UNcovering The Results Behind Brand’s COVID-19 Campaigns: Part 4

With many brands creating content in response to the coronavirus, we decided to use our emotional testing and targeting tool, UnrulyEQ, to see how their content is being received by consumers around the world.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve analysed UK, US, German and, most recently, Australian reactions to COVID-19 content.

We’ll be looking at ads from AirAsia, Colgate, Gov.sg and Prudential in this post to find out how viewers in Singapore felt about them and the impact they had on various brand and business metrics.

AirAsia – Keep Fighting, China- 加油中国

China has been one of the nations most affected by the global pandemic, although cases have been declining in that region from early March. In this ad, AirAsia and its team of senior leaders showed their support to China when it was most needed, through words of encouragement in the country’s local language, Mandarin.

But how did consumers in Singapore respond to it? Looking at the ad’s EQ Score — a composite score based on the intensity of emotions viewers felt while watching, plus a campaign’s ability to drive brand metrics such as brand favorability and purchase intent – it performed really well, scoring 7.3 out of 10, compared to the Singapore average of 5/10.

Viewers felt strong feelings of Warmth, Happiness and Inspiration upon seeing people from different parts of the world showing their encouragement towards China during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Respondents also found the video to be genuine, with people from different cultural backgrounds trying to speak in Mandarin to get their well wishes across. This contributed to brand favourability of 68.9%, the highest of the four ads.

Colgate: #SmileStrong

The Singapore Government implemented heightened social-distancing measures at the start of April, more commonly known as the ‘Circuit Breaker’, to stop the spread of the virus — limiting social contact with one’s friends and family. Putting together a collection of user-generated content, Colgate wanted viewers to know they were not alone during these trying times.

The overall emotional response was 45.9%, way above the Singapore norm, with intense feelings of Happiness and Warmth driving the ad’s strong emotional performance.

The compilation of smiling videos brought joy and warmed the hearts of viewers in Singapore, bringing about a sense of normality and continuity during these troubled times.

This is in line with our COVID-19 consumer survey findings, which found people look to brands to make them feel normal (19%), resulting in a strong performance across all brand metrics.

Brand recall for the ad was also high at 69%, which is impressive as Colgate’s branding was only shown once at the end of the minute-long creative, which got an EQ score of 6.9.

Gov.sg: Together, We Can

Achieving a 7.5, the highest EQ score among the four videos, the Singapore Government ad shows ‘frontline’ workers from various walks of life stepping up to support each other during the COVID-19 pandemic. The music used in the ad is a rendition of a popular national song, “Together”, which was first released almost two decades ago. This contributed to the ad’s strong overall emotional response.

One respondent commented: “I like that the video uses a familiar song, which can be used to inspire other Singaporeans to do their part to keep the virus under control.”

At 54%, this video had the highest emotional response amongst the ads, evoking a strong sense of Warmth, Inspiration and Happiness among viewers in Singapore.

This ties in with our findings that Singaporeans want ads to show how they are supporting their stakeholders during this difficult time, resulting in high brand favourability.

Prudential – Together, let’s #DOgood

The spread of false information and fake news has the destructive ability to cause confusion and real consequences, especially during crises, where stress and anxiety are already high. Prudential aimed to combat this sort of negativity by sending an important message to viewers. This ad achieved an EQ score of 6.7.

The overall emotional response to this ad was above the Singapore norm — over-indexing in Inspiration, Warmth and Happiness — and resulting in a strong performance across all key brand metrics.

Viewers liked that the video was informative and advocates against the spread of fake news and encouraged people to share positivity during this period. This drove the score for Knowledge to 27%, which is above the Singapore norm of 17%.

Although Prudential’s branding was only shown towards the end of the video, 58% of viewers were able to recall the brand.

As you can see from the below chart, when we consider the combination of positive emotions evoked, along with the high levels of performance of all key business metrics, all of these ads performed extremely well. This reinforces the fact that as a brand, you should be thinking very carefully about how you communicate with consumers during this time.

Landing the right message can be extremely effective and have a critical impact on your brand during this uncertain time.