the idea in favour of a digital campaign.

However, for brands in sectors like beauty, skincare, personal care and the luxury end of the FMCG market, digital sampling can be a very effective way of getting products into the right hands – and learning more about who those hands belong to.

Dave Corlett is New Business Director of Bath-based agency Ready, which creates bold promotional and tactical campaigns for clients including Soap & Glory, Quidco, Kiddylicious, and Burt’s Bees.

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Molton Brown, London-based fragrance experts, is launching its new Vetiver & Grapefruit Collection with a series of eye-catching retail experiences, featuring anamorphic art to create clever optical illusions that represent the tension between the new fragrance’s contrasting notes.

Molton Brown’s master perfumers have a rich heritage in combining imaginative and unusual ingredients to create unique fragrances. For this new campaign, the brand brought in rising designer Peter Tarka, a specialist in pioneering 3D imagery, to work with it on a marketing campaign under the title, ‘Build the Tension’, reflecting the contrasts in the new range.

Molton Brown then appointed creative agency Ready to deliver an experiential and promotional campaign to bring Peter Tarka’s creations to life.

To grab consumers’ attention and drive footfall to Molton Brown stores and concession stands, Ready created large-scale 3D optical illusions which have been rolled out at several shopping centres around the UK. Each one invites those who experience it into a world of rough and smooth textures, stark and soft shapes and gravity-defying objects that reflect the fragrance’s skilful construction.

Shoppers who interact with the experience were offered the chance to enter their details into a prize draw to win a luxury weekend in London. They also received a free 30ml sample of the bath and shower gel product from the new range.

The experience kicked off earlier this month, and has so far appeared at shopping centres in Newcastle, Glasgow, Bluewater in Kent and intu Milton Keynes. It opened at London’s Canary Wharf yesterday and today (May 21^st and 22^nd) before concluding at Victoria Quarter in Belfast on May 25^th.

Ready director Jake Xu says: “Molton Brown are true pioneers when it comes to original perfumery. So when they asked us to deliver a show-stopping retail experience for this launch, we knew we had to push the boundaries and create something unique and original. We’re really happy with the end result, and so are the team at Molton Brown. Working with them and their retail partners has been a great experience.”

Ready, based in Bath, is a multi-disciplinary creative agency specialising in promotional and tactical marketing campaigns which break through the noise of clients’ categories and persuade target audiences to take a desired action.

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