CASE STUDY: How PepsiCo’s Sting enhanced brand awareness through gaming

Background
Most of Sting's target customers are students who face very rigorous, demanding school and extracurricular schedules in Vietnam. They're always looking for new, amazing experiences and challenges to let off some steam.

Sting became the official sponsor of The Amazing Race Vietnam this year. However, for students, merely watching people on TV travelling around the world wouldn't be enough to experience the Sting brand spirit. So, Sting set out to bring the spirit of the brand, throughout the exciting format of the Amazing Race, to the target customers through an online experience.

Aim
Sting wanted to enhance the brand's spirit "Overcome challenges and live life to the fullest" on the digital space in context of the Amazing Race show.

Execution
Sofresh helped Sting tap into a common interest–gaming–among the brand’s target audience through a flash gaming platform to put the users in the middle of the action while tightly integrating the Sting spirit in a meaningful way.

Players could log onto the site, start with a quiz at one city, play a flash game, and end with a quiz at a second city. Every week, the brand launched two quiz games related to the TV programme or the specific city they are racing through. After the quiz they move through to the flash game. The top 10 players with the fastest times at the end of each week would win prizes; the fastest time overall wins grand prize.

Results

During the 10-week campaign period (18 May to 30 July 2012), Sting launched eight flash games and 20 quiz games across 20 cities.

Total user interaction with the game was more than 3,000 hours. Over 7,000 unique players took part in the game, twice the average of any game campaign the agency had ever done. And with no media buy, the site achieved over 110,000 hits.

According to Millward Brown, a global research agency, the Spontaneous Awareness (brand awareness) and Energy Kick (product specification) points have been increased to maximum 100, while consumer rating for Brand Love has gone up to 98 points and Top of Mind rating has received 5 points more.