Social influence consultancy Social Soup has launched a first of its kind Scan and Share technology in the Australian market.
The technology has been developed to support brands build momentum with consumers at the point of purchase and facilitate social sharing of real experiences and reviews.
The new micro payments technology has been launched into the Australian market this week with a new campaign with leading health and beauty brand Church and Dwight and its Curash babycare brand.
It follows successful testing of the technology with Pepsico and its Sunbites brand.
The campaign will see 1,200 highly targeted mum trialists scan a Curash product in a Chemist Warehouse.
When validated they will be immediately reimbursed for the product through the PayPal gateway.
The use of micro payments technology allows brands to scale to all stores and retail environments and trialists can be recruited and activated in real-time.
Once the trialists pick-up and trial the product they can share or post content on social or share a review with friends with an offer to trial the product.
Social Soup founder and CEO, Sharyn Smith said: “The old ways of sampling are simply not effective anymore.
“With little feedback and impact beyond an initial untargeted trial the ROI for brands is severely lacking.
Smith added: “We are constantly looking at ways we can innovate and pioneer social influence to help address these brand challenges.
“By activating a key channel in the sphere of trust for consumers and giving brands the ability to create mass trial and scaled social advocacy and reviews, we believe it will achieve a significant impact for brands within the retail environment.”
Curash senior product manager, Catherine Rowe said: “We’re really excited to be able to implement this campaign with Social Soup and support our key retailers.
“With the new Scan and Share trial technology we have been able to gain new customers in a unique way and benefit from Social Soup’s experience and influence to achieve powerful reviews in the retail environment.”
The new technology was developed in house at Social Soup and follows a successful trial with Pepsico earlier in the year.
The trial saw Pepsico brand Sunbites partner with Social Soup on a large-scale trail campaign with a group of micro and nano influencers.
Trialists were sent a live custom link where they could go in store and scan a pack to unlock a voucher for the product.
Once trialed, the group were reminded to upload photos for social and review the product.
The PepsiCo Sunbites campaign saw 15,000 samples facilitated in a real-time environment with a 1.6 x sharing rate.
The campaign created 17,300 pieces of content (photos and reviews) through the campaign giving Pepsico access to incredible content to repurpose across owned and earned channels.
Following the success of the initiative Pepsico and Social Soup are working together on another campaign.
Smith added: “We are talking to many brands at the moment to utilise the scan and share technology as their key launch initiative to drive immediate momentum behind a new product.
“This new method of delivering trial and advocacy in an authentic way combined with activating tiers of influencers to build reach and engagement is the best go-to-market strategy of this type in Australia at the moment.”
