Homeshop18’s New Brand Mascots Achieve Over 100 Million+ Impressions Through #ShoppingMakesMeHappy

Brand mascots are important for any brand campaign and when HomeShop18 decided to launch its latest campaign, they were faced with the same dilemma.

HomeShop18’s ideology became its brand campaign, ‘Shopping Makes Me Happy’. Targeted at value shoppers, the company wanted to deliver this message by breaking through the clutter and presenting someone loveable yet impactful. The aim was to deliver the brand message in a charming way. After various sessions of brainstorming and research, it was decided that the mascots would be animated cats - Billy and Sunny, a father and son duo. The cats were positioned as the co-founders of HomeShop18 with an aim to spread happiness through shopping by its 360 degree marketing approach.

HomeShop18 perfected the character-driven marketing code by launching their new mascots, Billy and Sunny, across all marketing platforms- online and offline. The brand campaign was launched as a TVC along with a microsite, Facebook and a Twitter page.

The Revelation

The Twitter strategy was to initiate conversation. For this, two Twitter accounts with the handle, @PerfectBilly and @pAwesomeSunny were created. As a sneak peak, their faces were covered and teaser tweets were sent out. This raised curiosity amongst people and threfore, initiated conversations.

The word 'Happiness' was used aggressively during the preview stage of the campaign. The objective was also to create a recall value in the minds of the customers through the word Happiness and associate it with Homeshop18.

After a lot of funny tweets and conversations, the brand announced the microsite and officially launched Sunny and Billy’s identity across both TV and digitally.

What Happened Next?

ShoppingMakesMeHappy.com had 3 lakh visitors and 1.5 lakh views on the Sunny and Billy YouTube video. The site also had 2.3 lakh shares on Sunny and Billy’s memes.