How Sodexo repositioned as a digital-first company using digital content & PR

CHALLENGE

In its 20th year in India, Sodexo had to adopt a digital approach replacing the ubiquitous paper vouchers that the company used until now. It wasn't all easy for Sodexo, known for its iconic paper voucher, to make this digital leap, as they faced numerous large and small challenges. The campaign kicked off in early May 2017. After demonetization and RBI guidelines to discontinue vouchers by Dec-end, it was a task to rapidly change its imagery to a digital-first company among clients & consumers.

STRATEGY

Changing the perception and brand awareness of an offline-heavy brand with was a hefty task at hand. Pouncing on the digital bandwagon and efficiently shifting the strategy to ‘digital-first’ gave Sodexo the ammunition it needed. Our task was to reach out to relevant stakeholders from traffic-heavy publishing portals to HR organizations and subsequent partners. Content creation around offline associations with Zeta, Spar, Chai Point, Grofers, mSwipe, Innoviti and Premium Pass further reinforced Sodexo’s focus on developing excellent content. We strategically devised the content strategy & focused on the prominent platforms consumed by target audience (Chief Human Resources Officer, Employees). Sodexo initiated its campaign to create ripples across the digital universe. The core of digital campaign execution strategy was choosing the right platform, content types & communications, turning our content into liquid content & making it easily discoverable over the Internet. The recipe behind the perfect performance of this campaign lies in an exact and opportune mix of timing, audience targeting, distribution channels, amplification, seeding, and cross-promotion on multiple platforms. Content Velocity (CV) is what we wanted to achieve = (views + articles + conversations + impressions) / time. We also monitored and analyzed more than 20,000 stories and 500K+ tweets (in 5 months using Meltwater) and started amplifying the same on owned assets. We observed that Share of Voice (SOV) for Sodexo increased dramatically by 550% which shows the success of our amplification strategy. Key guidelines for executing the campaign:

• Associating with CAT-A digital publishing platforms across beats (Business, HR, Fintech, Technology, Start- up) to showcase Sodexo’s digital infrastructure and the new product portfolio in less amount of time.
• Driving awareness around shift in Sodexo’s erstwhile reputation of a paper voucher company to a digital-first organization through content delivery via key publications, portals & category influencers.
• Building thought leadership of key spokespeople in the digital ecosystem in line with the industry developments through guest columns and authored articles

EXECUTION

The core execution of digital publishing was on three pillars Creation, Curation & Distribution of content.