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London

Berry Gardens' Victoria Blackberries: The King & Queen of Lockdown Fitness

This campaign delivered significant commercial impact. It was about finding a marketing platform for one of our most underrated berries and amplifying everything that makes them so great. We have now begun the journey towards making blackberries as synonymous with healthy eating, work-outs, fitness and recovery, as blueberries.
Rob Harrison, Commercial Director, Berry Gardens

OBJECTIVES

Re-position Driscoll’s Victoria blackberries as a health berry.
Drive a 5% yoy increase sales increase.
Create social content to deliver 1m OTS.

STRATEGY & RESEARCH

Blackberries contain: fibre, vitamins C, K and E, as well as being low cal, carbs and fat, and their antioxidant levels make them great for immune systems. And yet they significantly under-index among healthy under-35s.

Strategy: each & educate active, health-conscious under-35s about the health benefits of Victoria blackberries.

We did this via Instagram and working with some of the UK’s leading ’fitfluencers’ (30% of Instagram users are between 25-34).

EXECUTION & CREATIVITY

Pre-Covid and lockdown, we planned content from fitness influencers at a central London, indoor gym, in the early part of the blackberry season; lockdown changed everything and it became clear gyms were a no-go. We believed our campaign was dead.

But then in mid/late June ‘Locky I’ was ending, and there was a sense of both the ‘caged tiger’ feeling among so many of our targets and our ability to feed it.

We began by recruiting three ‘influencers to influence the influencers’, knowing that if you get some of this community on-board, others often follow; we then used their reach and influence to recruit another THIRTY fitfluencers (none of whom received payment).

All 33 took part in a specifically-designed workout at outdoor fitness centre Farm Fitness (which additionally provided a rarely experienced gym venue for our fitfluencers and a fantastic photography backdrop) – all fuelled by Victoria blackberries, Victoria blackberry shakes and Victoria blackberry protein balls.

Across four summer weeks we ran a series of outdoor, socially-distanced events to find our King and Queen of Lockdown Fitness.

They created huge volumes of content as they told their fans about every aspect of the event from start to finish, eating/drinking our Victoria-blackberry goodies and then bantering across social with friends/other competitors.

We then took all the content they created and amplified it with paid-for support, putting it in front of more under-35 health & fitness fans on Instagram and across Tesco.com.

EFFECTIVENESS & RESULTS

Re-position blackberries as a health berry: ACTUAL - well under way with volumes of buyers under 35 rising faster than any other category. Tesco to come on-board as 2021 sponsor.

Drive a 5% yoy gross sales increase; ACTUAL - we delivered a 9.3% eoy figure: almost double target.

Create social content with a 1m OTS; ACTUAL - 7,515,407: more than x7 target.

Re-positioning blackberries to drive growth.

This campaign was, put simply, about re-positioning blackberries in order to drives sales. Following years of no-one really knowing how best to sell them, we created a new positioning which made them relevant again.