The Best Marketing Campaigns From the Food & Beverage Sector
We’re into a new year and the next decade and we see it as a fresh chance to be creative, try new campaigns and push boundaries. So, in this miniseries we will be looking at the best marketing campaigns from key sectors like Food & Beverage, Travel, Tech and Lifestyle. Join us as we analyse the big brands who succeeded, what worked, what didn’t and how you can steal their style. We’re kicking off the series with the best marketing campaigns from the food & beverage sector. Hungry?
Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash
Marketing Stats for Food & Beverage
· Food delivery apps are rapidly growing in popularity, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast on mobile app usage. By 2021, over 20% of US smartphone users will use a food delivery app.
· 20% of all pins are food related. Food and beverage is the most popular category of content on Pinterest.
· BuzzFeed’s Tasty has more than 97 million Facebook fans
· The estimated return on investment (ROI) for email marketing for restaurants ranges from $38 per dollar spent to $43 per dollar spent.
· 90% of customers research a restaurant before dining, meaning your online presence and reviews must be polished. 92% of diners read restaurant reviews before visiting.
· “How To Cook That” is now a top 10 search phrase on YouTube
· Millennials want to know more about how their food is produced and want to “see the story behind the scenes” (81% and 80% respectively)
· Online grocery shopping is expected to be a $100 billion industry by 2020
· 67% of restaurants paid for social media ads in 2019
· 33% of restaurants use Instagram as their social media platform of choice
The F&B sector is fast paced, growing fast and with tough competition. Let’s look at some of the best marketing campaigns from big and small brands.
#1 Taco Bell – Best At Gen Z Messaging
Taco Bell is an American company selling Mexican food all over the world. Each year Taco Bell serves over 2 billion consumers and has 7,072 restaurants. The company was founded by Glen Bell who started out with a small hot dog stand in the 1948.
Fast forward to 2020 and when it comes to marketing to Gen Z and younger millennials, Taco Bell has it nailed. In fact, they throw shade on some of the technically bigger fast food giants. With more than 1.3 million Instagram followers, 2 million Twitter fans, and 93,000 YouTube followers, Taco Bell has been rocking some pretty clever campaigns lately.
Taco bell’s Instagram features new products, mouth-watering pictures, contests, a blog and plenty of event based marketing such as their #TacoBellFriendsgiving menus.
Taco Bell’s content hub features blog posts from fans, employees, dieticians, marketers and fun stories about the restaurants.
Taco Bell’s YouTube channel tells short fun stories like “What The Bell Happened”. They nailed the idea that video content under 1 minute is highly watchable and of course sharable for their demographic.
The brand puts fans at the center of their content. The YouTube series “For Here or To Go” is a great example. They also retweet fan stories knowing that user generated content is incredibly powerful.
They’ve nailed short, colourful gifs in their social media advertising:
And let’s not forget the 224 million views Taco Bell had on Snapchat with its Cinco de Mayo filter that turned users’ faces into giant tacos!
However, the best Taco bell campaign for us, was the time they opened a pop-up hotel in the summer of 2019. Yes really. And it booked up within TWO MINUTES.
Taco Bell fans went wild to get their hands on the 70 available spots (can anyone say FOMO) for the four-day takeover of the V Palm Springs Hotel. Of course, as a marketing campaign, the brand featured exclusive Taco Bell food that no one else has ever tasted before, Taco Bell-inspired nail art and hairstyles and even giant pool floats that look like sauce packets. We can’t even. But kudos to a brand who knows how to create an online buzz.
Takeaway: Taco Bell knows it’s audience demographic and creates content for them. The company has segmented the market targeting youth between the ages of 20 and 30. And they’re super specific targeting younger men especially who eat out a minimum of 12 times a month. The market has also been segmented according to income, targeting lower, middle and upper-class income groups. To really claim your space in the saturated F&B market, you must research your target market thoroughly.
Did you know: As voice search rises, food and beverage brands are increasingly creating audio content to enhance how users interact with their product.
#2 Ben & Jerry’s - Best At Taking a Stand
Who doesn’t love Ben & Jerry’s? Seriously, we’re actually asking! Ben & Jerry’s is an American ice cream manufacturer founded in the USA in 1978 by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. Today the brand generates around $240 million annually.
Let’s just assume that the ice cream is delicious (it is). What makes Ben & Jerry’s marketing so special? Very few food & beverage brands take a stand on ethical issues as much as Ben & Jerry’s and they do it so well.
The company is as much known for incredible flavours as it is for its stance on pressing political and social justice issues. Their product, social and economic values are featured on their website and echoed throughout their marketing.
The brand’s content hub features posts about ice cream recipes and new flavours as you would expect. But it also features stories that align with its values, like climate change, racial justice and fair trade. The content is highly engaging, powerful and inspires action from readers.
Jay Curley, Ben & Jerry’s Global Head of Integrated Marketing: “We’re trying to create a new model for how businesses can use their voice to have an impact on important social movements, and show that you can do that and it doesn’t hurt your business. As a matter of fact, it may help.” Proof that it does? Ben & Jerry’s business has tripled in the last 15 years.
And their ethos is summarised on their Instagram page with the bio “Peace, Love & Ice Cream”.
The brand integrates its values with the ice cream to create edgy campaigns like Justice Remix’d and Resist below.
Research shows that consumers respond better to brands that display corporate responsibility, with 73% of people believing companies should take a stand.
Other brands to do so recently were Gillette on toxic masculinity, Yoplait on Mom shaming, AirBNB on refugees and P&G on gender equality to name a few. Here at Moondust Agency, we’re loving it. Really loving it (no that wasn’t a McDonalds plug). The concept of turning marketing into a cause for good really appeals to us.
So back to Ben & Jerry’s and our favourite campaign. While Ben & Jerry’s has a long history of campaigning on everything from climate change to marriage equality, recently it focused on migrant rights working with the Lift the Ban Coalition. This was a campaign to allow asylum seekers to work while waiting for their claims.
Ben & Jerry’s teamed up with Refugee Action for a hard-hitting guerrilla marketing campaign. The brand sent 650 ‘nonsense pints’ of ice-creams to all MPs to demonstrate the absurdity of the ban.
They also gave away free ice cream as a part of their 'Waiting Isn't Working' campaign. When giving away the free ice cream, Ben & Jerry's encouraged their customers to sign a petition to change the right to work for refugees.
They placed “Have you Seen Common Sense” billboards all around London:
And ensured that the hashtag #waitingisntworking trended on social media.
Takeaway: Ben & Jerry’s are an excellent example of a food brand taking a stand and increasing brand visibility, popularity and loyalty in doing so. This is not to say that such activism will work for all F&B brands. It won’t. However, showcasing your values, community contributions and charity work on any scale is a positive thing. Food brands can team up with charities, donate a percentage of their profits, help feed the homeless, blog about welfare issues and join in with activism from other brands. It’s also key to tell the stories behind the food. How was it sourced and produced? Who made it? What makes it special?
Did You Know: Images sell in the F&B sector. Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without. Invest in high quality photos for your Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
F&B Marketing Fail
HOP - Not all F&B marketing campaigns end in glory. Take IHOP on Mother’s Day for example. The pancake house stoked up negative social media mentions for Twitter and Insta posts that shared a sonogram image of a stack of pancakes inside a womb. The post read, “If you have pancakes in your tum tum, does that make you a pancake mum mum? Happy Mother’s Day to ALL the moms out there!” Cringey right? Well users agreed and responses ranged from critiques of the anatomical error (a stomach isn’t a uterus) to anger over the timing (that week, women’s reproductive rights were challenged in parts of the USA.)
The key here is to think twice before you launch a campaign. Consider audience sentiment and mainstream news. If in doubt, keep posts clear of controversial topics.
#3 KFC – Best For Remaining Relevant
KFC was founded by Colonel Harland Sanders, an entrepreneur who began selling fried chicken from his roadside restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. The first "Kentucky Fried Chicken" franchise opened in Utah in 1952. So, how has such a vintage food brand managed to maintain growth despite fierce competition? Simple. They remained relevant.
One of KFC's most creative stunts: a Colonel Sanders bearskin rug given as an award in a creativity contest. Huge LOL on this.
“I couldn’t be more proud of what the marketing team has been able to do,” said Hochman, who was marketing chief for KFC U.S. before he was elevated to the president’s role. “If you’re not interesting or you’re not creating some type of emotion in the customer, you’re just basically being forgotten.”
KFC remained relevant by being quirky. In fact, to attract the influencer generation in Hong Kong, KFC recently opened a ‘concept store’ in the city’s centre. The three-storey-high restaurant features a dessert bar, self-ordering kiosks and Instagrammable art.
Perhaps their weirdest campaign #onlychickenbones came from Japan. KFC had extracted the bones of its chickens so that customers could use them for their ‘hot pot, ramen and many other things’. Whatever works for the region right?
The brand were also praised for their witty handling of a chicken shortage in the UK. The below advert trended on social media increasing brand loyalty and even sales once the supply problem was resolved. UK's top marketers named KFC 'FCK' as their favourite campaign of 2018. Arslan Sharif, global digital and loyalty director at Costa, called it "a great example of an ‘apology’ campaign", while Confused.com chief marketing officer Samuel Day praised the brand for turning a response to a crisis into "a new irreverent customer voice".
"FCK" won three golds and a silver at the 2018 Cannes Lions and took the Grand Prix for Campaign of the Year at the Marketing New Thinking Awards. It was also ranked the top press ad of the year by Campaign at the end of the year.
Takeaway: KFC are proof that a vintage food brand can remain relevant with the right marketing. They have even managed to incorporate a somewhat dated Colonel in their campaigns! Additionally, honesty is the best policy in the F&B sector. And the above campaign shows that customers appreciate an honest apology rather than bumbling excuses. Understanding how to use social media and PR to issue key messages is essential for the F&B sector.
Other F&B Campaigns we loved:
Innocent and their Blue Smoothie
10 Tips For Building Community In The Food & Beverage Space
1. Create a highly sharable website with vibrant images, videos and blogs
2. Regularly create content that showcases your ethos, products and story.
3. Invite food bloggers to contribute to your blog or share your social media posts
4. Use Insta stories to share behind the scenes food prep, recipes, customer reviews and meet the team interviews.
5. Make sure users can easily order your product or service, especially on mobile.
6. Email is still relevant for every food and beverage brand. Ensure you incorporate mouthwatering emails into your marketing strategy.
7. Use the right hashtags for your sector. Social media is filled with hungry foodies searching for the next tasty treat.
8. Write search engine optimised descriptions for your website and social media. Search is very relevant for F&B.
9. Cross-promote your content on other social networks and media channels. By helping other businesses, they will in turn help you.
10. Fully utilise user generated content (UGC) sharing reviews, tips, stories, comments and photos. Especially photos.