01 Mar 2018

Flourish Margarine IMACE campaign

Topics

Success achieved

Through trustworthy online voices we succeeded to increase the volume of positive sentiment communication on our category, resulting in a better image for our category.

Website: http://imace.org/en/homepage/
Project dates: January 2017 - March 2018 & beyond

Project team

The Communications working group composed of experts of our company members enlarged with some company marketing specialists. The project was managed with a project team composed of marketing and communication experts of several Member Companies (Unilever, Vandemoortele, Bunge, CSM, Aigremont, Smilde Foods, Dragsbeck, Mills).

Tools & Systems

Throughout the campaign, we used Crimson Hexagon as a platform for social volume, sentiment and conversation topic tracking. We complemented this tool by occasional use of Synthesio and Buzzsumo.

Engagement tracking and content management was facilitated through a custom-made platform of Flrish (similar to Traackr) - in combination with the influencer relationship tool called Join.

Introduction

The margarine category suffers from a rather negative image, despite the very positive intrinsics of the product. Modern margarines (B2B & B2C) are plant based (emulsion of plant oils and water) and are an important source of the healthy unsaturated fats in the diet. Margarine and spreads are also good sources of vitamin A & D. Thanks to their plant-based nature, their footprint is also three times lower than animal fat alternatives. It was obvious that this is not well known by the public, but once explained to the public, the attitude towards the category improves big time.

This has motivated us to start this campaign where we wanted to inform better on the intrinsic positive characteristics of our category by listening and responding on their concerns related to health and protection of the planet.

We also wanted to test a new way of communicating on social media, working with social media opinion leaders expressing themselves on the category, focusing on audiences who have an interest in health and protection of the planet. The idea was also to interact with the audiences on the blogs and to learn how people talk and feel about our category.

Discovery

Before setting off, we wanted to understand the waters we were navigating. We invested in a wide and detailed international deep dive of social media. We drilled this exercise down for every key market.

We flipped the model: by researching conversations in the social space, we got to understand who our current and future plant-based fans are. Two groups popped up in every key market: baking fans and the vegan society.

Our social media deep dive taught us:

that these groups are sizeable and growing
what type of content and conversations they love to engage with
at what time of the day they most engage with content
who they trust - and don't
what their level of understanding and support for plant-based margarine is today

The stats unveiled, as we expected, that two social platforms were highly relevant for our audiences: Facebook and Instagram. Facebook as an excellent relationship builder, Instagram as a place for visual inspiration and the creation of appetite appeal.

With these insights in hand, we ran a (small) test, to test the synergy for the margarine industry between Instagram and Facebook. It confirmed that by combining both in our strategy, we could reach people cross-devices throughout their content consumption journey.

Objectives

Our first mission was to pump up the conversation volume on plant-based margarine. We had a good reason for wanting to do just that. We noticed that the European conversation volume for margarine (and plant-based margarine) on social media declined year after year (-21% in 2017 vs 2016 + -11% in 2016 vs 2015). 'Opportunities to see' were too scarce. Our objective was to push the conversation volume up with 10% during the campaign period.
Our second mission was to create a small army of trustworthy positive voices in the baking and the vegan arena. These were not hit-and-run-contacts, but people that we want to build a long-term relationship with. Our objective was to find and mobilize thirty positive voices in total.
Our third mission was to create a more positive sentiment within the margarine conversation. Our objective was to up this with 2% during the campaign period.
Our fourth mission is to have the audience engage with the content created by our credible voices. We know that engagement is important to pump up public profile of plant-based margarine. Our objective was to up the positive sentiment by 5% during the campaign period.

Activities

The key to success is to keep the “administration and follow-up of the project” light. We did not work with lists and strict procedures. You need to have a team with a clear mandate to take decisions on behalf of their company and there needs to be trust in the commercial partner for smooth follow-up and light reporting.

This is very important in successfully running such a project in an association. We used also a lot of written consultations and telephonic updates. Very often we recorded the presentations to allow the project members to present the status and the results internally in their company to gain trust and interest for the project.

This is a schematic presentation of our journey with the Members from January 2017 till today:

In the following overview you can see how we went along with the influencers. Influencers are more keen to work for a category than for a specific brand. It is very important to check extensively the DNA of the influencer to be 200% sure that he/she matches your views.

*Activities - journey with our influencers*

Innovation

Many campaigns on social include mega, macro and micro-influencers. We decided to work with a mix of micro influencers - in combination with an active approach of nano-influencers. These nano-influencers are consumer- influencers who think highly of the category or defend it for personal or professional reasons.

The content created by the micro-influencers was actively shared with the nano-influencers that we were able to identify on the several European markets. It was the outreach to this big army of friends that generated a warm wave of support and love. We wanted to empower 'margarine positive voices' by giving them good content to have and to share.

In most influencer / social campaigns, these nano- influencers are being overlooked. They have proven to be very successful in our campaign, as they were the ones who actively amplified the content that was created by the micro-influencers.

Our content got seen and shared by people that truly matter: our consumers - old and new.

Challenges

Our biggest challenge was internal: to convince our members to run a social media campaign. They were very reluctant towards the use of social media due to the fact that you cannot control very well the conversation. Only a few of our members work through social media today and the knowledge on the possibilities were very limited.

We organized several sessions with the executive committee to inform on the possibilities of social media and showed successful campaigns from other industries.

We were able to convince them to run the campaign but on condition that we should be fully prepared to answer all issues that might arise in the blogs. We prepared an elaborated Q&A and key messages and we also approached several key opinion leaders to speak out on several topics (written and filmed). This extra preparation reassured the members that we could defend ourselves in case the communication would go wrong.

Achievements

Our campaign needed to server several purposes. It was both aimed at:

Getting our members to see, feel and experience that the margarine category is potentially a growing category.
Test-driving campaigns on social media: many of our members had no to limited experience with social campaigns - including influencers and paid media.
We set off to build a successful case that could be distributed to their marcom teams. We wanted to build an army of positive voices - that would keep on supporting the category thanks to good education and information.

What we did not manage to do enough:

We wanted to pass on knowledge and information to all member teams.
We noticed that this project remained -to a big extent- the project of a 'task force'. We did not succeed well enough to get traction with a wider group of members.

Targets & Statistics

These are the results of the campaign period (benchmark: average volume of the previous 12 months):

Via our combined micro & nano influencer approach we reached over 3 million people
Mentions of plant-based margarine: average of 250+ campaign mentions per country - during the campaign period
Retweets: average engagement rate of 6%
Shares: thanks to our nano-influencer campaign our campaign got shared on numerous private Facebook pages (no public information available)

Financials

The total investment for rolling out the project in Belgium, The Netherlands, France, UK, Germany and Poland was 150 K - all agency fees, licenses, influencer costs and media budgets included.

We outperformed on every single defined objective:

Conversation volume: we aimed for 1.5 million - we reached 3 million people
Positive voices army creation: we worked with +400.000 positive margarine contacts
Positive sentiment: went up - general uplift of 3%
Engagement: average of 6%

Most importantly, we got to grab and onboard the plant-based and vegan community in our key markets. As plant-based eating is steeply on the rise and the plant-based movement is gaining momentum, we are particularly proud of this successful groundwork. It is very fertile ground on which we can build strong relations with that very community in the future.

What would we do differently?

Due to the budget limitation, choices had to be made on the social platforms that you can work with and also the money available for paid pushing was limited. We also had to make choices on the number of countries in which we could run the campaign.

Feedback & Testimonials

“The flourish project got us closer to what consumers think about margarine, which is different from what often read in the press. As margarine is used frequently in most households as well as in professional Bakeries and kitchens, we got a lot of encouragement from consumers. Health aspects but also practical usability and taste matter to people. Baking with margarine is a delight. There has been so much positivity shared, in addition or contrast to often cited scepticism on alleged artificiality.”

Markus Rehde, President IMACE, VP BCS Unilever

“What I really liked is that in a way we broke the rules, as besides institutional communication we went social for the first time!
We had a strong message, we just had to find the way to effectively reach out consumers.

I liked the preparation, with social listening, to set the starting point, and particularly how we went through co-creation of contents in the bloggers own language. Should you ask me to define the campaign in one word I would say “fresh”.

And results where excellent”

Barbara Lanzoni, Senior marketing expert CSM

“Due to its innovative approach, Flourish project helped to put margarine in the positive spotlight it deserves. Instead of focusing on demystifying the amount of myths about margarine, Flourish puts effort in spreading the positive sentiment on margarine. There were already lot of positive stories and ambassadors of margarine out there, they only needed some closer look and support to reach the right people!”

Fernanda Martinez, Global nutrition lead Unilever

"Influencer campaigns are becoming increasingly popular today. Close to every company and association wants to set them up and roll them out. Very often, these campaigns have very little focus. Imace's campaign was an exception to this rule. It had focus and a clear strategy taking into account the power of micro and nano-influencers.

It is one of the most powerful influencer campaigns that I have come across. Wonderful results that really made a difference."

Herman Toch, inspirational speaker and guest lecturer at the Stockholm School of Management

Return to listing