About Alula
Alula is a new premium infant milk formula (IMF) product, belonging to Aspen. The IMF is an advanced complex care product that provides comprehensive nutrients to meet babies’ growth needs.
In September 2017, Alula – with the help of Sinorbis – launched in the Chinese market with an all-encompassing, multi-channel marketing campaign under the overarching theme ‘Sleep better, grow better’. While WeChat marketing campaign wasn’t the only channel used, it played an important part in reaching and engaging Alula’s target audience.
Phase 1: Building awareness for the link between sleep and growth
To successfully position and differentiate Alula in a sensitive market where customers rarely switch from their preferred brands, the company started the launch campaign with content initiatives that linked the quality of babies’ sleep to their growth.
During this period, Alula worked with a vertical site aimed at young mums to conduct a survey on the quality of their baby’s sleep – over 20,000 parents responded. Shortly after that, WeChat parenting and lifestyle KOLs started joining the discussion with their perspectives on the topic.
Phase 2: Alula enters the market as the premium IMF brand meeting babies' growth needs
In the second phase of the launch campaign, Alula entered the scene as the premium IMF brand meeting babies’ growth needs. To achieve this, the company published the survey results from the previous phase in a whitepaper, further strengthening the concept of ‘sleep better, grow better’ and positioning brand awareness in this area.
To take it one step further in terms of user engagement, Alula also created a WeChat HTML5 game that allowed parents to compare their baby’s sleep quality to that of survey respondents. Participants would receive messages like ‘your baby’s sleep quality beats 20% of the babies in China’. The interactive nature of the game along with the shareability of the results proved to be highly popular with digitally savvy and competitive Chinese parents.
Both the whitepaper and the game were heavily promoted via Alula’s WeChat official account, WeChat accounts operated by vertical sites and KOLs.
Alula whitepaper
Phase 3: Driving conversion and sustained growth
Once the brand’s foundations were established through the big launch, it was time to turn the attention towards sales conversion and sustained growth.
躺赢 is a social term Alula created for this campaign. It literally translates into: ‘when your baby lies down, your baby will win’. The word is easy to understand and remember, ideal foundations for user-generated content.
躺赢 Posters
To tap into the power of word-of-mouth marketing, Alula then published the 躺赢 information on WeChat and encouraged their followers to either reply with the keywords 爱羽乐好睡眠 or with a photo of their sleeping baby for the chance to win Alula products.
A list of winners of the lucky draw was also published on WeChat, which again increased the campaign’s reach as the winners shared the happy news with their network.
Some of the 躺赢 photos of participants
To keep Alula’s followers engaged, the brand continues to post weekly content on their WeChat official account. The content themes range from educational articles supporting the brand such as its history, source of the milk and company news, to general parenting and lifestyle tips. Special promotions that link back to Alula’s JD store are also featured regularly to close the loop between awareness, engagement and purchase.
