Rowse Honey / The Rowse Howse of Honey
Brief
2011 was a big year for Rowse with their first ever TV ad airing in February. The UK honey brand wanted to build on this momentum by hosting an offline experience later in the year. The primary ambition was simple - to generate brand awareness amongst their target audience of food focused mothers. On top of this Rowse wanted to bring their brand idea to life with an immersive experience that taught families about Rowse honey, and would help inspire a future generation of honey enthusiasts.
Strategy
To achieve mass awareness amongst such a specific audience we realised we’d have to build the Rowse experience in a pre-existing space. With ABC1 mothers in mind, we targeted family friendly music festivals and eventually selected Latitude Festival as a partner. We wanted the Rowse tent to be more than a branded event; we wanted it to be a festival highlight. Our idea was to turn the experience into an interactive story, where the children acted out a narrative as the main characters.
Activity
We built online momentum before the festival by hosting a family ticket prize draw on Facebook. This was promoted by Rowse owned media and an extensive blogger outreach programme. We started planning the experience itself by concepting, writing and designing a kids' storybook from scratch. Once we had this framework, the role of the event became to bring the story to life. When children arrived at the Rowse Howse of Honey they were greeted by the Queen Bee herself, who asked for their help in a very special mission. She informed them that to complete this task the children would need to be ‘transformed’ into bees, and complete ‘bee training’. Once they had accepted the challenge, the children were given bee aprons, deely bopper antennae and had their faces painted to make them look like bees. As ‘newbees’ they learnt how bees communicate, how they build their hives and how they collect honey through a series of exciting games and activities. Before kids left the tent they were given their own copy of the storybook. The experience was far from over however because inside the book the story continued. There were several tasks and challenges the children had to complete around the festival to accomplish the Queen Bee’s mission. In this way we turned a 30 minute experience into a two day treasure hunt.
Results
The online activity increased the Rowse Facebook following by 1,700 fans, and 1,200 families entered the prize draw. Through a combination of blogger outreach and social media we generated over 250,000 digital impressions with no media budget. Over the three days of the event we had over 3,000 children and parents pass through the experience. We turned 1,500 children into ‘newbees’, and almost half of these completed their missions over the weekend. Due to our prominent position as the sole brand allowed inside the Festival arena, and the fact that we had 1,500 branded ambassadors at the festival (our bee characters) an estimated one third of the total 26,000 festival audience were aware of the Rowse presence.
Latest tweets
Google implements step towards semantic search (and more similar to Wolfram Alpha): Google Changes Search http://t.co/cpTYBbz4 HT @rnadworny
02:07 PM May 17th, 2012
@RGA Which abominable TV show?
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10:00 AM May 17th, 2012
