CLIENT BRIEF
Merck Serono wanted to raise awareness about the top 10 most common diseases like Blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, etc. There was only one condition, they wanted to do that indirectly through a non-official community page on social media which will be sponsored by Merck.
CHALLENGE
1) We live in a country where many people are not aware of the dangers that could be created by not eating well, playing sports and taking care of themselves. Not just in Egypt, many of the middle eastern countries are not willing to live healthy nor follow a healthy lifestyle because we simply like tasty food that could impact our health negatively.
2) Most humans don't seriously accept advice from strangers and specially brands and organizations.
OBJECTIVES
1) Raise awareness about living a healthy lifestyle.
2) Entice fans to follow our suggestions and live a happy life.
3) Relating the medical and health tips with Merck, a leading company in the field of pharmaceutical and technology.
4) Indirectly creating awareness about Merck among the Egyptians.
INSIGHTS
Insight 1: I started analyzing health related facebook pages, and went through their content and fans reactions to learn the do’s and don’ts. I came out that we need to avoid the ordinary static facebook page that only posts about health issues as a one-way communication (monotonic).
Insight 2: People check any social media post comments and going through what other users are saying before tending to engage with the post.
Insight 3: I then started research by closely watching the target audience online behavior in Egypt, I dived into health related conversations and topics by using a social media listening tool and found that you’ll often meet three types of people when it comes to health talks.
Personality (a): The ones who know nothing but still participate in the conversation either by using sarcasm or an incorrect old culture health tip he overheard somewhere.
Personality (b): The type of people who have been through a health incident or was responsible for someone who has, those people have high hopes and are more encouraging to people around them, they also share correct early steps based on their minimal health experience.
Personality (c): The ones who have a valid and scientific healthy solutions due to their solid medical background, those are often healthcare professionals, doctors or medicine students.
SOLUTION
Connecting the above three insights, I chose to utilize facebook storytelling environment. That’s where we decided to create 3 fictional characters that were driven from the above three personalities, each had his own identity, characteristics, and also his own facebook profile. Now those 3 friends need a platform to engage on, so we created a facebook page named “Salamtak” (Get well soon), where this page was posting questions and thoughts about the most discussed health topics and rumors. Each fictional character was participating in the page’s conversation (Commenting on the post) and talking with fans to assist them and share with them recommended solutions and top tips for having a healthy lifestyle, each driven from his own background and personality.
Characters Teasers
Introducing Characters
Content was very engaging and that is noticed from high comments and shares received.
Fictional characters started getting popular. Fans started initiating conversations with them and following their social media profile.
This approach was different and unique because fans felt they were not only receiving information from a page, but having real conversations with real people. The page was perceived by fans as creative, one of a kind approach as per the fans testimonials.
Merck learned more about how people think and act when it comes to health, what journey they take when they have a health issue, what type of medications they recommend or been referred to. With this approach they are positioned as creative and innovative in their industry on social media.
KEY RESULTS
In 75 days.
Reached 2.2M fans.
Built a community of 70,000 fans from scratch.
More than 325,000 people engaged.
Fictional character received huge number of friend requests & messages on their own personal profiles.
Client: Merck Serono
Agency: BSocial
Creative Concept & Content Strategy: Mohamed Amer
Design & Illustration: Mohamed Ismail
Art Director: Mohamed Bahaa
Animation: George Adel
Copywriter: Abdul Hameed Habback
