Imagine this: A fried chicken crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside, and oh-so mouth-watering to the taste. It is as if the flavours are melting on my tongue (this is a TikTok reference #iykyk)!
That was my #JoyAtFirstBite moment with Jollibee; a throwback to 2019 when I was on a family vacation in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.
My sister and I joked that it would be such an interesting turn of events if I ‘levelled-up’ from a Jollibee customer-turned-advocate to a consultant for the brand. Oh, when they say “the universe tends to unfold as it should”, they were not joking.
Flash forward to October 2021 and VoxEureka had won the account to launch the first Jollibee store in West Malaysia! As if that wasn’t already superb news, I was approached by Pam, the Team Lead and she said to me: “Hey Vi, would you want to be part of the Jollibee team?”
I couldn’t believe my manifestation worked!
As you already know, Jollibee officially opened its Sunway Pyramid store to the public on February 8th, 2022. It will forever be a Tuesday to remember because it took the team four arduous months to realise this. After long hours of planning, persevering, and hustling, we launched Jollibee Sunway Pyramid with a BANG, and we couldn’t be prouder of ourselves.
Taking this chance to reflect on my involvement in this project, I would love to share some key takeaways and learnings on launching Jollibee in West Malaysia. May this be an insightful reading journey for you!
Note: I’ll be dropping some bee puns below so let’s see if you can catch them all! 😉
Lesson 1 – Preparation is key: Are you really ready for what’s to come?
Work commenced in October 2021, consisting of weekly WIP meetings with the Jollibee Malaysia and Philippines teams. The brainstorms for an effective 360 campaign provoked many questions:
- Was our social media content plan effective enough?
- Was our influencer marketing strategy providing us with the most optimal engagement rate once the campaign goes live?
- Are we targeting the right media for our event day, and would they cover our launch?
We needed the prep to ensure that all the questions posted were a hard ‘yes’.
The daily back-and-forth communications bee-tween client, our vendors and with our internal team was essential as we needed to ensure that everything was bee-yond standards. It took four months of intensive planning, we even worked during the festive seasons so we could ensure everything was on track, and thankfully hard work paid off!
Lesson 2 – Adopt an Outside-of-the-box Mindset: Let your creative juices flow!
The client brief was to launch Jollibee at Sunway Pyramid with a big bang, appealing to the younger crowds, particularly Gen Zs and younger Millennials. With that, we went above and bee-yond with our ideas.
We custom-made a Chickenjoy bucket replica, and included exclusive Jollibee merchandise in it, but that’s not all! We even gifted our media and influencer friends an actual bucket of Chickenjoy so that Jollibee (literally the mascot) could share the joy and they could taste the world-famous fried chicken for themselves!
Luckily for us, we had gotten ourselves quite a number of earned media, attained more than 5,000 excited followers on Jollibee Malaysia’s Instagram and a tonne of people sliding into our DMs too!
Lesson 3 – Be adaptive to change: We learn as we go!
‘Sometimes the bee-st way to learn is by trial and error’, this saying never rang truer to me before my participation in this campaign. It was my first time taking lead on any influencer activations throughout my time in VoxEureka, moreso my entire professional career.
Of course, I loved that I was given the opportunity to explore my interest in influencer marketing. Everyday was a new task needing to be completed and while that itself was a learning curve, I was also terrified of making mistakes.
But fret not, I am not one who backs down from a challenge. I wasn’t afraid to be assertive and gave my two cents during regroup sessions; and neither was I afraid to seek advice and feedback from my seniors when I faced roadblocks. Most importantly, I stepped out of my comfort zone, gave it my all and even improved my personal and professional skill sets while at it.
Lesson 4 – Teamwork makes the dream work: Cheers to always having each other’s backs!
Funnily enough, the full Jollibee team met up fewer than five times physically prior to the launch. Due to pandemic concerns, we mostly worked from home but bonded over regular virtual meetings and even formed several WhatsApp group-chats bee-cause having both a Teams group chat and channel weren’t enough!
Never once was my team too bee-sy whenever one needed to sense-check or have another pair of fresh eyes to “look-see” my social media post copies. I loved how I could go to them when I needed motivation and encouragement on those overwhelming days, and how everyone would say “it’s EOD, please clock out and enjoy your evening” as a reminder that work-life-balance is a must, not an option.
I love my Jollibee team and I truly appreciate all of you! Heartfelt thanks for being there for me, always!
Lesson 5 – Enjoy the present: Seize the happy moments!
“3, 2, 1! Say… Jollibee!” exclaimed the cameraman as we embraced the bright camera flashes. Even with face masks on, I could feel my team giving their bee-st smiles, bee-aming with immense joy and happiness.
At that moment, I thought “Wow, we really pulled it off. #MyVoxFam is part of the legendary moment when Jollibee launched its first West Malaysia store in Sunway Pyramid!”
As the camera stopped flashing, I turned to my team with a sense of gratitude and appreciation. Because without each and everyone’s hard work and hustle, you bee-st bee-live we wouldn’t have pulled this launch off as seamlessly as we did. Once again, thank you Jollibee team! Y’all are really buzzin’ buzzin’!
