A beer company that brews their beer from surplus bread were preparing to roll out a nature-focused rebrand – expanding their impact in the food waste space to incorporate action for nature.
They commissioned 181st Street to undertake audience profiling and market research and use the findings to design a business growth strategy that would increase their B2B stockists, attract more on-trade customers and convert them to off-trade regular purchasers to improve supermarket sales.
They also leveraged our advocacy communications expertise to help develop their impact strategy, define their nature narrative and design a campaign that would make more on-the-ground impact and attract PR, raise brand awareness and contribute to their business goals.
The result was a ‘Food Heroes’ focused, hyper-localised campaign tapping into existing communities with a shared mission, which unlocked £5,000 in funding for grassroots organisations creating real change.
The brand already had strong connections in the food waste community and a loyal core audience that supported the brand’s environmental purpose, but they needed to expand their reach if they wanted to meet their revenue goals.
Influencers only reach 5% of their audience per post, and become a very expensive way of tapping into existing audiences.
Commercially, we had already increased their email marketing revenue by 67% and optimised their advertising to perform at 500% ROAS, but they wanted a way to raise awareness of their food waste mission and attract more PR.
By working with strategic partners that share the brand’s values, we knew that they could expand their reach in a hyper-targeted way, to bring brand awareness to values-motivated audience segments most likely to become loyal repeat purchasers, and create PR worthy moments in the process.
All while increasing the brand’s positive impact on their cause.
Which is why we designed a food heroes focused campaign.
In communities around the country, unsung heroes, underdogs and everyday folks that care are solving problems big and small. Instead of battling algorithms to build a community, we designed a strategy to take the brand to the tribes that already exist, and become a champion of Food Heroes.
The business was already donating profits to charity, but without any clear strategy in place for this.
With this in mind, we suggested the creation of a fund – allowing communities and aligned strategic partners to nominate their heroes (expanding reach and audience engagement) and for the brand to provide financial backing to grassroots impact projects, where the impact of the funding could be directly tracked for Green Claims Code compliance and BCorp standard impact reporting.
This would also create PR worthy media engagements that uplifted the grassroots organisations that couldn’t afford marketing support, as well as the brand funding the impact.
The brand partnered with a community engagement platform to create an initial fund of £5,000, to be distributed to 4 ‘Food Sustainability Heroes’ working to fix the food system.
We were pleased to see that the campaign won the Social Impact Award at the Footprint Drinks Sustainability Awards 2024.
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