BRAND:
BEL
AWARD CATEGORY:
The Best Social Media Campaign
CAMPAIGN TIME RANGE:
10/09/2025 - 31/12/2025
CREDITS:
Icon Media
CASE STUDY VIDEO
STRATEGY
TLC entered 2025 as the #1 processed cheese brand, but leadership alone was not enough to secure future growth. In an under-penetrated category, the brand needed to accelerate user-base growth more aggressively as market leader. Even though recruitment of new users to the category were being sustained by very strong functional drivers, the biggest issue for TLC is retention: keeping current customers from moving on in a competitive environment where each brand is now starting to look the same and loyalty is getting weaker. This made it critical for TLC not only to stay visible, but to become more distinctive, build stronger brand love, and create deeper emotional connection in consumers’ daily lives.That challenge was intensified by the communications environment itself. In a market where brand distinctiveness was weakening, users could more easily move across cheese brands because many were perceived to feel increasingly similar. At the same time, consumers now live in a state of constant exposure to media, advertising, and brand messaging. In that kind of clutter, awareness is easy to buy; distinctiveness and emotional connection are much harder to earn. For a heritage brand like TLC, the real risk was not invisibility, but erosion: being widely known, yet less actively felt.As a result of this, the strategic goal of TLC has become apparent. It needed a more meaningful way to make its brand equity more present, memorable and loved by its consumers.TLC’s equity is Laughter — not simply as a cheerful tone, but as TLC’s most ownable way of helping people embrace positivity in every life moment. It is the brand’s emotional signature: the asset that makes Con Bò Cười feel warm, human, and distinct in a category where functional familiarity can quickly flatten into sameness.Therefore, using always on as a continuous expression of TLC's laughter equity in everyday moments, as a means of continually growing the emotional connection between TLC and consumers, and creating a more distinct relationship between TLC and consumers will provide TLC with both the ability to maintain customer loyalty among its existing user base and to generate additional customer acquisition through the recruitment of new users.
INSIGHT
The modern world is stressful, busy and full of information. The research also highlighted that 78% of young moms are stressed over balancing work and raising their child. Social media has become an outlet for both young adults and young mothers alike as a form of entertainment. In addition to using social media to research products and follow brands, many young adult audiences use these outlets to seek out funny or entertaining content.“Be positive” is easy to say, but easy to ignore. Generic optimism blends into the wallpaper of the feed. What captures attention is not abstract uplift, but recognition: content that reflects the exact tension people are living through, then reframes it in a way that feels immediate, culturally fluent, and emotionally relieving.Therefore, we were not looking to communicate a message of "positivity" (and its associated benefits). Instead, we were looking to take the idea of "brand positivity" and operationalize it. We wanted to create a social utility (using social media) rather than just another brand value. Therefore, our insight was that in a chaotic feed people pause for brands that can take the existing tension they are experiencing and provide them with something they can relate to, laugh at, and share with others.Laughter therefore became our stronger strategic asset. Laughter is more likely to break through to an audience than optimism. It is easier for an audience to remember a laugh than a statement of reassurance. Finally, laughter is much more unique/ownable by Con Bò Cười than generic words such as "encouragement.
CREATIVE IDEA
The innovation was not a new content format. It was a new operating model for an official brand page. We created a three-speed social publishing model that helped TLC behave less like an official brand page and more like a creator audiences would voluntarily follow. Introduce LOL — Listen to tension. Own the content. Loop the laugh.LISTEN to tension. This meant shifting the starting point of content development. Instead of beginning with product messages or calendar needs, we began with the frictions people were actually navigating: Monday fatigue, work pressure, agency grind, relationship strain, financial stress, festive overload, and the daily effort of holding adult life together. This made the work insight-led in a social sense, not just in a brand sense.OWN the content. Those tensions were not translated into generic relatable content, but into a uniquely Con Bò Cười expression. We curated the most resonant tensions, then reframed them through Bòsona — the red cow as a living social persona rather than a heritage mascot. This gave the page a recognisable authored voice: playful, equal-footed, slightly cheeky, and unmistakably rooted in laughter. The page stopped behaving like a bulletin board and started behaving like a creator property. LOOP the Laugh. The laugh is designed to travel. The joke did not end at the post. It continued into comment threads, admin interactions, community behaviour, creator participation, and user-generated extensions such as Thách Thức Gây Cười. We even created Bòsona stickers as a simple, branded tool to help audiences reuse and spread the laughter language themselves. That is why the work felt different. It turned brand-owned media into a living social behavior system. And the performance later proved the idea: Bò persona x de-negative insight emerged as the strongest-performing formula, while product-centric content without Bòsona consistently delivered lower engagement.
CONNECTION PLAN
The connection plan was built not as a channel checklist, but as a staged diffusion model for branded laughter.Stage 1: Establish the code on Facebook.Facebook was the primary platform because it was where the brand could most effectively build both depth and repeat exposure. For the target audience, Facebook remains a space where branded content, community interaction, practical research, and entertainment coexist. This made it the best platform to prove a new kind of official-brand behaviour: not merely informative, but culturally and emotionally usable. Facebook was where Bòsona could be established as a repeatable social asset.Stage 2: Adapt the code natively into TikTok and Threads.Once the laughter system was established, the brand extended it into more dynamic environments. On TikTok, LOL became short-form, trend-responsive, and format-native. On Threads, it became quicker, sharper, and more conversational. The objective was not simple duplication, but transliteration: keeping the same strategic code while adapting to the native grammar of each platform.Stage 3: Build a laughter network.To move from page behaviour to social behaviour, Con Bò Cười expanded through partnerships with humour-led communities and creators, including pages such as Con Én and Cò Lỏ, while also launching Thách Thức Gây Cười to stimulate UGC participation. This ensured the laughter was not only authored by the brand, but amplified by the social ecosystem around it.In this model, connection was not driven by paid distribution alone. It was driven by a branded social code capable of moving from post, to comment, to creator, to community, creating the halo effect expected of genuine social innovation.
OBJECTIVE-BASE KPI
[1] objective: Turn official-brand content into socially wanted content | platform: Facebook | metrics: Organic interaction Engagement rate | kpi: Compete like a social page, not a commodity brand page | result: From Sep–Dec, TLC reached 0.40% average ER, achieving near-parity with Nhà Tù Hỏa Lò’s 0.43%. This was also 2x higher than TLC’s full-year average ER of 0.19%, proving the page had moved beyond maintenance content into socially wanted content. | compare_with_benchmark: TLC Sep-Dec average ER: 0.4% Nhà Tù Hỏa Lò average ER: 0.43% TLC full-year average ER: 0.19% | source: Facebook Page Analytics Fanpage Karma tracking tool
[2] objective: Connect with core moms while expanding younger relevance | platform: Facebook | metrics: Follower growth rate | kpi: Grow the page with core 25–34 moms while increasing younger pull | result: The page gained +10.5K followers from Sep–Dec, becoming the key acquisition driver of full-year fan growth. | compare_with_benchmark: TLC Sep-Dec fan growth: +10.5k as 67% of 2025 growth (+15.9k) | source: Facebook Page Analytics
[3] objective: Turn passive engagement into participatory laughter | platform: Facebook | metrics: Owned channel buzz | kpi: Make the laugh co-created and amplified by TLC audiences on owned channels | result: The campaign engaged 16K unique users on Facebook, proving the laugh was not only consumed, but joined. The top-owned discussion post came from LOL content, with 5.5K average buzz, delivering more than 2x the discussion level of other paid-led outcomes. | compare_with_benchmark: N/A | source: Buzzmetrics Social Heat report
