How Sri Lankan brands innovate during the lockdown

After the lockdown from mid-March, like you and me many companies including brands were left wondering 

What’s next?

Many brands who were unsure of the future. So, they did what’s natural. Pause all operations and put all the marketing activities on hold. 

But amidst the uncertainty some brands were brave enough to stick it out during the hard times. And they were rewarded for their perseverance. Such brand was Elephant House Ice cream. 

According to the marketing manager at Elephant House Mr. Kasun Gunaratne, they wanted a way help the consumers to enjoy themselves as well as adhere to the physical distancing regulations. This is why he reached out to zMessenger to come up with a campaign for Elephant House Ice Cream.

Source: zMessenger-Locobuzz (Tag cloud representation)

The Brainstorm 

To find the right campaign the digital marketing team at zMessenger studied the user behavior. They used their social listening tool Locobuzz to understand what people were talking about during the lockdown. Looking in to online user behavior the team could see that many were taking up cooking and baking at home. This was the ideal opportunity to help the budding chefs to improve their skills.  By doing a deep dive in to home cooking, the zMessenger team found out that even though everyone wants to cook they are struggling to find ingredients during lockdown. Trying to solve this problem the zMessenger team found out a way to give recipes for ingredient they have at home. Thus, the introduction of Elephant House Dessert Chef – An interactive Facebook chatbot. 

Once the users initiate the chat, the Dessert Chef will ask them what ingredient they have at home. based on the ingredients the Dessert Chef’s algorithms suggests recipes for those ingredients. The user can select the most delicious recipe and the Dessert Chef will give them the full recipe to try out a new dessert. 

Emerging Patterns from Results

The campaign ran for several weeks and this is how it performed

Source: zMessenger campaign report

As the campaign progressed certain patterns started to immerge. For an example, what was the most abundant ingredient people had at home. Based on the popularity and availability the team further optimized Dessert Chef to help people more. 

This is what Kasun Gunaratne, Marketing Manager of Elephant House Ice Cream had to say

“We wanted to do something new to help people and bring them excitement during the curfew. And with zmessenger we started seeking ways of bringing  excitement to the people during the difficult period. This is where Dessert Chef fit in perfectly. To give budding chefs new recipes to try out with the ingredients they have at home.”

This is just one of the examples on how zMessenger helped to have such positive results even during times like this. But this is not just one case. Many brands who were active during the novel corona virus pandemic has seen impressive results.