GIF Campaign Case Study: How Kingfisher's #myFisher gained 20M fans

GIF campaign case study of Kingfisher's #myFisher shares how the brand leveraged Instagram with personalised GIFs.

Kingfisher Beer relied on personalized GIFs and User Generated content as a part of #MyFisher. A look at the GIF Campaign Case Study below:

Category Introduction

Beer is the most important segment in
the global market for Alcoholic Drinks both by volume and value. In comparison
to other Alcoholic Drinks is already quite concentrated with the top-5 players
accounting for roughly 60% of global volume.

Revenue in the Beer segment in India
amounts to US$14,188m in 2019. The market is expected to grow annually by 7.7%
(CAGR 2019-2023).

Source: Statista

Brand
Introduction

As a pioneer in the alcoholic beverage space, Kingfisher has time and again proven to be a front-runner in conceiving and executing digital campaigns that make it a relevant consumer brand amongst the millennial audience. As a brand that enjoys significant brand popularity, recall, and product preference, social media has been largely leveraged as an engagement platform by Kingfisher. 

Summary

GIF campaign Case Study - #myFisher campaign, targeted at the long tail of Instagram users from Bharat, presented the Kingfisher fans with a fun and quirky way to personalize the iconic Kingfisher bottle. Fans could search with the first three letters of their names +fisher, to discover a Kingfisher GIF personalized for them on Giphy.

This could be scaled, and used on stories to confess their love for brand and beer. Amplified with influencers and contests, resulting in a large scale adoption of branded gifs – to the tune of 15M Giphy views.

Problem Statement/Objective

• To be a front-runner on Instagram for semi-urban India, and humor the audience in ways it always has.
• In the alco-bev industry, bottle personalization poses incredible challenges with existing regulations. Could digital offer a way out to turn this around?
• In a country with a significantly large number of unique names, how can a brand like Kingfisher implement the idea of personalization at scale (20M+)?

Also Read: Case Study: How Mini Punjab’s Dara Singh Thali went viral with one blogger partnership

Brief

A three-point brief was given to the entire team behind the campaign -

1. An
   Instagram campaign for Bharat, as
   against the run-of-the-mill campaigns one sees targeted at the urban-affluent
   Indians on the platform.
2. Ride on User
   Generated Content, as against advertising powered by media money. 
3. Integrate
   brand strongly to the personalization idea, in a way both the individual as
   well as the brand share the spotlight equally.

Creative Idea

The iconic Kingfisher bottle with enticing GIPHY repository on Instagram stories was identified to be the key engagement vehicle. Multiple GIFs of the Kingfisher bottle were stored on the cloud, which users could search, discover and use.

Each GIF corresponded to a specific name of the format + . For example, Panfisher for Pankaj, Ankfisher for Ankit, Neefisher for Neelima and so on. This ensured an incorrigible connection between the brand and the individual. This also solved the problem of scale with names. Using just three letters on a single GIF, could be used and re-used by hundreds or thousands of individuals. 

Challenges

• Challenge 1 - To identify the right set of names that could be a representative of Bharat.

• Challenge 2 - Designing a large set of stickers. Manually involving a dozen designers on the task, wouldn’t be an efficient way to go.
• Challenge 3- Third challenge was discoverability. How would the fans come to know of these stickers, and how would they try them on?

Execution

• Executing Solution to Challenge 1 - Kingfisher fan base on Instagram was used as a sample-set, to arrive at a list of fan names that could cover an estimated 70% of the population. The brand mined the followers, exported the list of names, sliced and diced the data to find 500 three-letter combinations that would do justice to our scale objectives.

• Executing Solution to Challenge 2 - This was overcome using digital automation applied to design tools. The agency liaised with the Giphy team, to ensure the smooth transfer of GIFs to the cloud, and accurate tagging of individual names against stickers.

• Executing Solution to Challenge 3 – Tutorial videos were created that simplified the process and presented them in steps. A large pool of influencers including Radhika Apte was identified to communicate the process of trial via Instagram stories. A contest was built around the activity, to further incentivize the fans with a ‘feature’ on Kingfisherworld handle, luring them for participation.

Results

• Almost 20M fans from Bharat engaged through the campaign.
• 1000+ fans participated in contests.
• Around 550 stickers were created, which were viewed 15Million times on the platform.