Castrol Influence the Influencer
Castrol is a leading lubricant oil brand. Lubricant oil category users typically only care about the category twice a year – when they change lube oil during maintenance. This means the category is low frequency and low involvement. Traditional advertising has very limited impact on consumers. The lubricant oil category business is driven by independent workshops (IWS) sales, especially mechanics’ recommendations. But unlike shops in a fast food chain, Castrol has no control over these independent workshops because they are managed by individual owners. Independent workshops have no incentives to take part in Castrol’s communication campaigns. How could we get the mechanics in independent workshops to care about Castrol and become our most important influencers?
Insight & Strategy
We know mechanics’ recommendations are the most important influence for oil lubricant customers. If mechanics could clearly deliver Castrol’s unique selling point and campaign information to consumers during car maintenance, we could drastically improve conversion.
But educating and motivating mechanics is not easy. Mechanics are usually over worked, with no time to sit down for regular trainings. Workshops also don’t want to stress their most important assets with extra burden.
Our strategy become three-fold:
Keep the learning light and interesting
Keep the learning long-term
Make the incentives practical and tangible
Execution
To launch our new mechanics program, we leveraged the platform they already use day in and day out, WeChat. Specifically, a WeChat mini program.
Mini programs are essentially apps within an app – a user can open them without ever leaving WeChat. This makes for an innately shareable user experience.
Castrol designed a mini-program for mechanics that gamified the learning experience.
First, mechanics could choose their store location by uploading their store front photo for registration. Once registered, they received a bespoke poster to use for their store.
Inside the app, mechanics found a special brand zone with knowledge around how Castrol lubricants work around different types of engines. This not only enriched mechanics’ knowledge about Castrol, but also increases their credibility when they actually recommend Castrol.
Mechanics could then compete in a Q&A game to test their knowledge and enter lucky draws. By playing the game, they also earned points for their workshops on a monthly leaderboard. The winning workshops received practical, valuable prizes like toolkits and products.
Mechanics could also invite their mechanic peers to join the competition by sharing the mini program, increasing their lucky draw odds in the process. They could also invite their customers to vote for their favorite mechanics.
The campaign was 100% mobile.
Results
As a firm believer in smart marketing, Castrol wanted to find strategic ways to use less budget to get more impact. Turning to our high-involvement B2B audience, instead of the low involvement B2C audience, Castrol was able to tap into a new target audience. By using more effective mediums, especially digital and mobile, Castrol was able to generate fantastic sales results cost-effectively, and use mechanics as influencers to drive general brand awareness – B2B2C.
Our 100% mobile campaign was a complete hit. Over 900 independent workshops participated, and more than 13,000 individual mechanics joined the WeChat mini-program to become our best influencers, driving double-digit workshop sales.