Tawan

The Objective

Tawan, a brand of savory snacks, wanted to bring the brand back to its roots. Its prized customers in Thailand were always rural customers, but the brand had been seeing these customers slip away and knew it had to act. To win back these value-seeking customers and increase share of voice, Tawan decided to deploy sonic branding as a key strategy—using its branded music to prompt an emotional connection with the locals. And the brand knew the best way to achieve mass awareness and relevancy in a short amount of time was to run a TikTok campaign.

The Solution

Tawan certainly lives up to its reputation as an affordable day-to-day snack. It just had to remind its consumers of this. With relevance as the new cultural currency for brands, Tawan focused on driving attention with a customized journey of discovering the snack on TikTok, starting with a Branded Hashtag Challenge called #ตะวันเต้นแซ่บ (directly translated to #TawanDances), with the key message that "You can eat anything with Tawan".

The Branded Hashtag Challenge was launched in conjuction with other high-impact ads such as Topview and One Day Max In-feed Ads to drive mass awareness in the first three days. Tawan also collaborated with popular TikTok creators who participated in the challenge to build hype and show others how it's done.

The challenge videos were interactive, highly relatable and struck a chord with the daily lives of locals. The upbeat music was sticky with an earworm rhythm and the lyrics were simple enough to sing along to. The dance moves were also simple, which made the challenge easy to join.

Tawan retargeted engaged users to help sustain the campaign and increase product consideration. In order to generate insights for the campaign, the brand focused on incremental testing and joined the Test with TikTok program to set up structured A/B tests related to audience targeting. Utilizing In-Feed Auction Ads with the Video View objective, Tawan ran retargeting campaigns aimed at a broader audience and those who had been exposed to the Hashtag Challenge, and found that the latter was more successful.

The Results

In total, the campaign reached more than 21.7 million users in Thailand. Tawan also saw over 135,700 videos created and 17.7 million Hashtag Challenge engagements which drove a collective total of 174.4 million video views.

The retargeting campaign they launched also kept the momentum going, and ads retargeted to the Hashtag Challenge audience group saw a 10.6% increase in view-through rate and 20% lower cost per view as compared to a broader audience group. And thus, the Tawan dance was solidified in history as one of Thailand’s hottest summer TikTok trends.