Social Media Strategy Review: Slice

This review is a part of our ‘Social Media Strategy Review’ series where we do a 360 degree analysis of a brand’s social media activity. You can read the reviews of more brands here.

For kids who have any recollection of the early ‘90s, Duke’s Mangola was the go-to mango drink. After the take-over by PepsiCo in 1994, Mango Slice & Frooti competed for the spot incessantly. Today, while Frooti tries to quench the mango thirst of people (making them rejoice like young kids at the taste of it), Slice takes on an entirely different route of Aamsutra with Katrina Kaif.

But does the Aamsutra work for them? Launched in 2008, this campaign has tickled senses of many men (& women) on TV & print, but does their social media strategy hold true to their central proposition? Let’s see...

Overall Strategy:

The brand has expanded the Aamsutra (the mango scriptures) to take on indulgences & sensual pleasures in relation to, of course, mangoes. The brand is leveraging its ambassador, Katrina Kaif, in as many different ways as possible.

On Facebook:
The frequency of posts is mostly a post a day, some days two. Most content is visual, which is definitely a plus. All visuals are stylized to showcase their top-three selling points:

1. The rich ripe mangoes as the objects of desire
2. Katriana Kaif in a dual role of the seduced, & hence also the seductress
3. Sensual pleasures & indulgences in general, but visually made to be very mango-ey

The copy with the posts is short, crisp, & has variety. The team seems to be doing a great job of creating the “desire” for mangoes.
About 1% of fans connect with the brand, with Like + Comments + Posts.

This shows consistent peaks & troughs of engagement, save for the first week of March with a steep rise. While efforts to sustain engagements are seen, peaks of engagement are apparent at the times of a new campaign launch.

Example: The Kat & Mahi ‘Spice up your Slice offer’ in the first week of Feb, & now the SwayAAMvar in the first week of March. Engagement on posts with pics of Katrina are higher than the posts with Slice-based recipes or Sensual Escapes with respect to travel.

On a fan-base of over 650k fans, the average response per post seems rather small. Also I’m reviewing the brand from January to March, which is pushing their average down. I’m hoping (so is the brand) that the launch of SwayAAMvar will push the mean higher.

The sentiments on the page show that most of the audience is positively engaged or influenced by the brand. The audience is content with the updates received from the page. Always a plus.

And then, I take a look at their tabs and I begin to worry.

Mocktails by Slice is definitely a great idea, helps the audience do more with Slice.

And then... Identify the mango: The contest must have been a well-executed contest but it ended in May 2013! One would guess that they want to re-use the idea this summer too... but why not just use the “Hide” feature on your tabs?! And I see this happening with a lot of brands—while a number of tabs suggest a host of activities for their audience, most of them would have gone defunct or irrelevant now.

With other tabs following suit, I do hope that the brand soon picks it up to keep only active tabs on the page or not have them at all.

On Twitter:
Twitter is mostly a duplication of Facebook posts. Visuals are many. The brand actively engages with the followers with replies & retweets, especially during campaigns. They could actually slow their horses on the retweeting.

On the the hygiene content front, one tweet a day seems rather less for the medium. They could definitely create more content, not necessarily visual, for Twitter.

On YouTube:
The channel has 26 videos from the last 2 years, mostly TVCs. The channel has 155 subscribers & 84k views, which also shows that nobody is expecting continuous video content from the brand, except the TVCs which in most cases get advertised.

But the surprising thing is that they only have linked their G+ account on YouTube, neither Facebook nor Twitter, not even their website.

On Google+:
This is a platform where Slice is choosing to ignore, but then, why would they connect their YouTube to it?

The brand is simply existing on Google+ and my hunch is that somebody didn’t give it much thought when YouTube posed them the question to link the two.

The latest SwayAAMvar app on Mobile:
The app is now available on Android and is soon to hit the iPhone App store. The immersive experience of SwayAAMvar is interesting, to say the least.

How it works:
1. Log on to MangoSlice.in
2. Download the app
3. Punch in the code seen on your desktop/ laptop screen into the app

This is when the journey begins.. Starting from here..

Web:

Mobile:

The high-fives:

SwayAAMvar is an interesting link-up between the mobile & web interface

The visuals are beautiful

The voice-over is nice

I would most definitely want to see how this swayAAMvar plays out. I’m interested for sure.

The low-twos:

If I read about swayAAMvar on my mobile, I can’t have the complete viewing experience. I need to be using two devices simultaneously. Which is why, I read a lot of people complaining about not being able to move ahead in the app since they got stuck at the intro screen.

The screen on my mobile keeps flipping from landscape to portrait which is cumbersome

Beyond the mobile & web sync, the app is of no real value at this stage.

Battle with the competitor:

I have the most vivid memory of consuming Frooti since I was a child; the train journeys, the school functions, the small tetra-packs were always my sweet-mango favourite. Keeping that nostalgic bias aside, I’m quite disappointed with the social media presence of Frooti.

The audience doesn’t seem much enthused with the brand, low rates of engagement with greater negative sentiment, erratic content posting, the brand is not leveraging social media very well.

It isn’t that the content posted is of poor quality, it seems like the lack of effort took over the brand & they chose to fail on social media.

Conclusion:

Slice has been continuously on the toes with this Aamsutra. They are diligent with their efforts & produce good content & activities. Older tabs should be hidden or deleted from viewers. Twitter as a medium could be explored more. They should pay attention to their YouTube channel, the hygiene at least.

But overall, I would say...

With Slice! & Katrina, of course!

Expert View

The social media strategy for Slice is tight, with all aspects thought out and well rounded. However, a wholesome foresight on consolidating the app on a single device is a UX detail surprisingly missed by the social media team. Having to enjoy a teaser app, spread across two devices is definitely a cumbersome practice.

Slice also requires to create good video content for its YouTube channel. When you have a brand ambassador as popular as Katrina Kaif, creating video content will easily generate a huge buzz for your brand.

Slice is way ahead of its competitors like Maaza and Frooti, but it constantly needs to evolve its content strategy to avoid stagnation and redundancy.

Expert View by Rajiv Dingra Founder & CEO of WATConsult – An Award Winning Digital & Social Media Agency.

Analytics Support: Simplify360