#MobExAwards 2021 highlight: Mandai Wildlife Group fosters brand love among children with animal buddy initiative

As the owner and operator of award-winning wildlife parks, Mandai Wildlife Group aims to be a world-leading zoological institution that inspires people to value and conserve biodiversity. To further inspire visitors to protect wildlife and empower them to fuel positive change for themselves, others and the world, Mandai decided to launch the My Animal Buddy Programme under Mandai which provided greater opportunities for visitors to interact with animals. The programme brought thousands of children closer to animals, winning gold for Best Original Content and taking a spot as a finalist for Best User Experience at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's MobEx Awards 2021.

Challenge

Despite its award-winning wildlife parks, Mandai’s traditional business model of selling entrance tickets, memberships and partnerships with schools was not effective in furthering their mission of inspiring their visitors to value wildlife beyond their single visit. In addition, the frequency of wildlife park visits remained low and every visit was disconnected, with engagement ending once the visitors leave the parks. This meant that Mandai was only able to build a relationship with schools instead of parents and children despite their core target audience being families with young children between the ages of four and ten.

These challenges were further exacerbated by the Circuit Breaker due to the pandemic. With the closure of the parks, Mandai had to find different ways to maintain and increase engagement with their target audience.

Solution

Mandai wanted to achieve the following goals:

1. Increase annual visit frequency of visitors
2. Transform from being merely a park operator to a trusted everyday brand
3. Transform transient connections between the wildlife park animals and visitors to real, personal connections

To do so, Mandai started out by understanding parents and their needs through consumer research such as scraping of local parenting forums to identify key tension points, conducting focus group discussions with parents to understand parents’ needs and testing of product concepts with parents to ensure that the proposed programmes meet the needs of the parents.

The conducted research uncovered three main insights:

1. Parents knew that animal interactions were beneficial for their children but there were not enough convenient opportunities to do so.
2. Parents wanted their children to thrive with the right values but do not know how to instil such values without putting too much pressure on their children.
3. Parents needed help engaging their children at home and realise that digital tools are essential but they do not have a trusted brand to turn to.

After scanning the competitive landscape, Mandai found an opportunity in hybrid animal interactions by bringing together its traditional areas of success such as animals feeding programmes, petting zoos and behind the scenes tours with digital experiences such as livestreams.

Through this hybrid programme, Mandai could offer activities such as feeding and interactions, tours, educational publications, in-park content, keeper talks and animal shows to keep children engaged.

Execution

Mandai launched My Animal Buddy on 9 October 2020, a free, multi-modal, learning platform to teach children essential values and mindsets to thrive in the future while deepening their love for wildlife and the environment. The programme launch was executed via a media event featuring a virtual story and a live show.

With My Animal Buddy, every child can befriend their very own animal buddy and embark on a fun learning journey to connect with wildlife in the comfort of their own homes.

Each child gets to choose an animal buddy to adopt and takes a pledge to care for and protect it. The child will receive an adoption certificate. Weekly buddy messages and email content are sent to parents as engagement reminders.

Children can engage meaningfully with animals through different product features such as videos, quizzes, live chats, live keeper shows, parent resource sheets or connect with their animal buddies through live cameras and shows. Children were also invited to send birthday wishes to their animal buddies through a chatbot.

In March 2021, a new animal buddy, Sally, was announced together with the launch of a suite of teaching resources for preschool teachers to use My Animal Buddy content in their lessons.

Results

The launch of My Animal Buddy was featured in more than 20 articles across mainstream media, online news sites, online portals and even on MP Tan Chuan-Jin’s Facebook page. There was also an outpouring of praise for My Animal Buddy from unpaid influencers. My Animal Buddy’s virtual show also saw an engagement of over 10,000 children across 309 screens in two separate sessions.

Ultimately, My Animal Buddy achieved stellar results and successfully increased visit frequency, engagement and trust from parents without any marketing dollars. The programme has received glowing testimonials from satisfied parents who believe that the online content from My Animal Buddy is educational and trustworthy. More importantly, thousands of children are now inspired to care for wildlife.