Redefining Tea in China

Reaching a modern Chinese audience for a classic British brand.

Challenge

As a classic British F&B brand, Ahmad Tea enjoys significant market share around the world for its range of bagged teas, as well as innovative fruit teas and cold brew product ranges. Despite encouraging sales in the ultra-competitive Chinese tea market, dominated by local and international players alike, Ahmad Tea wanted to identify how to differentiate its China offer and grow market share.

The challenge was to identify the key market segment that Ahmad Tea could target in an effective and compelling way and launch a new multi-channel campaign to raise brand awareness amongst this target audience.

Actions

Ahmad Tea turned to Brandigo for a two-stage project to help them achieve their China marketing objectives.

Firstly, Brandigo designed and deployed an in-depth market insight research project that included a detailed competitor analysis, as well as qualitative and quantitative studies encompassing consumer surveys and focus groups. By analyzing the data, the team identified an opportunity with young, generation Z professionals in tier 1 and 2 cities.

The opportunity required a differentiated brand strategy, moving away from traditional messaging and imaging for tea products, based on shareable digital content.

The Brandigo team created a digital brand experience centered on the WeChat platform that asked users to complete a short multiple-choice questionnaire. The score each user received identified their individual ‘fruit tea’ personality. Then, to coincide with Valentine’s Day, users could invite friends and partners to take the test themselves and see how their ‘fruit personalities’ matched up. 

This in turn led to recipe suggestions for combinations of Ahmad Tea fruit tea products. In addition to WeChat, the team employed other Ahmad Tea owned media in China, as well as live streams and KOLs to push the campaign and key messaging.