With challenges like inflation and competition from lower-cost alternatives, we were tasked with making sure that SPAM® Brand stayed top of mind during consumers’ weekly grocery shop.
In order to accomplish this goal, we needed to grow usage with new consumers and expand their usage occasions, in addition to appealing to households where SPAM® Brand was already a featured pantry item. Recognizing the polarizing nature of this product, we wanted to convert customers who may not have previously considered purchasing SPAM® Brand.
Objectives: Awareness (new consumers), Purchase
KPIs: Reach, Traffic to e-Commerce pages, ROAS (e-commerce channels only)
Our strategy with SPAM® Brand was to go “always in” on high-value opportunities and specific moments throughout the year. This meant identifying “bigger bets” where we had the greatest chance of influencing consumer behaviour by reaching adventurous eaters when food was top-of-mind. Lunar New Year was an obvious fit for the brand, given East Asian households’ affinity for SPAM® products and the increasing popularity of this holiday in the mainstream.
Given the different challenges presented to us by SPAM® Brand, we knew this would require a two-tiered approach:
This resulted in a segmented audience approach that would allow us to deliver and optimize creative based on what was most likely to move the needle for our two distinct consumer groups.
Through research, we discovered that: 1) The cost of living crisis was driving more selective behaviours in-store, with value being top of mind, and; 2) East Asian consumers needed additional reassurance about the quality of the SPAM® meat to believe that good quality meals can be produced with it.
We created two messaging variants to address these barriers: Value (Highlighting SPAM®’s cost efficiency and reliability); and Nostalgia (demonstrating how SPAM® is used as an ingredient in traditional Lunar New Year dishes).
We engaged Chef Craig Wong (@craigwong) of Patois Restaurant in Toronto to produce influencer content for Instagram and license it for use in SPAM® Brand’s organic and paid channels. In addition to Chef Craig’s produced content, a Pound & Grain videographer captured additional images and footage. We engaged a second influencer (@melshangrytable) to expand our reach on Instagram and ensure a stronger presence on TikTok, as SPAM® does not maintain a Canadian TikTok channel. This let us leverage new and unique recipes for Lunar New Year featuring SPAM® that felt authentic and would better resonate with our target audiences than pre-existing global assets. Given the negative connotations around SPAM® Products, we felt that leveraging influencers who were genuine fans of the brand would help combat those stereotypes.
Our media plan leveraged both Meta and TikTok, providing the greatest opportunity to implement our desired audience segmentation while delivering strong reach for both audiences. TikTok was critical as it was identified to be the preferred platform for key East Asian audiences. We leveraged interests in various types of East Asian Cuisine with Parent and Millennial demographics to drive interest with new consumers, and built a number of retargeting and lookalike audiences, including followers, site visitors, video viewers and ad engagers to build frequency and drive repeat purchase with existing customers. We partnered with MikMak to build landing pages featuring our Lunar New Year photography and drove directly to retailer websites where SPAM® Brand was sold. Diverse formats, including carousels, single image, video and polling ads were used to maximize audience engagement and performance optimization - allowing us to truly customize ad delivery based on what worked at an individual audience level.
We worked collaboratively with SPAM® Brand to develop a list of KPIs and target benchmarks based on historic performance that would demonstrate successful outcomes against their business objectives for this campaign. We exceeded the following target benchmarks:
In addition to the quantitative performance metrics, we also drove strong qualitative results for the campaign. The brand lift study we ran showed positive outcomes for both ad recall and purchase consideration. Comments on organic and influencer content were overwhelmingly positive, helping to combat some of the negative stereotypes around SPAM® Brand.
