Loyal-tea and obsession is Chatime’s marketing brew
“Well that will never work” thought top marketer at bubble tea giant Chatime after ad agency revealed big brand plans. Now the CMO is eating her words along with her boba ball-filled tea after audience “laps up” wacky marketing efforts that give best sales yet.
When a brand is as worshipped as Chatime, your marketing can be as crazy and disruptive as you like as no matter what, your audience will “lap it up”, according to the bubble tea outlet’s top marketer.
Off the back of recent highly successful marketing campaigns, chief marketing officer (CMO) at Chatime, Joanna Robinson, explained how creativity, disruption, fun and “blowing sh*t up” has led to some major marketing wins.
Its most fruitful ad campaign this year, and first major above-the-line push since the pandemic, “Satisfy Your Strange” by ad agency Special Group gave Chatime its biggest week of sales ever. The campaign also saw a 310 per cent social engagement lift across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, 46 million earned impressions from media, and a near 6 per cent lift in brand awareness.
“People really do feel really emotional about Chatime – obsessed really – because it’s a brand that’s cool, but not to a point where it’s not about being inclusive and as a brand that’s something people just really gravitate to,” Ms Robinson said.
“The young audience just loves that it's a bit edgy. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a bit stupid. It’s almost like its own language.”
She said the brief was simple enough, to “pull apart all of Chatime’s market research and put it back together in a way that was different, disruptive, and would blow sh*t up”.
The March campaign was brought to life via a variety of out-of-home (OOH) ad tactics, plus an extensive digital campaign to target Chatime’s hedonist digital natives.
It brought new customers into Chatime tea breweries while also drawing in regular customers to relive their first Chatime experience.
Originally a Taiwan-based business, Chatime has been operating in Australia for 13 years and has grown its franchise network to 150 stores nationally, having just expanded regionally into Mildura in Victoria, with bigger plans to expand into New Zealand and the US.
With a target demographic of 14-28 year olds, which in reality skews much wider on either end of the scale according to the CMO, Chatime’s marketing heavily plays on the archetype of the entertainer – early trend adopters and hedonists who are passionate about life and love to influence their friends.
As a result, the former Unilever and Colgate Palmolive marketer said it’s easy enough for Chatime to be creative and disruptive with its marketing, because it’s “something the audience just laps up”.
The Sydney-based marketer admitted there’s been times she’s doubted the ideas and creative behind some of the brand’s campaigns, confessing she didn’t think a TikTok challenge as part of the Satisfy Your Strange campaign – which turned out to be a viral success with a total reach of over 20 million impressions – would work.
“We had our highest sales week ever off the back of that campaign and engagement across all of our socials. TikTok went viral with this AR filter of being able to turn yourself into a boba ball (the edible pearls in bubble tea), which when the agency presented I thought ‘well, that will never work’.
“Everyone loved the campaign. Not only did we do that for less than half a million dollars, but it’s actually still going and we’re about to do round 2 with our charity partners Canteen and Headspace.”
With major above-the-line campaigns on hold during the pandemic, most of Chatime’s ad dollars over the past few years have been spent on new product launch campaigns, a few Chatime store takeovers and smaller social campaigns.
Chatime’s second major campaign saw it team up with Universal Pictures in June for the release of the Jurassic World: Dominion movie. The co-branding campaign was designed to create buzz and drive brand awareness via OOH marketing, a limited-edition tea range and several TikTok competitions. With 12.9m impressions and a combined reach of 2.3 million people, the campaign exceeded expectations.
A major driving force behind Chatime’s marketing activity is its 1.2 million member-strong Loyal-Tea program, which launched in September in 2018. A whole section of Chatime’s marketing team is dedicated to mining data from the app to use to power future marketing campaigns.
As part of the tea brand’s plans to make the brand as accessible as possible, it launched DIY tea drinks as well as ready-to-go drinks in supermarkets at the end of last year, with 3000 Woolworths stores now stocking Chatime products. Chatime has also inked deals with other supermarket chains which it’s set to soon reveal.
As a franchise model, however, the marketeer said it’s vital that the overall marketing strategy of Chatime still protects the “holy grail” franchise stores as they “will always be the hero”.
“DIY kits and ready-to-drink products – there’s a place for them, but they will never be at the expense of what is our hero product,” the university sessional lecturer on marketing explained. “Our business partners are a fundamental part of our business model.”
Ms Robinson admitted that while the brand’s franchisees were nervous about launching Chatime in supermarkets, fearing it would drive business away from the bricks and mortar stores, it had the opposite effect.
“It’s expanded the brand awareness to a much wider level as Chatime now has a wider audience to consider than those coming to the tea breweries – but at the end of the day, we will always make sure that [the stores] are the ultimate holy grail of how we deploy our products.”
With plenty going on at Chatime HQ, including two international market expansions on the horizon, Ms Robinson said the reality of modern retail still weighs on her mind.
“Retail these days is really tough. You have to be more agile. You have to think smarter, you have to move faster. I think you have to constantly challenge yourselves within the business,” she said.
Yet she remains firm in her stance that work needs to be paired with fun, and that’s why she believes Chatime’s marketing works so well.
“The world got really serious there for a while and that’s one of the reasons the Satisfy Your Strange campaign worked so well because it’s a bit of fun, and a bit silly. Having fun is important – come to work, do good work, kick goals but also have fun,” she said.
Looking ahead, Chatime is already working on concepts for the Metaverse in the Satisfy Your Strange world and non-fungible tokens, as well as looking into new merchandise and apparel.
More Coverage
Are these the best ads from Super Bowl 59?
Forget the game result, was this the best Super Bowl advertising yet? Marketers were asked their expert opinions on the most entertaining and effective ads | WATCH
Can Aussie brands leverage the Super Bowl hype?
At $US8m for a 30-second advertising slot, the Super Bowl has become a major event for fans and brands. With the celebrity-studded ads regularly attracting global headlines, why don’t more local brands leverage the moment?