Mueller's Pasta has 100+ year history of making great pasta. While it's crafted pasta with care for generations, the brand was facing a new category problem: right now, all pasta is seen as the same, and consumers don't see how Mueller's is different and worth choosing over other brands. We had to create the Mueller's Pasta difference, so a targeted shift in communications became critical to increasing consideration at the shelf and making people aware of our key points of differentiation.
Our overall objective: Grow awareness for Mueller's Pasta by X%. *
We repositioned the brand with a new idea that stood out from the competition and had a clear consumer payoff – that we brought to life through the "Pasta, The Way It Should Be™" campaign built on defining our difference.
To help measure how well the new campaign resonated with our audience and impacted the metrics that matter, we partnered with Facebook to develop and launch a Brand Lift Study.
*Exact awareness growth goal is confidential and included in the confidential section for judges only.
The new campaign was founded in a powerful message that showed consumers there IS a choice you can and should make in pasta. While the category was featuring fully-cooked pasta dishes (covering up the actual pasta), our content heroed pasta in its purest form – dry, raw and uncooked. We utilized the power of sight, sound and motion across Facebook and Instagram content to emphasize our difference – demonstrating when you strip away the sauces, toppings and techniques, it's the pasta that counts.
But, was this message actually resonating with our audience and breaking through the brand-blindness in the category?
To determine that, we turned to Facebook's Brand Lift Study to better understand our campaign's impact throughout the brand funnel.
This Facebook measurement solution leveraged an experimental design to randomize our audience into test and control groups with similar characteristics. Our ads displayed to the test groups across the platform, including Facebook News Feed, Messenger, Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories and Audience Networks. Polls were delivered throughout the six-week campaign to both groups.
We worked with Facebook to identify three key poll questions that best aligned with our business objectives:
Then, results from the poll were analysed to measure lift in these key brand metrics. Comparing responses from those who saw our ads against those who did not, the difference in desired responses would mark our brand's lift in awareness.
Objective: Grow brand awareness for Mueller's Pasta by X%. *
Results: We exceeded our overall brand awareness goal by 158% during the campaign. The Facebook Brand Lift Study we launched contributed significantly to this overall increase – seeing very strong results that beat benchmark and moved all key metrics for Mueller's Pasta.
In fact, according to our Facebook representative, she had never seen another brand achieve a 17-point lift in Ad Recall during her time with the company, even surpassing our category leader in Top of Mind Awareness.
We also significantly beat region and vertical benchmarks across the board for all metrics too.
These benchmark-exceeding results from the Facebook Brand Lift Study contributed to the 49% above-benchmark Ad Recall Lift Rate and 50% above-benchmark Cost Per Ad Recall the entire Mueller's Facebook campaign saw from August to December 2018 – helping us beat our overall brand awareness goal by 158% in that period.
This clearly indicates that consumers understood the brand's difference and why they should choose us over category competitors. We successfully grew awareness by defining the Mueller's Pasta difference.
*Exact awareness growth goal is confidential and included in the confidential section for judges only.
