Nestlé: Ok Nestlé! Tell me more about food.

Vibha Gupta, Jitender Dabas

Source: WARC Awards, Bronze, Effective Innovation, 2020
Downloaded from WARC

Food conglomerate Nestlé created a Google Voice-powered knowledge service platform to position
itself as a nutritional expert and build brand trust among millennial mothers in India.

Nestlé is a major food and beverage player in the country, with a century old presence across
categories from confectionery to baby food, and wanted to play a more meaningful role in its
customers' lives.
A nutritional survey across India revealed that micronutrient deficiency among children had
reached epidemic proportions, even among the well-off, who were spending more time, effort and
money than ever, on food.
Nestlé forged cross-functional partnerships with tech platforms, content aggregators and search
platforms to create Ask Nestlé, a nutritional resource that included an AI-based Nina assistant to
answer mothers' questions, and launched it via a multimedia campaign.
Ask Nestlé achieved more than 3m engagements, strengthened Nestlé's nutrition credentials and
contributed to an 84% increase in corporate brand trust scores.

Campaign details
Brand: Nestlé
Brand owner: Nestlé
Lead agency: McCann Worldgroup
Contributing agencies: Digitas, Sensforth
Market: India
Industries: Food industry (general)
Media channels: Content marketing, Integrated, Mobile & apps, Online video, Print - general, unspecified,
Public relations, Search marketing, Social media, Television, Voice, chatbots, Websites & microsites, Word of
mouth, influencers
Budget: 3 - 5 million
Executive summary
This case presents the story of how Nestlé stepped out of its comfort zone and launched a new service to play a
more meaningful role in the lives of its consumers.

A nutritional survey across India revealed that micronutrient deficiency among children had reached epidemic
proportions. Nestlé, a leading food company, wanted to do something about it. For once, it decided not to launch
another product, its core strength; instead it launched a new knowledge service platform. Ask Nestlé – India's
first corporate service that answered all the nutrition-related queries of Indian mothers with children aged
between two and 12 years old – was a solution previously unheard of in the category.

Nestlé forged cross-functional partnerships with technology platforms, content aggregators and search platforms
to give mothers access to trained nutrition experts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that they could make
better, informed nutrition choices for their children. A mobile-first service, Ask Nestlé was present wherever
mothers went looking for information – search, social media, blogs, content and mass media.

The knowledge service platform was powered with Google Voice, and included an AI-based Nestlé Nina
assistant, a native chatbot along with the website that hosted the entire eco-system. This initiative completely
changed the perception of the brand from a leading food company, to a nutrition information services and
knowledge partner.

Market background and objectives

India was staring at a massive health epidemic

The majority of India's children were suffering from preventable health diseases:

More than 50% of Indian children under the age of five were anaemic.1
There will be an estimated 17 million obese children in India by 2025.2
With one in three children malnourished.3

Unfortunately, India was raising a generation of kids who were missing out on realising their true potential.

Enter Nestlé

Nestlé is a major food and beverage player in India, with a century-old presence across dairy, confectionery,
breakfast cereals, snacks and baby food categories. It is committed to providing 'taste, nutrition, health and
wellness' through its product offerings.

As a brand built on the promise of 'good food, good life', Nestlé decided to take on the unique health challenge
that India was facing.

An initial inquiry into the reasons behind the deteriorating health of India's children revealed that, contrary to
popular assumption, the nutritional deficiencies were as prevalent among the affluent classes as among the
nation's poor.
This was ironic, because urban Indians were spending more time, more effort and more money on food:

There had been a 50% increase in interest in health topics.4

14.5m searches for health and nutrition.5
45% of annual household expenditure was on food.6

Challenge

On the one hand, health and nutrition was occupying India's mind space more than ever before and on the
other, the health of India's children was deteriorating. As a major food player in India, Nestlé decided to get to
the core of this unique health situation.

Trust is the most critical currency in the business of food and through this effort, Nestlé wanted to cement its
position as mother's most-trusted partner when it came to matters of nutrition.

Our challenge: how could Nestlé partner the Indian mother in making good food choices for her children?

Objectives

Objective 1: engage mothers in a conversation about nutrition.

KPI: engagement scores among mothers.
Objective 2: strengthen Nestlé's nutrition credentials.
KPI: Nestlé and nutrition association scores.
Objective 3: become mothers' trusted ally.
KPI: brand trust scores among mothers.

Insight and strategic thinking

Our key cohort: the millennial mother.

Primarily residing in metros and Tier-I cities and belonging to the SEC A, B – middle to upper socioeconomic
class – she was an involved mother who was greatly invested in her child's growth and development.

The truth about the Indian millennial mother: today's Indian mother was unlike any previous generation of
mothers. She was more educated, had more access to healthy food options and, most importantly, was
technologically empowered.

With Google by her side, she was just a click away from all the information that she could possibly need to raise
healthy kids. Yet, the current generation of kids were suffering from preventable illnesses. We were talking to
the millennial mother who had access to every conceivable good food option, yet her children were not healthy.

Our starting point was to understand what the problem in India really was. Why, in spite of access and
availability, were India's children unhealthy?

The discovery: on studying the millennial mother's life closely, we found that she was feeling overwhelmed by
too much information and contrasting views on what was the right thing to do.
Source: Agency-client internal research

She was unable to take decisions and choose what was best for her child, and paediatricians and doctors had
limited focus and time to answer her everyday nutritional questions. Social media and blogs gave her opinion-
based information that was largely impersonal and unstructured. Caught between generational wisdom and
modern nutritional fads and trends, the mother was left feeling anxious and confused.

Interestingly, her problem was not about the availability of choice. It was about making the right choice.

Our approach

We decided to solve this problem for her by becoming her ally in the decision-making process. Because we
believe that only when a mother knows better, she can feed better

With this insight, we shifted the axis of the health and nutrition discourse in India: from better food, to better
knowledge.

Our idea

For once, a food company decided not to launch another product. Instead, we launched a new knowledge
service called Ask Nestlé: a first-of-its-kind solution that did not reside on the shelf but was always present in
mum's hand (held device).

Implementation, including creative and media development

Execution strategy

Ask Nestlé was India's first nutrition service specifically tailored to the needs of mothers of two- to 12-year-old
children.

Step 1. Data-driven understanding of the Indian mother's questions and queries.

Step 2. Mapping insights to Nestlé research and expertise.
Step 3. Identifying key content buckets.
Step 4. Studying the Indian mother's search-to-solution behaviour, to design the service ecosystem.
 Step 5. Forging cross-functional partnerships to build the platform.
Step 6. Beta testing and improving the platform.
Step 7. Launching the platform across media.

We partnered with Google to gain a data-driven understanding of the Indian mum's major pain-points when it
came to her child's nutrition and mapped that data with Nestlé's expertise and research.

We mapped the Indian mother's journey from search to solution, to design the service ecosystem. The Ask
Nestlé service platform was powered with Google Voice and a Nestlé Nina AI assistant and gave mothers 24/7
access to trained nutrition experts.

The ecosystem was designed to understand the nutritional needs of every child to give customised solutions to
the mother, whenever she needed it (real-time solutions), wherever she needed them (social media, voice-
search-activated, both on web and mobile).

A mobile-first service, Ask Nestlé gave the Indian mother access to custom meal plans, growth trackers, a food
diary and recipes empowering them to feed their children better.

Finally, to introduce the service, we launched an integrated communication campaign spread across web,
mobile, social media, print, an influencer network and television:
 We introduced the service with print and two television commercials.
We leveraged Facebook to answer daily nutrition queries.
We ran digital films on YouTube and on the Nestlé website.
We leveraged the power of mum influencer networks (Momspresso, Parentune) to partner mothers.

Integration, collaboration and iteration were the three key pillars of the Ask Nestlé campaign.

Performance against objectives

The Ask Nestlé platform was born out of Nestlé India's commitment to play its part in solving the country's
looming health epidemic. We wanted to become the Indian mother's trusted partner in making informed food
choices for her child and, in the process, strengthen Nestlé's nutritional credentials.

And our unlikely solution exceeded our expectations in delivering on the set objectives.

Objective 1: engage mothers in a conversation about nutrition.

We got mothers to talk nutrition:

More than 3.2m consumer engagements on nutrition.

42,000 hours of engagement.7

Objective 2: strengthen Nestlé's nutrition credentials.

We got mothers to think of Nestlé when they thought of nutrition.

Objective 3: become mothers' trusted ally.

We became mothers' ally and forged a long-term relationship with them:

More than 25,000 meal plans were created on the platform.

70% of mums were between 25 and 34 years old.
66% return users – a category benchmark.7

Why are these results significant?

Anyone working with mothers knows that their attention is at a premium and they are very uncompromising when
it comes to prioritising their time, more so for brand engagements. For a brand to command their time and
attention, it must be relevant to them.

The degree and quality of engagement that Ask Nestlé was able to generate was unprecedented in our market
for any corporate brand communication. Additionally, this campaign was not supported by any of the consumer-
facing sub-brands from the Nestlé portfolio.

Mothers' strong engagement with the brand and platform was proof that we were able to solve a real problem for
them.

Lessons learned
Success starts at the end of your comfort zone

As a major food conglomerate, the obvious solution for Nestlé would have been to invest more in its health food
portfolio and, as communication partner, our obvious response would have been to develop an evocative,
memorable creative campaign around it. This case has been a journey out of our respective comfort zones into
the hitherto uncharted territories of tech, data and service. Ask Nestlé was a category first in India.

We also learned that collaboration is the only way forward and that in order to come up with the most effective
solutions, integration and idea-sharing are crucial. And that there is never a perfect solution. Unlike a brand
campaign, launching a service platform means that you have the chance to constantly improve and evolve your
creative output.

So, in a nutshell, step out of your comfort zone and shake some norms up. And, doing it together, makes it
better.

Footnotes
1. NFHS-4
2. PubMed: World obesity, facts and causes, 2017
3. Census, 2011
4. Google internal data, January to December 2018
5. Google Search internal data, FMCG: year in search, 2018
6. Hansa Cequity Report, 2019
7. Google Analytics, September 2019
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