PepsiCo brings the World Cup spirit in-store

Cashing in on the cricket season, PepsiCo, the official beverage and snacks partner of ICC World Cup 2015, recently launched an eye catchy in-store campaign across India to capture its target audience. Executed by Brand Evoke Systems & Creative Solutions Pvt. Ltd., PepsiCo kick-started their first phase of Cricket World Cup campaign "Chip n Sip to the world cup” at modern retail outlets from mid of January'15. The seasonal communication grabbed the attention of shoppers with its offer - "Buy any Lay's and Pepsi together and stand a chance to win tickets for the World Cup in Australia”.

Speaking to POP, Kaushik Bhattacharjee, Founder and MD, Brand Evoke Systems & Creative Solutions said, "We were briefed to bring the campaign alive at selected stores of HyperCity, Tesco and ABRL through innovative collateral designs that can engage the consumers to participate in the contest to win tickets for Australia.”

"We came up with designs that can create immediate consumer connect by branding the trolleys, available facades, pillar branding, category branding, floor stack branding, wobblers on category shelves, tent cards on checkout counters, standees and created a drop box FSU for the "Fly to Australia” contest specially for Star Bazaar customers,” he added.

Following the first phase, the second PepsiCo consumer promotion activity across retail stores started from February 14 and continued March 31, 2015. For this second round communications, the brand launched its'Big Match Offer' &'Fun Match Offer'.

Bhattacharjee opines, "Our agency was briefed to come up with an eye catchy, out-of-the-box design for a category arch to be placed over the beverages category at Hypercity, Malad including a cricket pitch within the category aisle. Additionally, the promotional offer was also to be branded across all possible touch points including escalators, staircase, pillar, trolleys, entrance pillar and end-caps. We were also asked to come up with separate designs of FSU's to be deployed across 15 stores of Tesco Star Bazaar and 45 stores of Reliance Retail. In addition to the above, the promotional offers were also branded at select MORE Mega stores by Brand EvoSys that included category arch, category headers, floor stacks and sensormatic. We also branded cash till headers, end-caps and deployed 4'x4' FSU's at select stores of Spencer's Retail.”

Crossing hurdles

The designing of so many separate elements varying between each retail chain, was a mammoth task for the design team of Brand EvoSys, where they were required to track and design all the collaterals on time.

"We had to work on quite a few options for the key elements and many changes were made before the final designs were approved. It took us almost three whole weeks to complete all the designs and get the final approvals. Since the designing and approval process absorbed a major timeline of such a massive project, we were also under pressure to get the production and implementation completed in a very short period of ten days,” Bhattacharjee mentions.

The FSU's for Tesco and Reliance Retail were manufactured in Mumbai under the supervision of Brand EvoSys, where the agency prioritised dispatches for the other cities to ensure timely execution by their local team. The branding elements were printed and fabricated at local levels.
 
Talking about the retail execution and its challenges, Bhattacharjee shares, "While we ensured that production and dispatches happens on time to avoid any delay in implementation, permissions were not in place at certain stores and that eventually delayed execution by a day or two. Also, the major challenge faced by the team was in the execution of the category arch at Hypercity, Malad which took us an entire night and the next morning. With so many elements involved, we had to do the assembling work very cautiously in the store and then place it on the top of the Beverage Category.”