The Covid-19 lockdown has confined people to their homes and brands are not able to shoot their usual ad films with proper setups. But the show must go on — and so must brands’ engagements with consumers.
Brands are trying various means to reach out to consumers. Content marketing has come to the rescue of brands in the form of user-generated content, influencer-led content, social media challenges and others. For example, home-shot music videos, live sessions on fitness and well-being, live concerts from home, various art and craft videos, social media challenges and much more.
An important means to reach out to and engage with the audience for the food and beverage category is cooking and recipe videos and social media contests related to it. During the lockdown, people are actively cooking and trying new dishes at home. So it makes sense for brands to engage with consumers and increase brand consumption and visibility in the market by creating content around food.
Recently, ITC’s Sunfeast Dark Fantasy collaborated with Chef Kunal Kapur for the #DarkFantasyLockdownCreations campaign, wherein he invited the audience to send their own recipes using Dark Fantasy. He went live on Instagram from the brand's Instagram handle to create three desserts with the cookies. This campaign is a part of the bigger ITC Kitchen Project with content marketing agency Sheeko. Going live from the brands' social media pages is an innovative way to attract new page followers and audience. The day he went live from the brand's page, a spike of 900 followers was seen on the brand's Instagram handle.
Here’s the video posted by Kapur for the campaign:
In an estimated media value of around Rs 3.5 lakh, the brand was able to reach out to an audience of more than five lakh people through the campaign.
Sheeko Brandscore graph showing campaign performance on Instagram:
From the below Sheeko graph, it’s visible that Dark Fantasy was not active in doing influencer marketing this year. The last campaign it did on Instagram was in December last year.
Sheeko Brandscore graph of the brand’s performance during for a year: