Case Study: How Wakefit.co recorded a 64% increase in revenue during its awareness campaign

With its 'Meet Kumbhkaran' awareness campaign, Wakefit.co established Kumbhkaran as their brand mascot. The brand weaved in its social media efforts with mailers & ecommerce push to complete the purchase cycle.

This case study explores how Wakefit.co awareness campaign brought its Chief Sleep Officer, Kumbhkaran to life through a series of activations while engaging with the audience on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube in a relevant manner.

Category Introduction

According to a report by RedSeer, India’s furniture and home solutions market is expected to touch $40 billion GMV by 2026. The growth in the industry is fuelled by the fact that online shopping in India has become mainstream and spending per shopper has also doubled in the last five years and is adding about 20 million new product shoppers every year.

The total market for mattresses in India was around 18.6 million units, with an estimated new demand for mattresses being ~7 million units per year as per ISPF. Growth enablers such as lifestyle changes in the urban population, increasing awareness towards health benefits of sleep, increasing use of sleep trackers, is boosting the global sleep market. Over the last five years, India’s overall mattress market has grown at a CAGR of above 11%. The demand for a good quality mattress has gone upwards as people are becoming aware of its benefits especially since the onset of the pandemic.

Brand Introduction

Wakefit.co is a research and innovation-driven sleep and home solutions company established in March 2016. It was founded by Ankit Garg and Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, with a vision to democratize sleep and home solutions in India. With a portfolio that previously included mattresses, pillows, bed frames, mattress protectors, comforters, neck pillows, and back cushions, the brand has now expanded to include home solutions products such as study tables, bookshelves, shoe racks, TV units, bedside tables, coffee tables, dining tables, towels, and more.

The company manufactures its products in-house at its 6 manufacturing units spread across Bengaluru, Jodhpur, and Delhi.

Objective

While the brand's larger objective from social media is to build a community of sleep enthusiasts, brand advocates, and people who are generally passionate about home and living, the daily objective is to become part of larger conversations and engage with people by churning out content that resonates with their emotions. The goal is to create a brand connect while adding value to the audience’s lives.

Summary

Wakefit.co wanted people to know that it offers superior quality products that considerably improve sleep quality. The brand also wanted to make people aware of the fact that all its products are thoroughly backed by science and extensive research.

The brand wanted to ideate and execute a quirky and witty campaign that was out of the box, yet informative rather than boring people with jargon. This gave birth to the #ApprovedByKumbhkaran campaign. 

Problem Statement/Objective

Mattress buying online is growing rapidly but also comes with its set of challenges. The brand wanted to simplify these challenges for the customers. The campaign talks about the product quality and buying experience that will make people believe in the quality of their product.

With this campaign, the objective was to increase overall top-of-mind awareness for Wakefit.co and build consideration using its RTBs at the moment of truth.

Brief

To build top of mind awareness for Wakefit.co by showcasing the science, innovation, research, and development that goes into making its world-class and high-quality mattresses.

Creative Idea

Since childhood, we have often witnessed people being referred to as ‘Kumbhkaran’, for having a great sleep appetite. Kumbhkaran has been a cultural icon in most Indians' lives while growing up and it has passed on for decades. Most of the people who love to sleep have been called Kumbhkaran at least once in their lives.

Wakefit.co was confident that its audience would easily connect with the idea of Kumbhkaran as the ultimate sleep icon. Using this creative device, the company wanted to showcase that while it has scientific reasons for consumers to believe that it offers some of the best mattresses in the market, a stamp of approval from the world’s biggest sleep influencer, Kumbhkaran, would strengthen the company's appeal among consumers from a rational as well as emotional point of view.

Execution

The mattress brand leveraged a 360-degree digital approach to execute the awareness campaign and increase its virality over two months of the campaign. As part of the campaign, the brand introduced Kumbhakaran to convince the audience that if Wakefit Mattresses are approved by the biggest sleep influencer the world has seen, there is no reason to further contemplate buying a new Wakefit Mattress.

It was conducted in various phases and spanned across the brand's social media handles, YouTube channel, marketplaces, email marketing, influencers, meme pages, and more

As part of the first phase, the brand released a long-format video for the campaign, which was hosted and promoted across all owned and paid channels digitally.

Pos this, the brand leveraged LinkedIn to announce 'Kumbhkaran joins Wakefit.co as Chief Sleep Officer'. In a bid to create organic buzz, the brand also launched his profile on LinkedIn while the Wakefit team, including the company founders and department heads, engaged with the profile

While the company was aware that LinkedIn did not allow fictional profiles and would eventually take it down, it recorded historic data by collating screenshots and screengrabs of every conversation and engagement created by Kumbhkaran on LinkedIn!

As the Kumbhkaran continued to engage with people, various brands jumped on the bandwagon paving way for brand banter.

Also read: Case Study: How Snapchat Lens campaign for Chupa Chups garnered a Share Rate of 1.71%

With Wakefit.co Kumbhkaran activation garnering more engagement, the fake profile was soon banned by LinkedIn as per the platform norms. Leveraging the moment, the brand started the #BringBackKumbhkaran campaign for the brand.

Soon the brand turned to other platforms for further activations for the awareness campaign while engaging the audience in a relevant manner.

Wakefit leveraged Instagram with relatable posts in line with the campaign theme while keeping their brand mascot, Kumbhkaran in focus.

As part of the Wakefit.co awareness campaign, Kumbhkaran also invited people to join him for a live session on multiple platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. During the live session, the audience was met with a snoring Kumbhkaran who shared an email ID to reach out to him if people had any sleep queries

The live event garnered significant traction on Twitter and the #KumbhkaranLiveonWakefit trended at No.7 across India.

When people wrote to Kumbhkaran from the prompts on the live session, they were met with an out of office email that said he was busy sleeping

Further, the wakefit.co engagement campaign was also promoted on marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart to drive top-of-mind recall for the brand.

Leveraging content marketing tactics, the brand deployed email marketing, as well as newsletter campaigns, while encouraging people to interact with Kumbhkaran.

Overall, the Wakefit.co campaign generated awareness, recall, and consideration for the brand, while also positively impacting its business growth.

Results

• The overall campaign reach was 3.52 Cr
• 6.5M views on YouTube across all Kumbhkaran videos
• 1.3 Lakhs+ organic impressions on LinkedIn
• Pageviews on Wakefit Linkedin increased by 1.5x and followers increased by 3x
• Awareness lift was 10.3% against the benchmark of 3.6%
• Consideration lift was 5.3% against the benchmark of 1.7%
• Top of mind awareness received the highest lift of 47% against a benchmark of 35%
• During the campaign, Wakefit.co recorded a 64% increase in revenue in Oct 2021 over the revenue recorded in Oct 2020

Quote

Talking about the decision to get its mattresses #ApprovedByKumbhkaran, Prateek Malpani, Head of Brand, Wakefit.co., said, “As a sleep and home solutions company, we are not just selling mattresses and furniture, we’re selling good sleep and comfort to all our customers. We believe that the best way to convince people about something as intangible as good sleep and comfort while also building a brand connect is by having meaningful conversations with our community and generating great content for them that they easily relate to. We have already earned the trust and credibility of millions of customers as is visible from lakhs of high-rated reviews across the internet. We wanted to reinforce this trust and credibility by creating content and conversations that make people love the brand above and beyond.”

He added "We realized that there was no better device than Kumbhkaran to exemplify the need for sleep in Indian households. The #ApprovedByKumbhkaran campaign not only aimed to showcase light-hearted humour, but also focused the spotlight on our R&D capabilities - demonstrating that mattresses are backed by science and continuous customer feedback."