As COVID hit, people whittled down their visits to local cafés and started depending more and more on home brewers, like Keurig. Knowing our Keurig brewers were becoming a more consistent touch point in people’s lives, we had a unique opportunity to position Keurig as more than an appliance, but as a brand that can make a bigger impact during a time of struggle for both our consumers and the coffee community at large. Our goal was to lift brand awareness and favorability of Keurig, turning Keurig into a more meaningful product and brand.
As people were bringing the café experience home, we realized that the local café experience is not just about enjoying a great cup of coffee, but also supporting a local business. The reality was that local coffee roasters & cafés really needed support - 17% of US restaurants closed due to COVID. If people wanted to bring the café experience home, we wanted to show them that Keurig can help them not just enjoy great coffee, but support local roasters as they do it.
We created the Keurig Love Blend; a collection of 3, limited edition specialty blends available in familiar K-Cup Pods. Instead of Keurig putting together a coffee blend on it’s own, we collaborated with 5 local coffee roasters across the US and brought their coffee vision to life in each of those pods.
Beyond making our partnering roasters’ vision for coffee available to every home in America, all proceeds from sales of the Keurig Love Blend collection went back into their pockets, helping their business at a time they needed it most.
To bring the Keurig Love Blend to consumers, we created an emotional piece of content that not only featured the pod, but brought together our local coffee partners to raise awareness to the broader challenge at hand.
Through our hero content, social extensions, emails, a website and earned media promoting the Keurig Love Blend, we successfully raised brand awareness of Keurig by 7.1pts (1.5x campaign benchmark) and lifted Keurig’s favorability by 6.3pts (8x campaign benchmark) among those exposed to our paid units.
The sales of the Keurig Love Blend provided each partnering roaster more stability during the pandemic, while dramatically expanding their local and national exposure to potential new customers:
“The Keurig Love Blend will help our business stabilize. It’ll help us rest assured that we can continue to employ our staff.” - Deaton (Tectonic Coffee - Los Angeles, CA)
“The money that comes into it will help facilitate payroll, being able to bring back baristas that are currently furloughed, and also being able to open up some of my other cafes that are still currently closed” - Michelle (Hero Coffee Bar - Chicago, IL)
We made a real difference for our partnering coffee roasters and successfully positioned Keurig as a more meaningful brand - not just giving folks access to specialty coffee, but a way to make a real difference for coffee culture.
