2020 Winner
2020 Winners
Mott's Fruitsations
Buy a Cup, Give a Cup
2019 was a good time to be in the single serve apple sauce business. The category was coming off four years of consecutive growth - fueled, in large part, by Mott’s Fruitsations. The brand had spent a decade investing in marketing that promoted the benefits of apple sauce: versatility, simple ingredients and kid-friendly appeal.
The problem? Those benefits weren’t unique to one brand. Research confirmed that parents perceived a high level of substitutability in the category, and 80% of category growth was being driven by brands other than Mott’s Fruitsations - despite the fact that Fruitsations was spending more on marketing than all those other brands combined. There was a need to shift away from telling a category story (“apple sauce is a great snack”) to defining why consumers should choose Mott’s Fruitsations (“Mott’s Fruitsations is a great brand”).
Insights and Strategy
In January 2020, Mott’s Fruitsations announced it was bringing back its “Buy a Cup, Give a Cup” program - a partnership with Breakfast Club of Canada through which one cup of apple sauce is donated to children in need for every cup purchased, up to half a million cups. Kin&Co research confirmed 92 per cent of Canadians would switch brands if a different brand of a similar quality had a compelling social purpose - presenting a compelling opportunity to differentiate Mott’s Fruitsations.
Our job? Amplify ‘Buy a Cup, Give a Cup’ with millennial moms, giving them a reason to choose Mott’s Fruitsations. Three key things about our target that would shape our PR strategy:
- She’s a rabid consumer of media. Moms spend 214 minutes per day online, 167 minutes watching TV and 111 minutes listening to the radio (Statista, 2018). Millennial moms, on average, spend 17.4 hours per week on their 3.4 social media accounts (4 hours more than the average mom). We would need to reach her across multiple mediums with our message.
- The power of celebrity is real. A BCG study confirmed that millennials are twice as likely as Gen X - and four times more likely than Baby Boomers - to be influenced by celebrity endorsement.
- And she’s nostalgic. According to the Journal of Consumer Research, millennials spend more money on products when they are feeling nostalgic.
We also knew cause marketing on its own isn’t news - almost every major brand today has its own “donation” program. We didn’t want to overcomplicate the story, but we needed to amplify the announcement in a resonant way. Given what we knew about the impact of celebrity on our target, we aligned on leveraging a high-profile endorser to spread the news about the program.
Our goals?
- Drive awareness of this partnership by generating at least 20 million media impressions.
- Extend the reach of the campaign to social media, generating at least 5 million social media impressions.
- Ensure that at least 90% of the coverage delivered our message: the fact that if you purchased a cup of Mott’s Fruitsations, a cup would be donated to Breakfast Club of Canada.
Execution
Tapping into the power of notalgia, we identified a high-profile endorser with strong resonance among this audience: Canadian actor, director and 90s icon (plus, a Dad of two kids!) Jason Priestley.
To ensure the broad reach of our story across the multiple platforms we knew mom was consuming, we brought Jason to Canada for a multi-pronged campaign:
- Earned Media. Jason participated in a two-day media blitz in Toronto and Montreal, telling the story of Buy a Cup, Give a Cup to top outlets including Breakfast Television, KiSS 92.5FM, ET Canada, City News, Global Morning and La Semaine des 4 Julie.
- Influencer Breakfast Events. To drive social coverage, Jason hosted influencer breakfast events in both markets, providing attendees with the chance to learn more about the program and the important work being done by Breakfast Club of Canada
- Content Creation. We amplified the program through social content on Jason’s Instagram and on Mott’s Fruitsations’ channels.
Results and Impact
In the end, the 2020 Buy a Cup, Give a Cup program over-delivered on all targets, delivering:
- 70 earned media stories, delivering a whopping 39.5 million media impressions (+98% vs target)
- Nearly nine million social media impressions (+180% vs target)
- And every single story included a brand mention and a key message
Even better? Mott’s Fruitsations easily hit the 500,000 cup target, and the Buy a Cup, Give a Cup program was deemed so successful that the company has already signed an agreement with BCOC to repeat the program in 2021.