A Social Media Campaign for Hokey Pokey Ice Cream

A SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN FOR HOKEY POKEY ICE CREAM

Nguyen Chau Ngoc Bao

ID: 17229056

Tokyo International University

Executive Summary

This report demonstrates a designed project for Hokey Pokey Ice Cream in order to acquire and retain profitable customers, and create buzz about Hokey Pokey on a capitalized platform with limited marketing resources while still ensuring a high return on investment. In order to accomplish this campaign and bring the best results to the company, Instagram is chosen to be the platform to demonstrate the whole process. During this process, several metrics are taken advantage to measure and ensure the success of the campaign. In addition, a financial analysis will illustrate how resources are used for each component to promote the campaign. In the end, this social media strategy will bring various managerial benefits that are crucial to the development of the brand.

An Introduction to Hokey Pokey

Hokey Pokey is a chain of retailers that sell super-premium ice cream originated from India. According to an article by Chamikutty in 2013, Hokey Pokey started from a single outlet in Mumbai in 2008 by the founder Rohan Mirchandani, an investment banker, and management graduated from Wharton. Nowadays, the ice-cream brand has 24 outlets across Mumbai, Delhi, Nasik, Pune, Indore, and Aurangabad. Hokey Pokey offers customized ice cream with mix-in flavours, which is well-known among young people recently. The process of making an ice cream is set on a -23-degree ‘cold stone slab’ and done in front of customers’ eyes. There are 20 different flavours and several condiments that can be mixed to create many more combinations. Some of the popular flavours are ‘Double Chocolate Therapy’, ‘Chocolate Assassin’, ‘Mad King Alphonso’, ‘Knight in Armor’, and so on. In order to get their own ice-cream creations, customers have to pay Rs 50 a piece for scoops of basic flavours. However, it costs Rs 85 a scoop for a fancy creation putting in a waffle cup. This ice cream is produced with all vegetarian, more milk fat and less air than other local products. With the brand philosophy ‘Put a smile on your face’, Hokey Pokey aims to bring customers happiness with the best experience of making their own creations. Moreover, the founder of the ice cream brand, Rohan desires to target Hokey Pokey to the same league as Haagen Dazs and Ben & Jerry ice-creams. To achieve that position, it is critical for Hokey Pokey to take advantage of social network sites (SNS), which over 50 million of its consumers in India spend more than 3 hours on. Thus, the inception of this campaign will definitely promote brand awareness on social media and spread it to the world.

  The Social Media Campaign

This campaign will occur on a capitalized platform, Instagram, which is recently one of the most popular social networks. According to a ranking of the largest Instagram-audience countries all around the world in October 2018, India took the second place with 71 million users. [pic 1]

Figure 1. Monthly users in millions. Reprinted from statista, 2018, Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/578364/countries-with-most-instagram-users/

This result shows that Instagram is a potential platform to attract profitable customers. Besides, Hokey Pokey’s Instagram account only has about 1580 followers, a modest number compared to its over 100 thousand likes on Facebook page. As most of Hokey Pokey’s customer target is the youngster, it is more essential to promote the brand on this SNS, where a large amount of users is the youth.  

The campaign will last for one week and an announcement of the campaign will be added on Hokey Pokey’s profile. On the first day, Hokey Pokey will post a picture and a story on its Instagram account informing the start and information of the campaign. This campaign is considered a competition for customers. Customers will take photos of their own Hokey Pokey ice cream and post them to their personal Instagram accounts (not applicable for private accounts) with the hashtag #whoseHokeyPokeyisbetter, and tag the brand account (@hokey_pokey_icecreams) to those photos. By setting up a unique hashtag for the competition, it is easier for Hokey Pokey to manage the participation of customers. As soon as their posts are on Instagram, customers will get a 20% discount when purchasing an ice cream next time. This discount will be available for one week from the day of their posts. The requirement for this competition is that customers have to follow Hokey Pokey’s Instagram account and like the post of the campaign. After the end of the competition, Hokey Pokey will choose 10 winners who have the most outstanding and appealing pictures. The prize for each winner is a voucher for one free ice cream. The requirement for this competition is that customers have to follow Hokey Pokey’s Instagram account and like the post of the campaign. After the end of the competition, Hokey Pokey will choose 10 winners who have the most outstanding and appealing pictures. The prize for each winner is a voucher of one free ice cream.

Figure 2. An example of Hokey Pokey’s Instagram and post of the campaign.[pic 2]

During the campaign, Hokey Pokey will post photos and videos about its products every day. Moreover, its story is also kept daily updating the process of making an ice cream and showing different types of their products with the content related to the campaign. All stories about the campaign will be put in a highlight in order to let customers keep track of the competition. By creating interesting content, it helps Hokey Pokey to maintain engagement and communication with customers. In addition, Hokey Pokey will use paid ads on Instagram for the post and story about the competition during 7 days of the campaign. Taking Figure 3 as an example, the post will be run as an advertisement and the sponsored story will include a link leading to the campaign post.

Figure 3. An example of paid ads for Instagram post and story.[pic 3]

Metrics

In order to measure this campaign, there are 4 main Instagram metrics that are useful and ensure the success of the campaign. Since Hokey Pokey’s account is switched to a Business Profile, it is much easier to use ‘Insights’, an analytics tool that Instagram provides for metrics. The first metrics are individual post metrics including impressions, reach, follows and engagements. With Instagram Insights, it can be easily seen the total number of times Hokey Pokey’s posts during the campaign have been seen, the number of unique accounts that have seen those posts, accounts that started following Hokey Pokey that post, and how many likes, comments, and saved posts (see Figure 4). [pic 4]