Nestlé Waters Philippines' Hidden Spring Sports a New Image with Primesoft and Hidden Spring PLAY

The business challenge:

Hidden Spring, the Philippines’s first bottled natural mineral water brand, was introduced in 1982. With water originating from the freshwater springs of Laguna, it was recognized as the pioneer in the Philippine bottled water industry not just because it was the first of its kind, but because of the industry standards that it had set.

It underwent a major imaging and packaging overhaul in October 2003, featuring a practical and handy packaging, a more colorful and vibrant image, and a more stylish label.

In late 2004, the brand launched Hidden Spring PLAY, the first mineral water product in the country to include a sports cap in its bottle design. In line with this, Nestlé Waters Philippines, the company behind Hidden Spring PLAY, commissioned Primesoft to develop an engaging, sports-themed online game that would help to launch the product. The game was to run for two months and was to feature various prizes for its winners.

The Primesoft solution:

To address the requirements of Nestlé Waters Philippines and Hidden Spring, we first developed the online game’s concept, rules, logic, and promotional mechanics. We contracted the services of a third-party marketing consultant to fulfill some of these tasks.

The resulting concept was an online triathlon game called Hidden Spring Tri-PLAY. It had three levels of game play: the Running Leg, where players had to navigate a small city in order to find a special "key" that would allow them to proceed to the next level; the Biking Leg, where players had to complete a biking course and avoid various obstacles (such as potholes and rocks) along the way; and the Swim Leg, where players had to negotiate a swimming course and avoid various obstacles, such as killer jellyfish and sharks.

To further reinforce the Hidden Spring PLAY brand, we developed the game such that players would have to keep their "hydration levels" up by consuming Hidden Spring PLAY, which they could pick up in the course of playing the different legs of the triathlon. The object of the game was to finish all three levels in the shortest time possible, with prizes going to the players with the top 10 best times.

After we had finalized the concept, we then proceeded to develop the game in Macromedia Flash^®, using extensive animation and Flash^® Action Scripting. In addition to this, we developed a set of back-end Web applications and integrated them with the front-end game interface. These back-end systems provided the functionality required for player registration, for player scoring, for game security, and others.

We also designed and developed various e-marketing materials, such as e-mail blasts–which Hidden Spring used to promote the game to various e-mail lists.

By the end of the promotion period, Hidden Spring Tri-PLAY had been played by over 600 unique users. Moreover, a total of over 12,000 unique games had been played—far exceeding the expectations set by Nestlé Waters Philippines.

Today, Hidden Spring is one of the most admired brands of Nestlé Waters, with "brand loyalists" who have patronized the brand since it was introduced, as well as with newer consumers who are from a younger, more mobile, and more dynamic demographic.

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