Vietnamese energy drink brand Sting created an online gaming experience, combined with real-world activations, to encourage young people to live more adventurously.
To refresh its iconic image to and engage more meaningfully with Vietnamese youth, Sting set clear and ambitious objectives across two key categories.
By focusing on these objectives, Sting wanted to both solidify its market position and deepen its emotional bond with the next generation of Vietnamese citizens.
2024 marked a significant milestone for Sting as the brand introduced its latest Visual Identity System. While the brand has always celebrated and embraced the experiences consumers enjoy every day through exciting adventures, this year, it wanted to delve even deeper into gen Z's psyche.
By leveraging its heritage "adventure" platform, the brand's mission was to not only celebrate the joyous moments of consumers, but also to address their concerns and aspirations, creating a truly transformative and meaningful experience.
Sting understands that gen Z is a generation of fearlessness and exploration. However, this spirit is often overshadowed by the immense pressure of school- and work-related deadlines and exams. As a result, one in five members of gen Z exhibit mental health issues, seemingly losing sight of the beauty of living adventurously. Therefore, Sting, the champion of youthful adventure, made it its mission to reignite gen Z's passion for adventure and encourage them to lead a more energetic and exciting lifestyle, seize the moment, and turn the unexpected into epic rides.
The creative framework and media strategy aimed to jolt young people into a realization, motivating them to break away from their norms through an alternate hunter version of themselves. After doing so, the plan was to encourage them to embrace this alter-ego to enjoy life to the fullest. Each phase was supported by thematic messages urging specific actions, maintaining the campaign's adventurous spirit. Integrating this media strategy across multiple touchpoints ensured consistent, impactful engagement, offering gen Z opportunities to rediscover their adventurous fire.
The meta-adventure campaign was crafted with deep understanding of gen Z's complex media behavior of blending the physical and digital worlds, enabled by their smartphones. All creative was mobile-centric and 70 percent of the budget was allocated for digital, with 90 percent of this spend directed to smartphone activities to help players seamlessly navigate through their hunting experience.
Creating transcendent and immersive experiences was the primary objective when Sting built its hunting experience. Centralized avatar profiles powered by reality-bending tech was crucial for players to seamlessly navigate the game.
Stingers — as the brand calls its users — were first invited to an immersive world powered by an augmented reality (AR) app upon which they could turn into hunter alter-egos, then prompted onto Sting's website to redeem initial prizes and assigned limited-edition passports to unlock real-world battle royale playground to win even more. Here, through AR and GPS technology, interactive stories revealed clues about treasure locations, enhancing the narrative experience.
The real-world playground included augmented reality puzzles and hidden quests, turning everyday locations into fantastical battle zones for participants to hunt for virtual treasures and earn prizes. Leaderboards were updated by the minute, further amplified by posts on the Sting fan page, to hype up players and recruit even more participants.
Entering the summer of 2024, the competition within the energy drink category was growing fiercer. More and more brands joined the fray alongside established competitors, each one vying for every point of market share, every second of attention from consumers, and majority of brands kickstarted their campaigns one month earlier than norm. So, for Sting, the leader of the category, the mission was critical yet straightforward: protecting its business leadership while standing out from the crowd thematically and emotionally as the energy drink of adventure.
The initial phase of the campaign succeeded with flying colors. The brand messaging and activation resonated with Vietnamese youth. This positive momentum and excitement turned into real, impactful business results for Sting, with the brand realizing a 12 percent increase in share of sales at youth hotspots.
