… or how Britvic, together with creative partners Just Peel, created a promotional campaign for Drench, specifically for vending machines, that really, really worked.
PICTURED: James Cripps and Wesley Harris of Britvic meet winner John Patchett with Alison Hobson
By Ian Reynolds-Young
****UPDATE… watch this space for news of the NEXT Vend2Win campaign! 24th July 2017.****
Britvic’s James Cripps puts it most succinctly: ‘It’s really easy to run a campaign on supermarket shelves, but it’s difficult to make it quite as exciting when your retail outlet is a vending machine.’
That was the position from which Britvic, along with the company’s marketing agency Just Peel, embarked upon a quest to create a promotion for Drench that was unique to the vending sector and which would engage with consumers in a way that was every bit as ‘exciting’ as those delivered by other sales channels…
The reasons for choosing to promote Drench were compelling. Drench had been re-formulated and its sugar levels reduced, in readiness for the government’s impending Levy Tax. To draw maximum attention to that important change, a completely new bottle had been designed and three brand-new flavours added to the range. It was vital that these developments were brought to the attention of vending consumers as soon, and as effectively, as possible.
The concept that began to tick the boxes was ‘Spin and Win’, a game, similar to a fruit machine, that could be played by consumers on their smart phones at point of sale. Just Peel’s strategy was to create the excitement of an ‘instant win’. There would be prizes of £25 and £50, with a First Prize of £1,000.
So far, so good; but there were a couple of concerns. First of all, which of Britvic’s vending customers would be asked to participate and secondly, how would the campaign be promoted, at point of sale, to the consumer?
‘We always saw this as a trial’ James said. ‘Rather than roll out ‘Spin and Win’ to all of our vending clients, we decided to offer it to our Top Ten customers, measured by the number of glass fronted vending machines they had in their machine park.’
It was the task of Just Peel to come up with a device that would attract consumers and encourage them to take part. ‘Our idea was to design a collar that would sit on the neck of the bottle and grip just below the lid’, Just Peel MD Alison Hobson said. ‘The bottleneck collar would offer consumers three ways to participate: firstly a QR code that could be scanned by the consumers’ phone; secondly, the possibility of using an SMS (text message) to take part and finally, a URL enabling customers to play at any time.’ There was a more fundamental task: ‘Naturally’, Alison said, ‘we had to design the collars in such a way that they would be sufficiently robust to withstand the processes of placement and dispensing. If they were disconnected from the bottles before they made it into the hands of the consumer, the whole campaign would flop.’
Even when the collar passed all its field tests, one impediment remained to be overcome: it was not possible to add the bottleneck collars on the Britvic production line. In fact, they would have to be added by individual route operators as they refilled their machines. ‘It was a worry’, James agrees. ‘It added time to each machine visit and we were worried that large numbers of collars would never made it to the bottles and end up in a bin somewhere instead.
‘We were working with hand-picked operating companies so we knew we could rely on them to explain the importance of the additional work to their staff on our behalf’, James said. ‘Having said that, we thought it was only fair to offer a small incentive to route operators, so we proposed that the route operator whose machine dispensed the winning bottle should receive £50 in High Street vouchers.’
And so it was that, with the additional creation of an on-door promotional sticker, ‘Spin & Win’ was ready to go. The promotion began its roll out and by Christmas, lucky winner John Patchett of Bradford had scooped the top prize of £1,000 in High Street vouchers and Route Operator Daniel Heywood, of LTT, had pocketed his £50 bonus.
So: was the promotion a success? For James, Alison and for Britvic, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. ‘Sales increased by 20%, simply by putting the collar on the bottle’, James said.
Alistair Balmforth, MD of one of Britivic’s ‘Top Ten’, Refreshment Systems, was highly complimentary: ‘To be fair’, he said, ‘Britivic’s Spin and Win is the best thing I’ve seen yet as a driver of vending machine sales.’
‘At the end of the day’, James said, ‘it’s in the interests of operators to get more people buying their favourite products out of vending machines, so they are looking for things like this all the time.’
