The Business Problem

Marketing Director Dave Levine, approached UNO to develop creative and media to launch the product locally and internationally. It was their intention to launch Sipahh! in the $170m Milk Modifiers category with a range of flavours to appeal to children to 12 years. This was a category dominated by Nestle’s Quik.

When UNO launched the new Sipahh straws, the task was not just to launch  a new brand, UNO needed to establish a completely new product category.

We had to work within a limited budget to completely re-educate the milk flavouring consumer audience. Nestle Quick and Milo had market dominance grounded on half a century of big budget marketing spend. Sipahh was to be launched with just 20% of Nestle’s annual budget for Quik.

Sipahh had to own fun, tactile flavour cues to appeal to kids, as well as reassuring mums about the health benefits of this new product.

UNO's Creative Solution

We leveraged creative promotions that didn’t cost lots of money:

• Credibility with the under 12’s with a fun cow who could be rude and spoke their language, and definitely didn’t need Mum to recommend the product
• Free kid’s magazine promotional space through supply of entertaining cartoons featuring Mort; on magazine sampling so Mum wasn’t the first to hear about it.
• A trail blazing set of websites- one for kids and one for parents
• 3 animated cartoon style ads, with space on Pay TV negotiated as a pay for sales % Targeted Trade advertising
• Free straw sampling

The Outcome

In less than a year, Sipahh gained 20% share of the ‘milk modifier’ market in Australia with just a fraction of the spend of the major players.

The campaign was so successful, it was rolled out in over 20 countries globally.

A sad postscript

Buoyed by their stunning success, management hired more staff and decided the next straw product would be a coffee flavour for teens. We were briefed on the product, but could not recommend they launch it because our experience taught us you could launch a second product to a younger group, but you couldn’t take a product popular with little kids and sell it to teenagers. It was hard to deliver that advice but we will always take a risk in the client’s best interest. Unistraw moved the coffee straw launch to a global agency, and it failed dismally after a big spending campaign. Unistraw was sadly placed in receivership 12 months later.