Maximising awareness days for food and drink brands
Each month we see an abundance of international and national awareness days. Sometimes it can feel as though there is one for absolutely everything… National Bean Day anyone?
This doesn’t mean awareness days aren’t useful marketing tools, because they are. It gives a brand an opportunity to promote its products, in a way that’s creative and fun.
ADPR’s favourite food awareness day campaigns:
World Nutella Day (February 5)
As the name suggests, World Nutella Day is a day dedicated solely to Nutella. Nutella has a website devoted to this day and includes recipe inspiration videos as well as a historical timeline of the event creating an interactive and visual site. Creating an awareness day is easy but getting the media to take notice of it is not. If you’re thinking about creating an awareness day make it interesting and timely to the media. Firstly, check the awareness days calendar, some months are busier than others and you want to avoid a clash with another well-known awareness day. It might be that you want to tie in with an awareness week. Secondly, make sure it’s interesting. Does it inspire, educate or entertain? For example, you could run with a novelty angle like Christmas Jumper Day – a fun way to raise money for Save the Children. Finally, it’s time to promote your awareness day far and wide. List your day on sites like Year Ahead, create social channels dedicated to your awareness day, get a celebrity onboard to promote the brand/cause and use PR to get things noticed.
Pancake Day (March 5)
Another approach that can pay dividends is to “piggyback” off existing awareness days. Nutella dominated Pancake Day in 2017 with its #PancakesLoveNutella song and again in 2019 with a £1.9 million campaign, by launching limited edition jars.
World Pizza Day (February 9)
Pizza brand giants, Domino’s Pizza, used social media to capitalise on World Pizza Day. The brand used its Twitter page to its advantage as they offered customers a chance to win a year’s supply of free pizza, if they retweeted the #InternationalPizzaDay tweet; this post gained 6.5K retweets (shares). Like Dominos, brands can tie offers and discounts in with awareness days and promote them on social media using hashtags to get them noticed.
Tomorrow is #NationalPizzaDay! RT for a chance to win 🍕 FREE PIZZA 🍕 for a year. Rules: https://t.co/yxqR91GGCf #WinDominosPizza pic.twitter.com/PJ1hcZxGxi
— Domino's Pizza (@dominos) February 8, 2019
World Gin Day (June 11)
Premium mixer brand, Fever Tree, launched a #WorldGinDay pop-up bar on London’s South Bank. The double-decker container bar also hosted a rooftop masterclass in addition to live music and the chance to check out the brand’s new Aromatic Tonic. Awareness days provide a great opportunity for brands to host an event – and have a chance at media attention. The awareness day provides a news hook, top that off with a new product launch and you’ve got yourself a good angle. Just be sure to give the media plenty of notice.
With a little creativity, the sky is your limit when it comes to getting in front of your target audience this year.
If you would like some assistance in creating, managing and implementing a killer awareness day cmapiagn, contact us today for a chat about how we can help.
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