Challenge
KitKat has been synonymous with taking a break since the 1950s, but they wanted to refresh this positioning with a new advertising campaign that could be scaled across a diverse range of markets. With such long-standing, timeless and iconic brand positioning, they had a huge amount of equity to utilise and protect. They needed to refresh consumers’ understanding of what having a break meant to people across different cultures so that it could be activated in a distinct way that stayed true to KitKat’s brand essence.Approach
KitKat believes in the power of building campaigns based on validated consumer insights. They wanted to start early in their process to maximise impact by iteratively improving their ads throughout various development stages. We designed a collaborative research programme that involved the brand, their agency and Kantar global advertising effectiveness experts. The process lasted 9 months and involved a multi-disciplinary end-to-end approach which incorporated LINK qualitative, AI and survey approaches at critical moments throughout the ad development cycle. In the early stages, LINK qualitative was used to explore and identify a winning idea which could form the foundation of the campaign.Insight
It became evident that people from across the world feel their breaks are under attack. While most people admit they take enough breaks, just 34% believe those breaks are good enough because they have less control of their schedule and that they are distracted or interrupted by having to multi-task. The early qualitative research identified the invaluable human truth that many people feel the need to break better. Based on this and other brand specific insights, the ad agency developed an excellent script that was ready for testing around the world.The first challenge was choosing the right soundtrack. LINK AI was then employed to quickly and efficiently test the animatic with various soundtracks globally to identify Queen’s I want to break free as the option with the broadest appeal across markets. With this knowledge the KitKat team was able to confidently proceed with in-depth tests for the animatics which were then tested with the LINK+ survey tool around the world.
Consumer feedback was very positive across most markets. Naturally, cultural nuances in some markets dictated varying performance, which thanks to LINK+, we were able to identify and recommend optimizations for. In India in particular, lack of cultural nuance surrounding breaks was shown to be holding back local response to the global execution.