Description

VkusVill is a natural product brand with honest and clean ingredients. It's a Russian retail supermarket chain which has its own produce trademark. Moreover VkusVill offers more than 140 different types of natural ice cream.

Problem
The ice cream category has an impulse demand, and those competitors who simply happen to come the consumer's way, while they are making some routine shopping at mass retailers, have a higher chance of success.
In VkusVill, you need to physically go/ surf for an ice cream (whether it's in an offline store or using an app). Therefore, it's crucial for the ice cream category to be top of mind for consumers when associated with the VkusVill brand. Moreover, attracting ice cream customers during the summer season provides extra opportunity to maintain traffic to the store chain in general.
VkusVill's Unique Selling Proposition (USP): The diversity of flavors in its natural ice cream. This variety is the key to driving repeat purchases and increasing overall sales volume by engaging customers with the full range and inspiring them to try different flavors. Challenge: To provide compelling reasons for customers to break free from their habitual choices and try new flavors all summer long.

Solution
The strategy was to use emotions and summer experiences to engage the audience with VkusVill wide ice cream assortment. The goal: to make people crave not just ice cream, but to specifically seek out a VkusVill store to try a particular flavor.

Insight
Russian summers are short, and people want to live them to the fullest, packing in as many new experiences as possible. Many even create "summer plans" or bucket lists in advance to ensure they don't miss a thing.

Idea
For those planning to maximize their fresh summer impressions, VkusVill offers 140 different flavors of MYce cream. We encouraged people to include VkusVill diverse MYce cream flavors into their varied summer plans for an even more exciting and fulfilling experience.

Strategy
While Russians love ice cream, they are quite conservative in their flavor choices. The top three are: Plombir (45%), Vanilla (21.5%), and Chocolate (21%). All other flavors lag far behind, with Crème Brûlée (4%) being the closest to the top three.
140 flavors at VkusVill are an exciting challenge. However, given the category's conservative consumer behavior, it was crucial not to simply announce the large selection, but to propose new consumption scenarios and new ideas for summer activities, where trying a new ice cream flavor would be an organic part of the experience.
Therefore, our outreach efforts focused not only on informing consumers about the different flavors available, but also on promoting summer vacation ideas that involve ice cream.
In our engagement and conversion channels, our activities were aimed to expand the consumption repertoire.

Realization
VkusVill launched the “Summer Plans” advertising campaign, which paired different VkusVill MYce cream flavors with exciting summer activities. Through a bright and effortlessly summer-like creative style, the campaign inspired the audience to seek new summer impressions, including a new summer “MYce cream” impression.
The advertising campaign was implemented between 27.05.24 and 31.07.24

Сommunication channels
Channels for Building Awareness: Subway (metro), OOH , and targeted display advertising in digital media.

Channels for Engagement and Conversion:
Owned Media: POSM, Indoor advertising, the app, self-checkout kiosks, social media, the landing page, e-mail, and push notifications.

Gamification mechanics:
1. Telegram game “MYce cream Scraper” (18.06 - 15.07) – create a MYce cream tower from 140 flavors before the walruses steal it. 100 participants received 1000 bonuses weekly, among those who collected the entire tower, five major prizes of 20,000 bonus points each were raffled.
2. "MYce cream Bingo" Dedicated Landing Page (1-29.07): Every week, a new selection of 35 flavors of ice cream with a unique number was published. To participate, users had to purchase at least 2 items from that week's selection. At the end of each week, 6 winning flavors were selected. The more flavors a participant guessed, the better the prize was. Those who guessed all 6 “winning” flavors at least once competed for the prize - a trip to Antarctica for two.
Gamification and promotion mechanics were highlighted in digital, POSM, and OOH advertising.

Results
Total coverage: plan 1 million/ fact 1.131 million
ROMI: 143%
ROI: 125%
Ice cream sales growth, units: +30% YoY
Ice cream sales growth, revenue: +47% YoY
Whole VkusVill chain sales growth in revenue, plan 5%/ fact 9%
Ice cream category newcomers growth: 310K customers
Number of new customers with their first ice cream order: 41K customers

Credits

VkusVill
Egor Kalinovsky — Marketing Communications Leader
Daria Bessonova — Senior Marketing Communications Manager
Elizaveta Sporykhina — Art Director
Victoria Rodionova — Senior Copywriter

GREAT
Ilya Litnitsky — Account Director
Tatyana Shipkova — Head group account
Alina Vedernikova — Junior account manager
Ruslan Kravchenko — Creative Director
Vadim Solovyov — Creative group head
Anna Vygonaylova — Creative group head
Mark Dubonosov — Art Director
Polina Yakovleva — Art Director