I’m pretty sure you’ve seen all the Nestea Recruit stuff on Facebook and maybe even scooped a free can of Nestea by Concrete Beach. Well here are the students behind the whole campaign at Western. Artur Tsurkan, Joanna Fu and Karen Yu are a team called “The Rev” who competed to score a summer internship with Nestea. Artur is a second year political science student (AEO2), Joanna is a second year global economics student (AEO2) and Karen is a first year MIT student (AEO1). Read about their journey below.
1) What is the Nestea Recruit competition?
Joanna: The Nestea Recruit is a national marketing competition hosted by Coca Cola. They have one of their marketing agencies called Inventa run this event where students all across Canada compete to win an internship at Coca Cola or one of their marketing agencies. You also get tuition and some spending cash. It happens in 3 stages. You first compete an entire country, then your own school and then you face off in the finals.
Artur: In these three stages of the competition, you are given a challenge to work with. One cool thing about the Nestea Recruit is that they take the marketing pretty seriously. They’ll give you spending cash to execute. They have strict requirements on how they want you to market, brand and sample the product. In doing so, they force you to learn and discover the marketing principles that drive the company itself and to adopt those as apart of your brand ambassadorship. We faced off in two challenges, now unfortunately not moving on forward. The first was a national competition where we had to devise a video and get votes from our friends or other people on campus through social media. The second challenge involved sampling Nestea.
2) Tell me about The Rev
Karen: With the Rev we didn’t want to just come up with a random name. We really wanted a purpose for our team. We found that we wanted to create a revolution with everyone’s life with Nestea because they brand themselves as a refreshing brand; like try something different. So we wanted The Rev to be something in everyone’s life where they do try something different.
Artur: The Rev is a bit more ambiguous intentionally. Our campaign was to accumulate the community together to be apart of something different. In our second campaign, we called it Revitalize. The idea was that during this stressful period, we revitalize the students on campus. Our purpose with the Rev was to keep this single image of the team but in each of our challenges trying something different and tying it to our essential brand identity.
3) Where are you guys originally from?
Joanna: I’m originally from uptown Toronto, I’m from Markham.
Artur: I’m from “uptown Toronto”, I’m from Richmond Hill.
Karen: I guess I’m from “uptown Toronto” too, I’m also from Richmond Hill.
4) What was a problem that your group faced and how did you overcome it?
Joanna: Our first challenge we had to create a video that displayed the start of something different as well as the theme of spinning the bottle. The goal of the video was to post it on youtube, approved by Nestea, sent to all our friends and to garner our votes from all our family and friends and anyone on campus.
Artur: The specific problems we faced were numerous. Our video, one of the requirements was to feature our team. But in fact our video we featured ourselves the least. We wanted to focus on our brand identity, focus on what's around us, the people around us. We got a bunch of our friends who were really well known on campus to cameo in our video. So we had a guy and a girl sing, one problem we faced with that was that you can’t have a cover of an official song; that’s copyright. So we had to cut that out and leave the imagery there. But the cool thing we did from that, we took snapshots of the video, posted it on Facebook and tagged our friends, and that actually incentivized them to share it on their Facebook. That helped us reach a broader community. The second thing with getting votes was that a lot of us had mutual friends and at some point we were going to exhaust the number of friends we could get to like our video. So we had to come up with a more innovative solution to have us do less work. Our solution for that was a referral strategy. So what we did was have a mini contest of our own and people compete in terms of referring. I set up the referral system to work technically. We distributed cards with a referral code. When people told their friends to vote for us with that referral code, we kept track of how many referrals they had and we gave those individuals a $100 prize. We skyrocketed from 800 votes to 2000 which was huge!
Joanna: The second challenge was to have people on your campus experience the start of something different. The way that happens is you bring experiences to them, you have them sample some Nestea, Instagram the experience and hashtag your team.
Karen: What we wanted to do was create a theme for our experiences. Our major theme was the past present and future. Our three experiences were the past. We had a teddy bear mascot and people could take pictures with it to relive their childhood. The present experience was a physics experiment. We had two plungers and they had to try to get it to stick together. The future, we created the Rev board and we created it out of sticky notes and people would write their goals on it, so essentially they were creating a pledge. We campaigned for 3-4 days. A lot of the challenges we faced was the weather and permission from campus to distribute Nestea.
5) What contributed to the success of your group?
Artur: For us, we made sure our brand identity was front and centre. We had a wonderful logo, strict colour scheme and made sure people knew who we were. And we had that because people would visit us and be like “you guys are the Rev! I saw you guys on Facebook”. The brand identity definitely contributed to our success.
Joanna: Another thing I think contributed the our success was the fact that we had three strong team members who had different skill sets, but at the same time matched so well together. Artur was technically skilled, Karen was very creative and I was more focused on execution.
Karen: We knew each other’s strengths very well and we played on that. I wouldn’t try to do something that I knew someone else in the group could do better.
6) What was the result for your team?
Joanna: We ended up winning the first challenge and we all got $500 each which was really great and seeing that our team pulled through to be top in Canada. And especially since last year’s winners were from Western as well. After the second challenge, unfortunately we lost to the other team which did an amazing job. We get an exit bonus, another $500 each and we got a really great experience from the competition.
7) What’s your favourite drink?
Karen: We love Nestea but I love Asian drinks like passion fruit buble tea with lychee jelly.
Joanna: I love Coca Cola. Coca Cola owns Nestea at the moment so that’s really great!
Artur: Brisk! No, I’m joking! Not Brisk. Never Brisk. Regular water is probably going to be up my alley for the next couple of weeks.
Congratulations to the Rev for making it that far in the competition! If you want to see more from their campaign, visit their Facebook page.
Cheers,
Anna Li