Building emotional connections: how foodpanda fosters brand love with brand ambassador Pau-Pau

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by Samuel Pordengerg Mar 17, 2023 News
Building emotional connections: how foodpanda fosters brand love with brand ambassador Pau-Pau

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Understanding consumer motivations and knowing how to influence them will become even more important for brands in a fast paced market. Pricing and discounts used to be the main motivator for customers, but this is no longer the case for younger shoppers.

They prefer to purchase from brands they trust and like. In Singapore, DeVries Global found that 98% of Gen Z respondents are willing to pay a premium for transparent brands.

Almost three in four consumers in Singapore will stick to brands they like, according to a survey.

Younger consumers prefer to support brands that they relate to and that they are transparent. It's important for brands to be able to relate and engage with consumers.

Brand love is a powerful driver for business success. People who are emotionally connected to a brand are less likely to switch.

It is possible to balance tactical-driven campaigns with emotional-driven campaigns in order to showcase the values the brand stands for in an authentic manner.

Two years ago, foodpanda had a challenge. It had to find a way to communicate what it stood for. Pau came to be that way.

Since we introduced our brand ambassador Pau-Pau a year ago, he has become a well-loved friend to fans all over the region, including Singapore.

Through Pau-Pau, we are able to expand the ways in which we interact with our consumers, especially younger users of the app.

Consumers are engaging with foodpanda.

Pau-Pau has made it easier for us to work with brands that are like minded. He has made it possible for us to interact with our customers in fun and unexpected ways, such as with his own food flavours with the ice cream cookie & co, CRUST and Famous Amos, and he even took over the flash coffee stores.

We were given more ways to engage with our customers. When offline events resumed, foodpanda became a main sponsor for music and food festival GastroBeats, featuring a branded zone with an optical illusion area, photo booth, and games to win Pau-Pau merchandise.

It was the most visited zone with more than 450,000 footfalls and thousands of organic user-generated content.

There will be a foodpanda branded zone in 2020.

Overt sales content doesn't do as well as content that is more emotional. We can see the difference in performance on newer channels.

Pau-Pau gives us the ability to create non-tactical content that can be used on the internet. We can still appeal to the preferences of our consumers while letting them know of our promotions if we include them in a manner that is non-overt.

Since the introduction of Pau-Pau, the average engagement rate on our social media channels has increased by 5% and all of our social media channels have experienced steady organic growth.

There is a meme called Pau-Pau corporate life.

There has been an increase in interest in gamified shopping. We ran a campaign where customers could win an exclusive Pau-Pau plushie by completing a stamp card on the platform. All 500 Pau-Pau plushies were redeemed in the first few days of the campaign.

If it weren't for Pau-Pau, the shift in direction to meet changing consumer needs wouldn't have been successful.

Customers are placed at the center of marketing campaigns.

We want to take Pau-Pau to the next level and have people experience life to its fullest and live like a panda. We want people to free up their time and energy so that they can focus on what matters to them.

The campaign included buses with 3D installations of Pau-Pau.

We created a new self-care TikTok series, where the content is not about the platform and its services, but comforting messages such as trusting the process and timing of things in life.

The best performing video in this series got 1.2 million views and 300 comments, all of them positive. As viewers relate to the video, they mention in the comments that they use foodpanda as they feel that foodpanda knows them.

The first time we got our customers involved through a real-time out-of- home user-generated campaign was when we invited them to share how they live their life to the fullest by uploading photos on the social media platform.

The photos were on display for seven weeks on 40 screens.

User-generated content is real-time out of home.

In highly competitive industries, brands that are not sensitive to the latest trends will fall out of step very fast.

In taking the time and effort to understand consumer behavior, brands will be better equipped to roll out engaging content for their customers.

Finding and incorporating that differentiating factor to stand out among the competition seems to be the likely recipe for long-term success, and we are happy to have found that in Pau-Pau.

AnnaLisa Andrulli is the marketing director of foodpanda.