BIC Cello partnered with Kavishala for a month-long campaign on the occasion of World Poetry Day wherein people wrote poetry using pen and paper garnering and shared it on social media, resulting in 1k+ entries.
BIC Cello married putting a pen to paper with digital media and hosted a Twitter contest #PoetryOnPaper in association with Kavishala on Poetry Day. The case study further analyses the campaign execution and results.
Category Introduction
In India, the stationery market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 6-7% in the medium to long run. Before the pandemic hit the country in early 2020, due to an increased focus of the government on the education sector, the demand for school and office stationery was growing. Since the stationery industry is largely unorganized and is heavily dependent on the offline retail channel, there has been a major drop in sales since the beginning of 2020. The closing of schools and offices has aggravated the loss. As a result, most of the brands in the category have shifted their focus to online marketplaces where there’s a clear surge in demand for stationery, especially in the art and hobby segment.
Brand Introduction
Cello® started its journey in 1995 by manufacturing and marketing a wide range of classic ball pens with imported tips and German inks. Focusing on innovation, high-quality pens, and leading-edge technologies, Cello soon became India’s most loved writing instruments brand over the years. In December 2015, the French stationery leader BIC® acquired 100 percent ownership in Cello® writing and the company was renamed as "BIC Cello (India)".
The manufacturing expertise, consumer requirements, constant research on tips and inks, and offering of a broad range of writing instruments make the company the market leader in the category.
Over the years, BIC Cello has expanded its product portfolio, offering world-class products in stationery categories like permanent markers, whiteboard markers, colour markers, mechanical pencils, roller pens, fountain pens and office and school stationery products.
Marketing objectives from Social Media:
- Building brand awareness
- Continually creating consumer engagement to ensure top of mind brand recall
- Directing traffic to e-commerce marketplace
Summary
The ‘poetry on paper’ idea was selected because the dominance of the digital age has made it difficult for people to express their emotions and feelings through written words, despite the fact that writing is one of the most beautiful ways to discover one’s innermost self. On Poetry Day we wanted to encourage people to express themselves through the use of basic stationery products. A pen in hand-applied on paper to allow a free flow of thoughts became the core inspiration.
Kavishala became the preferred partner to take this forward, as they provided a platform to new and young poets and writers to write, share, recite and discuss their poetry and literature online as well as offline. The community has various regional chapters as well but primarily is a Hindi platform.
Problem Statement/Objective
While we are all surviving during this pandemic, everything has gone digital. Children don’t attend school in person, adults don’t go to work, and digitalisation has completely taken over our lives. The brand wanted to bring back the focus on creative expressions and imaginations through pen and paper, which not only help alleviate mental stress but also shine the spotlight on how a pen can become our closest ally in the age of keyboard and mouse.
Through this campaign, we focused on reminding people how it feels to use pen and paper to express their feelings in the form of poetry.
Societal stereotypes make people hesitant to share their feelings for fear of whether or not other people will see their emotions as valid. Poetry could be a wonderful way to channel those emotions. More and more poets are speaking out in their work about social issues, human topics, and lifestyle and relationship reflections, among other subjects.
Kavishala and BIC Cello co-created the platform where people could come together through shared emotions and experiences with the use of a simple pen.
Brief
The goal was to encourage individual experiences and help to open up the discussion of poetic expressions to a wider audience. The accessibility of poetry allows us to better address stereotypes and the dangers of putting one’s feelings in a closed box.
The simple brief was, channelise your emotions and feelings, use a pen to create a character, a name, a face, and a story and bring your feelings to life.
Creative Idea
Poetry reading and writing both engage our senses as well as our emotions, making the art form experiential and hugely effective in connecting with our minds and hearts. Writing poetry is to create a sharp and accurate snapshot of what one is feeling.
Challenges
- How to ensure people actually pick up a pen and paper to write?
- Direct product integration was a challenge for the campaign as we were all stationed at home.
Execution
The idea was brought to life through a Twitter campaign #PoetryOnPaper by BIC Cello Signature Pens. The campaign challenged people to write poetry on paper and challenge 3 Friends for the same. The poem was supposed to have a minimum of four lines and the picture of the handwritten poem had to be upload on Twitter using the hashtag #PoetryOnPaper. The campaign started on the 21st March and concluded on 23rd April 2021 and received high participation.
The campaign was launched on Twitter but was further amplified on Facebook and Instagram as well.
The activities undertaken during the period of collaboration were #PoetryOnPaper Campaign on Twitter, top post promotions using Cello Banner, an email campaign ‘Poetry on Paper - Supported by BIC Cello’
Results
Quantitative
- Impressions Total: 23,86,550
- Engagements: 1,94,984
- Users 20+ Celebrities (Average Following of all users ~12 Lakh)
- Total Tweets on #PoetryOnPaper: 1,256
- Website Banners:
- Total Impressions: 108,654
- Unique Impressions: 73,465
- 2 Emails to Kavishala Writers - Campaign ‘Participation for #PoetryOnPaper’ with branding -
CMO Quotes
Tanveer Khan, Director Marketing, BIC Cello India said, “As a leading stationery brand deeply rooted in the core philosophy of enabling creative expressions and bringing joy to everyday lives, we felt reigniting the importance of ‘Poetry Day’ would be an excellent way to motivate and encourage people to have individual and collective conversations around everything they feel strongly about. The basic objective was to inspire people to connect with themselves using pen and paper and to bring their feelings to life. Kavishala understood our brief completely and was the ideal platform to amplify the core message. Thanks to their well-entrenched reach and engagement with the right audience, they bought the idea to life and helped convert this into a successful campaign. We unpacked this together and received a flattering digital response, beautifully testifying how everyone can make sense of their worlds simply by using a pen to express and fuel their imagination. It addressed our campaign objective of simply making people happy and joyous through meaningfully integrating our products in their lives.”
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