Social Media Marketing Activities for Nestle's Nestcafé Brand in Vietnam

Olay Natural White's more than 7,600 fans on Facebook is not too impressive, especially for a product of a famous brand like Olay. This can be made clearer when comparing Olay's Fan Page with the Fan Page of OMIO - another cosmetic brand quite popular in Vietnam - which has more than 14,111 fans, which is nearly twice as many as Olay Natural White 58 .

In general, in Vietnam today, Olay is one of the brands that is quick to use social media marketing with certain efforts and successes. However, to be truly effective, Olay must invest more time and effort in this type of marketing.

3.2.2.2. Social media marketing activities for Nestle's Nestcafé brand in Vietnam

a) General introduction about Nestlé Vietnam company and Nestcafé brand

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Nestlé is the world's leading nutritional food company. In 1995, Nestlé Vietnam Co., Ltd. (100% foreign investment) was established, under Nestlé SA Group. Also in 1995, Nestlé was licensed to establish Dong Nai Factory, specializing in the production of Nescafé instant coffee, Nestea instant tea and packaging of Milo drinks, Nestlé nutritional cereal powder, Maggi seasoning powder and sauce, Coffee-Mate cream powder. Nestlé Vietnam Company is headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City and has a business office in Hanoi. Nestlé has a Dong Nai factory in the South. Currently, Nestlé Vietnam has a total of 1,000 employees.

Nestlé products are very diverse, from milk, tea to coffee and are for many different age groups. Among them is Nestcafé coffee. This is the world's leading instant coffee brand with a 70-year history and is loved by many Vietnamese people 59 .

58 Facebook (2010), http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/omiocosmetic?ref=ts , April 23, 2010.

59 Nestlé Vietnam (2010), http://www.nestle.com.vn/ , March 28, 2010.

b) Social media marketing activities for Nestcafé brand of Nestlé Vietnam company

Nestcafé's current social media marketing activities mainly focus on the campaign to build the Let's Talk forum - a forum mainly for young people to discuss and express their personal thoughts on issues such as marriage, love, entertainment, society, etc.

It can be seen from the name of the campaign that the main social media tool that Nestcafé uses is the forum - a technology application that, although not as highly connected and interactive as community networks, is still quite popular today. The Let's Talk Forum built by Nestcafé started operating in August 2009. Let's Talk was built with the aim of creating a forum, a healthy and creative playground for all Vietnamese people at home and abroad. Nestcafé has the ambition to turn Let's Talk into a common community where everyone can discuss and share all thoughts and views on life and people to help each individual expand their knowledge, have the opportunity to exchange, connect and together build a better life and community. The main categories on the Cung Chat forum are about Friends, Love, Work, Career, Education, Marriage - Family, Entertainment, Society and the newly added topic is Hanoi 1000 years. In addition, coming to the forum, members also have the opportunity to chat, discuss, and interact online with some famous people such as Ho Hoai Anh, Hien Thuc and some current Hot Bloggers in Vietnam such as Moi Do, Giay Do, Dementor, Trang Ha, Yen Dieu....

In general, the features of Cung Chat are not different from other forums. To join the forum, members need to register and provide some basic information. After registering, members have become part of the Cung Chat community. They can participate in expressing their thoughts, voting for their favorite topics or even creating their own topics that interest them. In addition, on the forum, members can also participate in small poll surveys similar to the form mentioned in the example of social media marketing activities for the Olay Natural White Cream product above.

To further support this forum, Nestcafé also uses Facebook, creating a group on this social network also named Cung Tro Chuyen. Facebook users who join this group can also discuss similar topics as on the forum. In fact, this group was created on Facebook mainly to promote Nestcafé's Cung Tro Chuyen forum to the Facebook user community.

c) Evaluation of social media marketing activities for Nestcafé brand of Nestlé Vietnam company

Overall, the Chat Together forum with certain advantages has recognized Nestcafe's efforts in reaching its customers, specifically young customers.

First, the content of the forum initially attracted the participation of members. The hottest topics had thousands of views and discussions. For example, the hottest topic on the forum was “Is college the only way to success?” which attracted 15,366 views and 1,090 discussions 60 .

The forum interface is also an advantage recognized by many young people. Cung Chat is built with a prominent and eye-catching interface in the main red color of Nestcafe.

In particular, Nestcafe also cooperates with "Vietnamese stars" as mentioned above. This is also a great advantage to attract forum participants.

Another advantage of Cung Tro Chat is that the forum has organized many practical ( offline ) activities to contribute to bringing social media marketing activities from online to real life. For example, the writing contest "Cung Tro Chat with Nestcafé", talks with famous people such as: psychological counselor Dinh Doan, Nguyen Cong Vinh, Ly Thi Mai, designers Ha Linh Thu and Ngo Thai Uyen, ... The talks were held in turn at universities, industrial parks and cultural houses nationwide, creating for young people a useful playground and the opportunity to interact with famous people.

60 Let's Chat (2010), http://www.cungtrochuyen.com/ , April 23, 2010.

With the above advantages, the result is that after nearly 8 months of operation, as of April 23, 2010, the forum has attracted 14,332 members, of which 13,861 are active members, accounting for about 97%. With 9 fixed topics, there are currently 28,165 sub-topics created by the management board as well as participating members. Thus, from the first day of operation in August 2009, on average, the forum has had about 60 new members and 117 new topics created per day. These are the

Encouraging statistics for Chat Together 60 .

Besides the advantages that have been achieved, Nestcafé's Chat Together forum still has many weaknesses. Specifically as follows:

First of all, as an online forum for young people, Cung Chat is at risk of becoming boring in terms of content over time. Some topics on the forum are currently considered diluted and bland, even quite useless, such as "Should I love my best friend's friend?"; "Should I love my best friend's sister?" and "Do you think loneliness and solitude are the same?"... In the short term, such content can still attract the attention of a certain number of members, but if in the long term, the forum is still flooded with such content, Cung Chat is very likely to be forgotten.

Recently, there have been comments criticizing the forum itself with language and words that are not in accordance with Vietnamese customs and traditions, or some members taking advantage of the forum to advertise their products and services. These phenomena have caused a lot of negative reactions from many members.

In addition, in terms of technology, Cung Chat is still too simple. The interaction between members is limited to the internal scope of the forum. Meanwhile, one of the great advantages of social media tools is the high interaction between users, often not only within an online community but also between many different online communities. Nestcafé created a group on Facebook to support Cung Chat, but the forum itself does not have any link to this group.

To see the above weaknesses more clearly, we can compare Cung Chat with Pepsi We Inspire - an online community newly established by Pepsi.

launched in 2010 and has many similarities with Cung Chat. Pepsi We Inspire is a place for African women to share stories that inspire them in life. Although only targeting a small customer segment, Pepsi has built this online community very carefully, with in-depth content, ease of use and high connectivity with Facebook. Users only need a Facebook account to be able to use Pepsi We Inspire. To promote this website, Pepsi's marketing experts also created additional accounts on Facebook, Twitter & Youtube under the name Pepsi We Inspire. These are all experiences that Nestlé Vietnam needs to learn from Pepsi if it wants Cung Chat to be more successful.

The emergence of web 2.0 technology and modern tools capable of wireless Internet connection as well as the trust in word-of-mouth marketing and the need for consumers to connect and share information in the community are the basis for the formation and development of social media marketing. Nowadays, more and more experts trust and choose this type of marketing. Therefore, many interesting examples of the use of social media in marketing activities can be found around the world.

In Vietnam, social media marketing has only been introduced for a short time. Besides the difficulties encountered from the legal system, infrastructure and information technology, in general, this type of marketing is gradually finding its place. Factors such as the increasing demand for Internet use and participation in online communities of the people as well as the young population structure have brought many advantages for the development of social media marketing in Vietnam.

CHAPTER III: SOME SOLUTIONS TO DEVELOP SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING ACTIVITIES IN VIETNAM

1. Factors affecting social media activities and social media marketing in Vietnam in the future

1.1. The trend of trust in word-of-mouth marketing continues to increase

From the early 90s when advertising first appeared in Vietnam until the past few years, it is probably not wrong to say that Vietnamese people still have a "strong belief" in what appears in advertisements. Many people even enjoy waiting to see advertisements. However, over time, people's lives have developed more and more, and the opportunity to access mass media has also increased. The phenomenon of advertising appearing with increasing frequency from newspapers, television to banners, posters, and flyers flooding the streets sometimes causes negative feelings for consumers. Meanwhile, recommendations from family, friends, and acquaintances have often been highly appreciated by consumers in recent times and this phenomenon still tends to develop in the future. In addition, it is also necessary to mention an important characteristic of Vietnamese people's personality: crowd mentality. When shopping and consuming, Vietnamese people are often influenced by the thought: " If friends use it, colleagues use it, then I will use it too ". This way of thinking has existed for a long time and will not change in the near future. The results from the actual survey are clear evidence for the above statements. Specifically, among the survey subjects who responded that they participated in online communities, the majority (76%) said that they had received information shared about products and services from their friends and acquaintances through these online communities, 55% said that their purchasing decisions were influenced by the above shared information.

Thus, it is clear that in the future, word-of-mouth marketing will still have a solid position for businesses in Vietnam, in which using social media to effectively leverage word-of-mouth in marketing activities is increasingly proving to be a reasonable choice.

1.2. The trend of using the Internet in general and online communities such as social networks and user sharing networks continues to grow.

According to statistics from the market research company TNS, if in 2006, Vietnamese people spent 295 minutes watching TV and 22 minutes reading online newspapers every day, by 2009, the time spent watching TV by Vietnamese people had decreased by 1 hour to 233 minutes/day while the time spent reading online newspapers increased to 43 minutes/day 61 . According to the chart of Internet growth rates of some countries and territories in Asia from 2000 to 2009 of the Internet World Stats website in figure 9 below, Vietnam is one of the countries with a spectacular Internet growth rate (10.882%) 62 . All of these statistics are evidence of the increasing trend of Internet usage by Vietnamese people in the future.

Figure 9: Internet growth chart in some Asian countries (2000 – 2009) 62

61 TNS, quoted by Phuong Khanh (2009), Vietnam Marketing Magazine No. 61 , Military Printing Factory 2,

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62 Internet World Stats (2010), http://www.internetworldstats.com/ , April 1, 2010.

It is not too difficult to explain this trend when the Internet today has penetrated into almost every corner of daily life. Especially in big cities like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, with the increasing quality of life, people not only access the Internet through desktop computers but also through laptops or smartphones such as iPhone, Blackberry, ...

Along with the increasing trend of Internet usage, the trend of participating in online communities such as social networks and people's sharing networks has also developed. In recent times, the massive appearance of social networks has demonstrated the increasing need for sharing and connection of Vietnamese people through online communities. According to actual survey results, among those who are not currently participating in any online community, up to 92% said they plan to participate in the near future. In particular, Vietnamese people are also starting to tend to consult shopping information through these online communities. Specifically, according to the actual survey results, while currently only 45% of respondents said that one of the purposes they participate in social networks is to learn about products and services, up to 71% responded that in the near future they plan to refer to information from online communities when making purchasing decisions.

In summary, the two trends analyzed above are considered advantages for the development of social media marketing in Vietnam. In the future, businesses in Vietnam who want to try their hand at social media marketing need to clearly understand the impact of the above trends on this type of marketing and how to take advantage of them in specific campaigns as well as in their business's long-term social media marketing strategy.

2. Some key solutions to develop social media marketing activities in Vietnam

2.1. Solutions from the business side

Using social media marketing in business practice requires a deep understanding as well as the ability to learn quickly from the business to