Fubon: FUBON FOOD

Credits & Description:

Category: Best Use of Digital PR

Advertiser: TAIPEI FUBON COMMERCIAL BANK

Product/Service: COMMUNITY WEBSITE

Managing Director: Fupei Wang (Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide)

Group Account Director: Tammy Cheng (Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide)

Digital Influence Consultant: CJ Wang (Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide)

Account Executive: Milly Lin (Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide)

Media placement: Social Media Channels - IPenn - 1 March 2010



Summary of the Campaign

Fubon Commercial Bank’s credit card was ranked No.3 in Taiwan in late 2009, lagging well behind Citibank after their highly successful 2008 promotions to drive card usage. Fubon was struggling to achieve 'active rate' growth (defined as any card usage in past 6 months) in a cluttered card market.

Fubon revamped their dining offers and the agency created a totally fresh social media based launch approach in the category. The 'Fubon Food Master Community' tapped social media insights around Taiwanese diners and became a more relevant platform for informing customers about Fubon’s dining offers and allowing them to build and share their dining experiences online.

The campaign drove Fubon card active rate up by 6 percentage points compared to year-ago, moving Fubon into 2nd position. The highest record was 74.78% in April 2010, caused by a successful consumer event. Fubon cardholder spending on dining grew US$ 6 million per month, generating incremental interest and fee income for Fubon.



The Situation

Taiwan is a highly crowded credit card market with 35+ card issuers vying for



The Goal

Campaign objective was to grow Fubon credit card active rate (past 6 month usage) from 68% to 72% by using a fresh approach to dining programs.



The Strategy

Insights on Taiwanese dining habits revealed consumers:

- select restaurants from the internet

- share their dining experiences via social media

- search for and share special and money-saving dining offers via social media.

This shaped our strategy to transform the credit card customer relationship by making it more participative, interactive, and added-value rather than 'discount'-based.



Our core idea was the creation of the Fubon Food Master Community, a dining community website to launch Fubon’s dining offers and connect like-minded diners. In doing so we:



• Become the first bank to create a dining-oriented community site with comprehensive restaurant offerings and encouraging consumers to generate content

• Accessed multiple online social media channels to generate word of mouth drawing members to this community and recommending the dining offers

• Leveraged bank e-channels to increase current cardholders’ awareness and usage



Execution

The whole campaign ran from the end of 2009 to April 2010, and the consumer event was held from March 2010 - April 2010.

- Fubon Food Master Community Site:

i. Our agency created easy-to-use content like printable restaurant guides with Yahoo Maps to enable restaurant search by area, cuisine etc

- Consumer event: a promotion voting on best photos from Fubon dining experiences

- Social Media Channels:

i. Our agency used banner advertising on i-Peen, one of the largest online gourmet communities, which gave access to 2.7 million members.

ii. We invited 7 influential bloggers to dine at the most popular restaurants using Fubon benefits during holiday periods (days where the public currently perceived most dining discounts were not valid), and blogged about the program and its benefits

- Bank e-channels:

i. Banner ads on Fubon’s banking site reached all cardholders.

ii. Seasonally relevant eDM to drive traffic to the site and increase user loyalty.



Documented Results

Our PR campaign achieved an active rate of 74%, +6 percentage points above year-ago and a new historical high for Fubon, which saw it close the gap with Citibank and leapfrog Chinatrust Bank into 2nd position. Especially, during March 2010 to Apr 2010, the website launched two stages of consumer events, therefore the active rate reached 74.78% in Apr 2010, as the highest recorded during the campaign.

Dining spending on Fubon cards grew by US$6.1million per month (confidential client data) and was the fastest growing spending segment on Fubon cards.

These results were a result of the Fubon Food Master Community Site. Average unique monthly visitors to the site (UMV) reached 47,446. Total page views for Fubon reached 950,000 for six months, outranking Citibank’s competitive site.

Fubon-contracted restaurants on i-Peen were viewed over a million times with a click-thru rate (CTR) of 9.21% or 36 times the average CTR of banner ads in Taiwan of 0.25%.

Blogger recommendation articles on Fubon Food Master Community by our 7 invited bloggers generated 88,372 page views.