Branston

Driving Wider Usage

Problem

When you think Branston, you think cheese and pickle sandwiches right?  

But we did some research and found that there was definitely an appetite for finding out how to use Branston pickle in cooking. Yes, you read that correctly.

This seemed an exciting discovery – imagine how much further we could push the brand with all these new usage occasions?! Getting people buying it more often and using it in new and exciting ways. 

Branston challenged us to dig deeper into this new information through a digital campaign, allowing us to test the waters and find out how exactly people wanted to use Branston pickle in their kitchens and beyond.

Insight

We took this research and ran with it, creating a small set of research surveys (using social media) to winkle out as much information from customers as we could. 

We quickly found out that people were either strongly opposed to using pickle in other ways, or really excited by the idea. Pretty much a 50/50 split. In other words, some people are definitely more adventurous when it comes to pickle than others.

This provided us with more than enough ammo to come up with our creative idea…

Idea

So we gave a title to those people that are more adventurous with their pickle – The Pickle Pioneers!  

We wanted to use the campaign to shine a light on those who are most likely to experiment with other ways of using their pickle, particularly in cooking. 

We did this in a few ways to reach as many people as humanly possible:

RECIPE FILMS

The main focus of the whole campaign were our 3 recipe films. These featured ‘foodie’ microbloggers who each had a recipe for using Branston in their cooking. These people became known as the original ‘Pickle Pioneers’. The people really in-the-know about pickle. 

DIGITAL

There was a huge campaign across digital and social to get these films seen, with an extra ‘new use recipe’ developed by Twisted Food for their community.

ON PACK

The campaign also included a promotion on jar lids – offering recipe ideas, a 50p money off coupon and details on the promotion. This was added to 1 million jars, as we set out on a mission to find our ‘Pickle Pioneers’.

#PICKLEPIONEERS

The promotion invited people to share their recipe creation on social with #PicklePioneers or upload it to the website for a chance to win monthly cooking prizes.

MAILING

To get in front of existing Branston buyers, we worked with Dunnhumby to create 100K mailers. These showed off the new use recipe guide, the #PicklePioneers promotion as well as money off coupons.

WEBSITE

The Branston website acted as the hub of the campaign – with consumers directed to picklepioneers.co.uk for more recipe inspiration, recipe films and to enter the #PicklePioneers promotion – they could also rate other peoples’ recipes and share them for additional rewards.

Results

Strap yourselves in, here are some stats that really show off how successful this campaign was:

  • 6 million ad impressions
  • 3.1 million video views
  • 1.2 million completed views (That’s 37%!!)
  • Video completion rate was sometimes as high as 89%. That’s EIGHT NINE percent.
  • People who saw the campaign were twice as likely to search for ‘Branston pickle’ online. Therefore twice as likely to buy. 
  • Brand recall moved to 2% above UK average
  • Brand association moved up 5%
  • 25% of people said they would pass on the info after watching a film
  • Time people spent on the Branston website and page views more than doubled from the previous year
  • 227 new usage recipes were received and 605 ratings on other people’s recipes
  • Over 15K in sales via the on pack promotion 

And breathe…