Holidays consistently bring in larger sales for businesses, and marketers everywhere have caught on to this by holding special holiday campaigns. Easter is an especially popular holiday during April of every year, with many businesses going out of their way to impress both potential and current customers. We’ve seen a lot of interesting Easter marketing campaigns, but the five we’ve listed below are among the most memorable, driving interest and profits for the businesses that launched them:
Deliveroo – Game of Thrones Eggs
Source: Deliveroo
The TV series Game of Thrones was a major hit in the UK in 2019, and Deliveroo successfully took advantage of this during their Easter campaign. The restaurant delivery company made Game of Thrones-themed eggs available for delivery in London, Manchester, and Leeds, starting from April 14 to April 21.
Mimicking scaly dragon eggs, the eggs from Deliveroo were remarkable-looking, weighing 1 kg each with a height of 20 cm. They were made with fairtrade white chocolate that was handpainted. To top it off, each egg only cost £0.80.
Aside from overlapping with Easter, the campaign also started on the same day as the Game of Thrones Season 8 premier, which boosted attention massively. In fact, around 4 million people from the UK watched the first episode on Sky Atlantic, while 17.4 million people watched the show on TV and streaming. Joe Groves from Deliveroo had said: “We see huge spikes of orders around season premieres and finales and we thought what better way to celebrate hardcore fanboys than with these amazing scaley creations.”
Thorntons – CGI Easter Egg Factory
Source: Youtube / Junction Eleven
Thorntons’ specialty product is chocolate, and the company amped up its content marketing for Easter. John Rowley—the search manager at the time of the campaign—described this as the second biggest chocolate season of the year. In anticipation of this, Thorntons launched an interactive platform called “The Ultimate Guide to Easter Eggs,” which presented a detailed, gamified view of how it manufactured chocolate eggs.
Loaded with interesting facts about both Easter eggs and the company, Thorntons’ interactive factory mesmerised viewers right away. It was charming and well-crafted, and viewers also had the incentive to search for five Easter eggs that were hidden throughout. If they found five eggs, they had the chance to win a year’s supply of chocolate and a tour of the actual factory.
Thorntons’ beefed up this effort by inviting influencers to visit the chocolate factory themselves, after which they posted about the experience in social media. This gained a lot of attention on Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms, and Thornton’s also made a behind-the-scenes post on their website.
ASDA – Giant Hen
Source: Youtube / Home Cinema Adverts
ASDA’s Easter campaign centred around the theme of #GiantHen. If that already sounds catchy, the commercial that catapulted it into the spotlight is even harder to forget. ASDA came up with an ad that ran on TV throughout Easter, and its storyline involved a giant monster hen made of chocolate. The hen had apparently invaded the UK, making appearances and causing widespread concern and curiosity among the country.
Finally, the hen was taken to a branch of ADSA, a major supermarket locally. It remained calm as the crowd buzzed around it, stepping up onto the roof and laying chocolate eggs that slid down inside the supermarket. This wacky video was created to advertise the 20 million chocolate eggs available in ADSA for Easter.
Despite mixed reactions from viewers, the video garnered 650,000 views on Facebook during the first day alone, and the hashtag #GiantHen was seen 3.9 million times. ASDA even made a spoof news channel to go along with it, with news anchors reporting sightings of a large chocolate egg and a matching large footprint.
Mashable – #CraftyEggs
Source: Mashable (click to play vid in separate tab)
Although you can go the route of painstakingly crafted apps or high-definition videos, Mashable’s Easter campaign proves that making a splash doesn’t require a hefty budget. Mashable successfully engaged people by holding a challenge where they crowdsourced content from their users. They asked the public to upload videos of how they decorated their own Easter eggs, using the tags @mashable and #CraftyEggs on social media. The most creative eggs were featured by Mashable on their own platform.
Decorating Easter eggs is a favourite activity, so it wasn’t surprising that people enthusiastically rose to the challenge. Not only did this give Mashable greater publicity, it was also a source of free content for them, and those who were featured put in the extra effort of sharing Mashable’s post. This was accomplished through social media marketing, with a post that could have taken less than an hour to whip up. Until now, #CraftyEggs is still used as a hashtag every Easter until now.
Nestle – Alice
Source: Youtube / David the Agency
Nestle released a one-minute commercial called “Alice” for Easter, cutting down on standard tropes such as Easter bunnies and eggs for a more unique slant. Emphasising how brand marketing needs to appeal to emotions, the commercial featured a modern-life Alice, evoking a sense of nostalgia and childlike playfulness. Alice in the commercial is simply a gigantic girl who towers over everyone else while going about her everyday life as usual. However, when she goes to her family home and her mother greets her, she returns to her normal human size and eats chocolate while enjoying Easter with her family.
This is capped off by the tagline: “Life makes us grow up. Easter brings us back.” The commercial also has a rabbit in every scene, which you’ll only notice if you look closely. Rafael Donato, the creative vice-president of the agency that made the ad, said: “We make use of the giant girl metaphor to explain this very real feeling that we all go through at some point in our lives. And chocolate has this very power to stop the world and bring us back to our true self.”
Although there are common elements that crop up again and again in Easter marketing campaigns, there’s always a way to combine them into something fresh and unique for your business. Easter is one of the most profitable holidays, and whether through video, social media, content, or PR events, taking the time to do extra marketing on Easter is likely to result in increased sales and visibility.