Calphalon is cultivating its own brand of cook — one born of creativity, experimentation and, above all else, a genuine love of food. Pair this adventurous spirit with a digital market that’s embracing people’s affection for customization, and you create the perfect recipe for innovation. You also invent an industry first: Your Set by Calphalon. Allowing customers to build a cookware collection tailored to their culinary needs, Your Set is revolutionizing its category. To leverage Calphalon’s ahead-of-trend position, we took a digital-only approach to launch. Our main ingredient? Social marketing. Backed by a website designed to support the commerce end of the product line, we served up a savory selection of Pinterest challenges, Twitter chats, VYou Q&As and Viggle collaborations. The result? Social mentions of Your Set rose by 75 percent, with impressions up over 100 percent. Even better, Your Set outsold the average order size of its Calphalon e-commerce peers by more than six times.Calphalon’s digital-only approach mixed traditional social media tactics with a more sophisticated palate of cross-platform collaborations. In addition to elevating sales, the campaign sought to achieve a more monumental goal: shift consumer brand perception from a functional to a more personal perspective — one aligned with people, ingredients and lifestyle. We started the Your Set by Calphalon launch with social media staples Facebook and Twitter — announcing contests, promoting partnerships and engaging users. We also hosted Twitter chats via the extremely popular hashtag #foodiechats, with conversations about cooking tips, kitchen must-haves, eclectic ingredients and more. For Pinterest, we created a Your Set board populated with product pins, menu ideas and favorite recipes. And, with the arrival of December and its much-coveted seasonal shoppers, Calphalon unveiled the Your Set Challenge, which gave users the chance to win a custom cookware set by creating — and then pinning and repinning with the hashtag #yourset — their own “Your Set Holiday Challenge." Through VYou, a site that blends video with Q&A for live and recorded sessions, the brand dished up advice from celebrity chef Michael Symon via Calphalon's VYou channel. Calphalon also collaborated with Viggle, a loyalty rewards and second-screen program for TV, which provided a companion sweepstakes for viewers who checked into The Ellen Show during her famous 12 Days of Giveaways. This campaign also featured an à la carte, month-long Viggle sweepstakes promotion. By the campaign’s end, the mix of these digital ingredients truly delivered. In addition to increasing sales — Your Set comprised 20 percent of Calphalon’s Best Set sales in Q4 — brand perception shifted favorably. During pre-launch, consumer word associations most commonly included functional terms such as “durable," “cookware" and “reliable." Post-campaign, those words changed to “love," “family," “passion" and “cooking." Some more savory outcomes: the digital media conversation rate was five times the national average. Sentiment and passion intensity increased by 18 percent and 15 percent respectively — levels that held steady for the duration of the seven-week campaign. Post promotion, a Google search for “Your Set" revealed over 20,000 results for Your Set by Calphalon. And, year over year, Calphalon’s social media presence is up to 92 percent, a direct result of the Your Set campaign.
