Lay’s: Find Your Flavour

Challenge

Every summer, Lay’s releases a new series of flavours. As a part of its 2021 flavour launch, Lay’s wanted to connect the 200 million young Chinese consumers who had moved cities with the taste of home. Through this, Lay’s wanted to increase sales and brand awareness.

Nowadays, star power alone is not sufficient to entice today’s young Chinese, who prefer content that delivers emotional values. Meanwhile, competition among snack brands had never been fiercer: The demand for Chinese snacks continued to rise under consumers’ growing favouritism for homegrown labels.

On the other hand, many global snack brands were also rapidly churning out new flavour ideas to adapt to consumers’ changing taste.

So, for its 2021 flavour launch, Lay’s needed to outsmart the competition with innovation, connecting the +200 million young migratory Chinese workers with the taste of home.

 

Strategy

Tapping into foods ability to trigger personal memories and a warm nostalgia for home, Lay’s crafted six unique flavours – Roasted Oysters with Garlic, Crispy Grilled Fish, Cumin Lamb, Sichuan Spicy Chicken, Beer, and Old Pickle – each inspired by one of China’s different provinces.

Tapping into the insight that food can instantly trigger memories and that short videos are the hottest medium for Generation Z, Lay’s set out to deliver the taste of home. It did this in partnership with Bytedance, pioneering Douyin’s (Tiktok’s) first-ever immersive short-video documentary series: ‘Find Your Flavour’, which was also Campaign Summary the platform’s firstever co-created content with a brand – specifically targeted to engage China’s population of young, migratory workers!

 

Execution

In the series, each episode saw one of China’s top KOLs journeying home in search of the unvarnished flavours of their region, which uncoincidentally were one of the six new limited-edition Lay’s flavours. While talking about the foods they loved most, each KOL also shared their personal path to success and life ambitions, helping to connect to the audience of migratory youth via content with purpose.

On these gastronomic trips, the KOLs were joined by celebrity cameos who fondly recalled their personal anecdotes 3 of local flavours. During each episode on Douyin, viewers were invited to take part in the Lay’s Douyin challenge, ‘Find Your Flavour’, whereby they were asked to share their favourite hometown dishes, along with their life story and ambitions.

To promote the challenge, Lay’s partnered with hundreds of KOCs who crafted content on Douyin while on the hunt to find their flavour.

 

Results

Lay’s pioneering ‘Find Your Flavour’ Douyin documentary was wildly loved across China with a whopping 4 billion views, which inspired over 600,000 incredible UGC videos via Lay’s Douyin challenge.

As a result, Lay’s drove a massive uplift in sales and top-of-mind brand awareness. In addition, despite never having been featured on Douyin’s brand voice chart in its history, Lay’s rose to the second place immediately following the series’ launch.