#TeaForTrump – Viral marketing case study

Challenge

The intention and endeavour behind this intervention were to spread the word about the goodness of organic, green tea. #TeaForTrump digital and content marketing activation focused on inviting users to send their requests to Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) directly so that he drinks the green tea and gets a fresh perspective in life. Amidst very real chances of Mr Donald Trump’s becoming one of the world’s most powerful man, he continued to elicit strong concerns around the world owing to his extreme views often bordering on sexism, racism and beyond. In a modern take of the Gandhian principle of peaceful persuasion, TE-A-ME Teas took a friendly approach to changing Trump for the better. After all, green tea has proved to fight against harmful free radicals and cleanse the mind and bodies, helping one to maintain a healthy balance The campaign kicked off on 14th July, four days before 2016 Republican National Convention on 19th July. It was a real challenge to start the campaign as there were very high chances to get lost in the clouds of conversations around Donald Trump.

Strategy

TE-A-ME teas delivered four years’ supply of green tea to Donald Trump. The special package was hand-delivered to Trump Tower, New York in a good-humored attempt to cleanse Trump’s system. We captured the excitement and anticipation in a video as New Yorkers cheered the two saree clad women who delivered the special #TeaForTrump. The campaign was conceived and weaved around the wheels of real-time content marketing. Real-time marketing for this campaign, owing to its nature, required preparation for the worst and best case scenarios. After a lot of pre-planning and brainstorming, we arrived at more than 20 scenes and created tactical plans to tackle each one of them. Unlike any traditional PR Firm or PR Agency, we followed our consulting framework and moved along with the same thought process throughout the campaign.

Key guidelines for executing #TeaForTrump

• Since we were dealing with a critical profile, we had to be ready for positive/negative scenarios in regards to online reputation management. Since the campaign was mainly routed through the medium of Twitter, we had to monitor tweets and responses from all over the world.
• A sound, yet flexible, media plan was put in place keeping in mind the target audiences. Since the campaign was around Mr. Trump, we wanted the US media to take note of our campaign
• A detailed content seeding framework was created along with the Integrated Channel Strategy
• The bold nature of this campaign made it ORM sensitive, no matter how much planning we did, there were surprising responses, thus, keeping a tab on conversations around @RealDonaldTrump was important.
• Various crisis situations were chalked out and accompanying crisis management strategies were set in place.

Execution of this content marketing campaign

Content Distribution

A good piece of content is the essential bedrock of any digital campaign, but it's not the end goal. The key to success is content reaching every potential prosumer. #TeaforTrump campaign started its journey from India to create the ripples across the digital universe. The core of digital campaign execution strategy was real-time marketing, 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 Velocity is what we wanted to achieve = (views + articles + conversations + impressions) / time For the first 72 hours, a team of 11 members @armdigital were working day & night to capture & engage into the real-time emotions and reactions activated through #TeaForTrump & #DrinkTheTea across the globe. We also monitored & analysed more than 200K tweets (all across the world) and observed that Share of Voice (SOV) for TE-A-ME in Donald Trump conversations was very high during first 48hours of RTM which clearly indicated the success of our amplification strategy. ref: Planning behind Tea for Trump real time marketing campaign Given that we were dealing with two time zones simultaneously, once the video started being picked up, constant monitoring and ORM was at the base of our execution. Validation of the assumptions made in the pre-planning stage & modification for better results wherever deemed fit was the need of the hour. Real Time Marketing has many versions and we have our own proprietary way of looking at it. There is no one size fit all formula, for TE-A-ME our approach was lead by customized RTM Framework. RTM planning starts along with the conceptualization stage, there can be a lot of scenarios that can happen after you publish your content. A lot of pre-planning is involved, we brainstormed more than 20 scenarios and created tactical plans for each one of them. We followed that framework and moved along with them throughout the campaign.

Campaign Results

Below is the glimpse from the campaign which was monitored in more than 80 countries

Awards

• Most creative PR Stunt in South East Asia by Marketing Magazine in PR Awards 2017
• Viral Marketing campaign - India Digital Awards 2017
• Best Viral Marketing Campaign - Drivers of Digital Award - 2016
• Most innovative use of social media IPRCCA 2016
• Best Viral Marketing Campaign by Campaign in CIDCA 2017
• Best Content Marketing Strategy - FOXGLOVE 2017