Sense Café: A Capella

Over the past decade, China, traditionally known as a tea-loving nation, has developed a strong taste for coffee. The brewing coffee craze was further accelerated by the COVID pandemic, which propelled demand for premium instant coffee and elevated consumers’ expectations for specialty roasts and unique coffee experiences. At a time where FMCG giants had to adapt almost overnight, Nescafé - a long-time leader in China’s soluble coffee market - rose to the challenge, swiftly pivoting online by launching Sense Café by Nescafé, a new China-born, digital-first, experiential coffee brand. Sense Café by Nescafé first came to life in 2017 as an annual experimental pop-up event combining unique coffee recipes and sensorial excitement to deliver immersive, personalized experiences that sparked thousands of conversations on Chinese social media. In order to replicate this offline success into the online world in a post-COVID era, Nescafé had to expand its digital fooprint and diversify its offerings to cater to increasingly sophisticated consumer groups and new consumption occasions. In 2020, Ogilvy Beijing helped Nescafé turn the Sense Café IP into a standalone premium eCommerce brand powered by a digital ecosystem blending data and innovation. The agency partnered with Alibaba, leveraging real-time consumer analytics to inform product development, including creating the right blend, designing ‘online first’ packaging and crafting cross-platform social content that delivered a premium brand image, drove consumer engagement and conversion to Tmall.