To pro­mote its new Home­Team app, which con­nects chil­dren with far-away grand­par­ents, Pana­son­ic launched the #Mak­eRead­in­g­LessS­cary cam­paign, aimed at cre­at­ing dia­logue around social health across gen­er­a­tions on social media. The cam­paign suc­cess­ful­ly expand­ed Panasonic’s reach, and showed how a brand can piv­ot its mar­ket­ing towards an app and less tra­di­tion­al audi­ences.

Although seniors aren’t the first mar­ket one would think of for social media, old­er con­sumers are out there lis­ten­ing. A Pew Research Cen­ter study released ear­li­er this month found that while only 35 per­cent of Amer­i­cans over 65 use social net­work­ing sites like Face­book, these users tend to use the sites more than oth­er users. More impor­tant­ly, 27 per­cent of old­er adults own either an eBook read­er or a tablet. Our team at Pana­son­ic has devel­oped a unique project: Help­ing seniors bet­ter con­nect with their loved ones through tech­nol­o­gy, and we’re using social media to reach out and spread our mes­sage. While our strat­e­gy start­ed off with some exper­i­men­ta­tion, it’s evolv­ing into high­ly suc­cess­ful cam­paign, with high engage­ment rates.

Evolving Consumer Marketing Strategies For The App Space

In the spir­it of Hal­loween, last month our team launched #Mak­eRead­in­g­LessS­cary, a cam­paign cen­tered around our app, Home­Team. Our goal was to reach fam­i­lies – and for many fam­i­lies, Hal­loween means trick or treat­ing, cos­tumes, par­ties, and oth­er things that are a lot of fun, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly edu­ca­tion­al or ben­e­fi­cial to old­er fam­i­ly mem­bers social health. There are count­less grand­par­ents or mil­i­tary par­ents who would love to share in Hal­loween tra­di­tions with their fam­i­lies, but are phys­i­cal­ly far away. So we built a Hal­loween well­ness cam­paign that encour­aged healthy activ­i­ties like read­ing or play­ing togeth­er – learn­ing togeth­er being the expe­ri­ence we want to fos­ter for our end users.

Enabling Special Family Moments

Many peo­ple think of Pana­son­ic only as a con­sumer elec­tron­ics com­pa­ny, but about 85 per­cent of our busi­ness is in the B2B mar­ket and our com­pa­ny is now expand­ing into apps. Home­Team is a prod­uct we launched in 2015 as part of our company’s Health and Well­ness divi­sion. It tar­gets a mar­ket of fam­i­lies that are geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­tant from their grand­par­ents, and allows grand­par­ents to read books and play games with their grand­chil­dren across the coun­try or any­where around the world. As a grand­par­ent (or any­one else) turns a page on the app, their loved one hun­dreds or thou­sands miles away sees the page flip and their face on video chat. The ser­vice has either an annu­al or month­ly sub­scrip­tion fee (and includes a free tri­al month so fam­i­lies can see if it’s the right fit) and can be used on the web or through our iOS and Android apps. Our launch was some­what of a soft one, which helped our mar­ket­ing con­sid­er­ably. One of the great advan­tages of apps is that you can rapid­ly update and improve your func­tion­al­i­ty. After launch­ing, we enhanced our com­mu­ni­ca­tions func­tion­al­i­ty, added con­tent from pop­u­lar pub­lish­ers like Dis­ney, Pixar, and Mar­vel, and improved our UI, among oth­er things.

Marketing For Nontraditional Audiences

For us, cre­at­ing an app and viable mar­ket­ing cam­paigns to sup­port new audi­ences was a sim­ple exer­cise of find­ing the most under­served cohorts. Pew research also found that the num­ber of Amer­i­cans over the age of 65 using social media jumped from 19 per­cent in 2012 to 35 per­cent today. One thing we learned quick­ly in mar­ket­ing Home­Team is that we need­ed to under­stand the dif­fer­ent audi­ences of grand­par­ents, grand­chil­dren, and even par­ents as the con­nec­tors of the two, but grand­par­ents and grand­kids could be treat­ed as one tar­get mar­ket based on their social media behav­ior. We dis­cov­ered there are fam­i­lies in all sorts of cir­cum­stances, where chil­dren are geo­graph­i­cal­ly far away from one par­ent or anoth­er – or even have aunts, uncles, or fam­i­ly friends in far-away cities. When we launched Home­Team, it cat­a­pult­ed us direct­ly into the worlds of con­sumer app devel­op­ment and social health and well­ness. This meant quick­ly mas­ter­ing audi­ence seg­men­ta­tion for the app world and con­duct­ing in-depth research of a spe­cif­ic slice of social media users. Pana­son­ic has a robust social media pres­ence, but con­duct­ing cam­paigns for iPad apps is quite dif­fer­ent than con­duct­ing a cam­paign for a Blu-ray play­er. We had to test, test again, and iter­ate quick­ly to accom­plish the results we achieved. It also meant con­tin­u­ing how we lever­age social media across all our busi­ness­es. Rather than just get­ting our mes­sage out to cus­tomers, we also lis­ten to cus­tomer feed­back online and hear what they say back to us. This ends up influ­enc­ing the design of our prod­uct, and has helped us gauge the cor­rect approach for this cam­paign.

Engaging With Family From A Distance

We found many of our old­er users want­ed solu­tions to help them engage social­ly, and that informed our mar­ket­ing for this prod­uct. Your world can start to shrink as you get old. It’s hard to have a mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tion at a long dis­tance with a child, and grand­par­ents don’t want video chat sit­u­a­tions where you ask how their day was, and you get a one-word reac­tion that it was “Fine.” This made us real­ize the back­bone of our cam­paign was pro­vid­ing a way to engage with chil­dren from a dis­tance – and empha­siz­ing the idea of books, games, and video chats to pro­vide an expe­ri­ence that they would have in real life, all through a com­put­er or tablet. Our mes­sag­ing for this cam­paign and oth­ers tells grand­par­ents that this is “Their Love, Our Con­nec­tion.” Our ini­tial results showed that this mes­sage test­ed well. Most impor­tant­ly, it pro­vid­ed Home­Team with the ammu­ni­tion for our first sea­son­al cam­paign for Home­Team and a suc­cess­ful base for fur­ther exper­i­ment with time-spe­cif­ic mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties. With the suc­cess of this cam­paign, and reach­ing new audi­ences, we plan to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of sea­son­al-themed con­tent for geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­persed audi­ences.