Fiorucci is a nationally distributed, premium Italian meat brand that has low awareness and a much smaller marketing budget vs. category leaders, and its core target consumer loves to entertain and consider themselves a crowd pleaser, whether for 2 or 22. It wanted to find ways to break through during real-time, pop culture moments that helped reframe how people think about the brand and “charcuterie” as a whole.
Following the success of two annual Super Board campaigns, Fiorucci Foods decided to roll its success into the next major sporting event of the year where our crowd pleasers gather to watch games and share food, March Madness!
Right behind the Super Bowl, March Madness has the second-highest number of “casual fans”. An estimated 70 million March Madness brackets are filled out each year. That means that for three weeks, millions of fans are gathering to watch games together, often over snacks and meals at home.
After selling out of our previous Super Board board campaign within the first 47 minutes of launching we knew our audience had the appetite for a sale rather than just a social media giveaway.
Our Mission: Insert Fiorucci into the March Madness conversation on social, increase brand awareness as a premium brand, drive traffic to the Meat Madness landing page, and encourage viewers to purchase a custom charcuterie board.
It was clear our fans loved Fiorucci’s Football/Valentine’s Day Super Board so much they kept asking for us to make more, unique boards. So, we knew we had to answer their calls to bring custom charcuterie boards to other major sporting events. March Madness was the next big sporting event on the calendar that we knew would resonate with our casual sport fan crowd pleasers, so we quickly designed and developed an “Instagram Worthy” charcuterie board unique to the Fiorucci brand that captured the essence of basketball and could also feature Fiorucci’s handheld charcuterie meat and cheese snacks, the Paninos.
Our team was tasked to make the campaign and the ultimate consumer deliverable more affordable, as this was a new concept extension into a sporting moment the brand had never ventured into before. We had a tight, all-in budget of $52k ($22k of which was reserved for influencer partnerships needed to promote the board).
We knew that with a tight budget for production and promotion, we had to be very selective in how we presented the board and who we worked with. We had to get as much as we possibly could from every facet of the campaign without sacrificing the quality in the eyes of our fans. Our boards were valued at $500 a piece, but we sold them for $139 - to honor the year March Madness started (1939).
Our team designed a custom mailer box to enhance the unboxing experience for our influencers and consumers alike that created more opportunities for content creation and leveled up the premiumization.
Next, we added interactive, playful components to the board design that gave the board an interactive element, dunkable basketball hoops for sauces and dips, that we knew was critical to the causal March Madness fans who connected to teams and games solely because of their brackets. We wanted to try to emulate that same level of connectivity.
Simultaneously, we worked to source premium charcuterie pairing items for our board from similar and complementary brands, who we knew we could trade promotion for inclusion into our boards and kits.
We looked specifically at food creators, who could help us showcase the board and its interactivity. We used three paid influencer partnerships with creators on both Instagram and TikTok. Our key brand ambassador @Ainttooproudtomeg was our foundation and gave us consistency in voice and content across multiple promotions. Partnerships with @Samanthabauchmann (who we connected with months earlier via DM about our Super Board) and @FoodMyMuse all supported the launch of the sale with Instagram Reels, Stories and TikToks.
Finally, we supported the program with our own branded content - connecting everything back to the brand, its Paninos and our campaign landing page. Because this time, there were no giveaways. We had learned the limited edition drops were preferred by fans because it took the chance and perception they could never win away.
While no one in our office had a great showing in our office brackets, our March Madness boards became the Sweet 16 underdog story we had hoped they would be. Our test into a new sport based on fan requests was a slam dunk.
Over the first two weeks of the chaos that defines March Madness, we used two well-timed limited edition drops to sell out of 50 one-of-a-kind premium Meat Madness charcuterie boards.
Our influencer partnerships with @Ainttooproudtomeg, @Samanthabauchmann, and @FoodMyMuse across Instagram and TikTok promoting the drops drove 753 unique visits to the campaign landing page - way more visitors than boards!
In total, across Instagram and TikTok, the campaign included 42 content pieces, all of which earned over 302k views, 774 shares, 670 saves, 5.4k likes and 268 comments.
This was all done on a $52k budget that put the majority of the spend into creating something truly exclusive and valuable for our fans, current and new.
