Look beyond the label - a campaign
Success achieved
How FEVE increased its community by 26% in a year, by showing Europe that glass packaging is the best packaging for preserving the flavour of any food or drink.
- Website
- http://feve.org
- Project dates
April – December 2015
Project team
Among 11 local teams where the Friends of Glass campaign is present (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia), the central Friends of Glass team consists of:
- Michael Delle Selve, Senior Communications Manager, FEVE
- Adeline Farrelly, Secretary General, FEVE
- Nora Lawton, Co-Managing Director, Weber Shandwick
- Christian Prior, Account Director, Weber Shandwick
- Alexander Lazarou, Senior Account Executive, Weber Shandwick
- Eleonora Minozzi, Digital Strategist, Weber Shandwick
- Benjamin Fox, Digital Strategist, Weber Shandwick
Tools & Systems
- YouTube
Introduction
Glass packaging is beautiful. It’s also sustainable, 100% recyclable and safe to store food and drink in. Yet glass as a packaging option faces stiff competition from other materials, especially plastics and aluminium.
In 2015, the second year of the Friends of Glass engagement campaign, we focused our efforts on how glass best preserves the flavour of any food or drink it contains. We worked with wine, water and beer sommeliers, and food experts including chefs and nutritionists to define the Taste of Europe.
Consumers all over Europe were invited to #MapYourTaste via a BuzzFeed-inspired quiz that would reveal their taste profile. We discovered that Europeans favour umami (a strong bland or savoury) flavoured food, over very salty or sweet. Our #MapYourTaste ‘Tour d’Europe’ visited EXPO Milano, but also London, Burgos, Hamburg, Munich and Paris.
Discovery
Glass packaging is facing fierce competition with other food and drink packaging materials, in particular plastics. In 2013, FEVE tasked Weber Shandwick with creating a direct engagement campaign that would influence everyday European consumer perceptions about the benefits of glass packaging. Glass packaging enjoys major advantages – directly linked to health, taste and the environment.
Our 2014 campaign focused on the health benefits whilst in 2015 our focus shifted to the topic of taste.
Key campaign objectives for 2015 revolved around:
- Expanding Consumer Awareness: While engagement with our target group (women and mums) was clearly active, we also needed to diversify and strengthen awareness to other influential members of the household such as fathers, and additional consumer groups including youths/teens.
- Deepening Consumer Engagement: Whilst Mums primary focus is to ensure their families stay healthy and safe, a secondary priority for them is to keep their families happy. Within a busy and crowded space (that is the food and drink sector), mums are keen to purchase products that provide for their kids genuine happiness, implicitly this can be linked to food and drinks products that taste good. Glass is the ultimate taste preserver – it maintains foods and drinks in their purest form, ensuring the best, enjoyable and unadulterated taste.
Objectives
- Promote glass as the best food and drink packaging option towards consumers
- Grow the Friends of Glass online community of consumer amplifiers across Europe
- Deepen consumer engagement via established social channels such as Facebook and Twitter
- Raise awareness of the benefits of glass, relating to the taste of food and drink, among influencers
Activities
Taste experts join the campaig
Food and flavours are an important part of society and culture in every country in Europe. We decided to play with the cultural differences and similarities of the food and drinks we prefer the taste of, while positioning glass as the best material to preserve the taste and quality of food. Our plan was to collaborate with an international group of food experts, chefs and sommeliers to conduct a social experiment to explore which kinds of tastes – from sweet to spicy – appeal most to people across Europe.
We recruited a pan-European panel of seven high-profile “Taste Makers” who acted as ambassadors throughout 2015:
- Swedish sommelier Andreas Larsson, the “Best Sommelier in the World”;
- Arno Steguweit, Europe’s first Water Sommelier from Germany;
- Caroline Furstoss, France’s Best Sommelier;
- Italian nutritionist Professor Giorgio Calabrese;
- Guillermo Cruz, Spain’s Best Sommelier;
- Jane Peyton, UK Beer Sommelier of the Year;
- Christophe Baert, chef and VP of the Belgian Euro-Toques Association.
We worked with our “Taste Makers” to create a Buzzfeed-style multiple-choice quiz featuring 11 questions designed to capture consumer flavour preference data. Working with the Weber Shandwick Studio team in The Hague, we used the results to build and create an animated Taste Map of Europe, which tracked all results to eventually ‘map’ a definitive Taste of Europe.
Among the surprising findings were that Europe’s favourite flavour is umami (bland or savoury), with bitter and sweet in second and third places. The quiz also covered cooking, shopping and entertainment preferences.
The Taste Map lives online on the Friends of Glass interactive content hub, with all content amplified, pushed and shared via our owned social channels, as well as those of our Taste Makers.
The campaign was supported by a relatively small but incredibly effective ‘paid-for’ social media budget. All data collected on our content hub (consumer input) was then collated and leverage to provide results that formed the basis of our extensive traditional media outreach. This outreach focused on 11 key European markets (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, UK, Czech Republic, Austria, Croatia, Poland, Switzerland and Slovakia).
An infographic of the most interesting results was also used across social channels to generate further consumer engagement. This infographic was also used as a key asset during media outreach. The infographic is available for download below.
Tour of Europe, mapping people's tastes
The campaign was supported by a #mapyourtaste tour of local markets. Our Tour d’Europe kicked off at EXPO Milano in May, followed by visits to Paris and Taste of London and made a final stop at Burgos in Spain. At each stage of the Tour d’Europe, more data was captured, which allowed us to map the specific tastes of each country.
Other activities included an online competition that resulted over 5,500 entries (and genuine consumer contributions to the Taste Map). The eventual winner enjoyed a VIP trip to EXPO Milano.
Challenges
Glass is often seen as a given household item. What is the best way to market a product without a brand? All activity during 2015 focused on addressing a central challenge: how do we, FEVE and the glass industry, inspire consumers and drive real consumer engagement around the benefits of glass packaging, in a manner which could lead to genuine behavioural change and drive further purchases of food and drinks products in glass packaging?
It would have been easy to compare and contrast the health, taste and environmental credentials of glass with other packaging materials, but FEVE wanted to keep the campaign tone positive. Our mandate for the three-year project was to avoid mentioning other packaging materials in a negative way, and instead to focus on all the fantastic attributes of glass.
Achievements
The grassroots support for glass which we built in 2014 grew to something approaching a consumer movement in 2015. The results speak for themselves; almost 30,000 consumers contributed to the Taste Map; The Friends of Glass community increased by 26% in just one year to almost 82,000 amplifiers and authentic positive supporters of glass. All efforts combined to ensure that we exceeded very ambitious KPIs of 25% community growth putting us firmly on track to have an engaged community of 100,000 people by the end of the third year of the campaign. (end of 2016)
The 2015 campaign generated over 28 million social media impressions – this represents an increase of 127% vis-à-vis our 2014 campaign. There were more than one million views of the animated map on the Friends of Glass website. Video content has been watched over 560,000 times, 320% more than in 2014. And finally, we leveraged all our digital and social data to generate an impressive 417 traditional media clippings (across eight markets, with a total circulation of over 1 billion).
The third year of the campaign is now underway, focusing on the environmental sustainability of glass packaging, to continue to drive consumer awareness and encourage people to buy more food and drink packaged in glass.
Key factors of the success of our campaign was the mix of engaging content creation, online and offline engagement and the collaboration with some of the most profiled taste makers in Europe.
This balanced mix helped us to efficiently raise awareness and discuss our topics with our key audience group, asking them to Look beyond the label. It’s not only the health benefits of glass that are important, but also the taste credentials. The packaging matters; Look for Glass. Choose Glass. Buy Glass. Glass not only ensures food safety better than any other container material, it also guarantees the best taste.
What would we do differently?
The campaign was very successful and we are satisfied with the results. If there was a possibility, it would have been great to further develop partnerships with food and drink “Friends of Glass” brands that could have helped bring the campaign to supermarket shelves and directly in contact with people. As it is designed now, Friends of Glass is not yet ready to face this challenge but is one aspect we can develop in the future.
Feedback & Testimonials
Campaign Ambassador Quotes
“The glass impacts a lot because wine is a product that needs to age, that needs time, so we really need packaging which is neutral with no oxidation. Glass would be definitely the best way to keep wine and to age it so it evolves in a good way, not to get [sic] oxidized.”
Quote by Caroline Furstoss, French Wine Sommelier
“I would actually buy almost everything in glass. I think that glass has a lot of advantages: It is clean, you can rise it, you can reuse it, you can open it, you can close it. To me it is the perfect packaging for food and nutrition. And I think the packaging is one of the most important parts about drinking water. In my opinion there is just one true possible packaging. Because nothing else contains the fragile product of water as good and as positive as glass does. Any other of the packaging is either not stable enough or not packing the product into its own atmosphere. I would definitely prefer and recommend a glass bottle.”
Quote by Arno Steguweit, Europe’s first Water Sommelier
“I have never wondered about the meaning of my tastes’ preferences until I met Friends of Glass at Expo Milan 2015 for an evening entirely dedicated to international tastes. During the evening, I had the chance to listen about the importance of preserving the taste of food and drink, the correct way to preserve food and how the packaging affects health."
Media Quotes
“The shape of a glass can definitely affect the taste and drinking experience of the beer.”
“The rim is especially important,”
Peyton, also the UK ambassador for Friends of Glass.
“Its size affects the way a person drinks the beer.”
The Telegraph
"Matching beer with food can bestow memorable complex and flavoursome gustatory experiences so for this year’s Christmas feast, eschew the wine and instead choose beer. And serve it in appropriate glassware because the shape of the glass can affect the taste and the drinking experience of the beer as well as the aesthetic."
The Huffington Post
“I learnt that glass acts as a natural shell around the beer which preserves flavor and nutrients. It is inert, which means unlike cans it needs no added chemical layer to keep the beer fresh. There’s no taint or aftertaste either - you just taste the beer and nothing else!"
The London Blog
‘Glass has a history with taste’.. ‘Friends of Glass is a community that brings together all those who appreciate the qualities of glass to preserve food and beverages. They invite all food lovers to participate in #MapYourTaste to build a European interactive map of taste.’ The Friends of Glass community is leading this unique experience through a fun and simple questionnaire.’
Femme Actuelle
“Take your own glass jars and reuse them... “The Friends of Glass initiative has won our sympathy; We think about the toxins that could affect your food much more. Glass packaging is much safer and easier to recycle”
Delicious
