By 2016, the US snack world became a $102 billion business, with an average 6,296+ snacks cluttering shelves (IRI, 2016). Goldfish crackers competed against more wholesome snacks like yogurt and granola bars (IRI, 2016) and 'snack giants' like Doritos, Tostitos, and Cheez-It with budgets up to 1.5X Goldfish's (Kantar Media, 2016).
Meanwhile, insights indicated Goldfish was missing a bigger opportunity with an important new target: Millennial Moms.
Objectives:
1. Inspire Millennial Moms to buy Goldfish, increasing household penetration.
2. Drive engagement and experience with the Goldfish brand – as measured through her level of campaign-driven interaction with the brand in the digital space.
Research, including social listening, uncovered three powerful insights which we leveraged:
Millennial Moms: She's prioritizing being happy and present in-the-moment with her children, vs. racing to keep up in an overly-structured world. (Millennial Moms, Agency Research)
Goldfish Truth: The unique physical attributes of Goldfish crackers let Mom indulge in whimsy and play, immerse in the innocence of childhood through play, and enjoy moments of connection with her child (Psychologics, Character Camp, Millennial Mom exploratory 2016)
Goldfish storytelling: Goldfish crackers can be used to create an immersive experience into everyday moments.
Big Idea: Goldfish turns little moments into big smiles.
In storytelling spirit, we launched a campaign called Goldfish Tales. The tales aren't about snacks; they're about life – celebrating little moments of connection between mom and child made happier with Goldfish crackers. The Tales let the smiling personality of Goldfish stand out in the crowded snack category. Our first tale was a road trip to Grandma's house, in 2016 we added a Snow Day adventure and finished the year heading Back to School. Our tales use rhyming prose and iconic visuals to tap into Millennial Mom's cherished childhood memories.
To drive emotional engagement, we created a visually striking miniature environment that puts Goldfish into mom's world, and mom into theirs. To drive fun and immersion, we elicited a DIY feel by partnering with one of the best stop-motion animation companies, Stoopid Buddy Stoodios (creators of Robot Chicken). They helped create a miniature world in which shag carpeting becomes grassy fields and clouds are made of cotton balls. We provided an immersive behind-the-scene look at how our tales were made, and focused our communication to engage our audience to share their stories too.
But with all the communication vying for her attention and engagement, how does a little cracker breakthrough in the giant snacks category? By engaging our target in our campaign and inspiring her with immersive, inspirational content opening her up to infinite creativity where she is, her social feed.Outside our core reach vehicles in traditional media, we focused on consumer engagement and promotion on Twitter and Instagram – providing her with behind the scenes content, bite-sized how to tutorials, monthly seeded content and celebrated UCG content –inspiring her to create her own content capturing little moments and big smiles
Through fun, unique and clever creative each month we seeded a new theme with mini tales that we created and challenged consumers to create a tale with that theme in mind. Not only did we see but we celebrated the content we received allowing it to inspire us and others next month. Through this continued dialog with this audience the content shared kept getting better and better. Through paid social media and digital display, we promoted the engagement platform, and even featured some of our most creative consumers. The more we reached out, the more consumers responded.
We truly engaged and amplified the amazing tales our fans to inspire and create more smiles each day for us and their families.
The team created a platform that allowed for inspiration and true engagement with our audience, making Goldfish always in the cabinet, and more importantly when little moments create big smiles for Millennial Families.
Delivered against key business and sales goals
In 2016, Goldfish grew household penetration for Millennial families' 4.3 pts from 64.3% to 68.6% and 2016 dollar sales in MULO were up 6%.
Drove significant engagement, emotional connection and experience with Goldfish
- Inspired +12,000 amazing tales submitted into promotion by our fans (Brandmovers, 2016)
- Tripled followers on all social platforms and significantly increased engagement across key social platforms:Twitter engagements 18,000 (+997%) Instagram engagements 18,800 (+651%) vs prior year activation resulting in a total program reach of over 57,000,000 in social space alone.
So successful, effort expanding into additional markets
- Canadian market – Global adaptation of campaign
- Hispanic markets – Full activation of campaign in Spanish language including incremental instore merchandising, local partnerships
