Saving scrummy snacks from grown-up paws

Bear Nibbles

BEAR was born in 2009 to meet a growling demand from parents for healthier snacks for their kiddies, who wouldn’t willingly eat fruit. After consecutive years of rapid growth, BEAR faced falling sales with fewer shoppers buying less frequently. Collider’s grizzly challenge was to reverse this decline.

First we needed to work out what was going wrong. Consumer research identified taste as the biggest barrier to purchase. Because BEAR was healthy, parents believed their kids wouldn’t like the taste. The focus on health messaging had essentially reduced the appeal. We were tasked with changing this perception. We needed to make BEAR so irresistible you’d struggle to keep your paws off them.

The insight that both kids and parents loved BEAR inspired our ‘Paws off Parents’ creative, a tongue-in-cheek campaign that playfully dramatised the tension between parents wanting to get their hands on their kids’ yummy YoYos.

A seven month social led campaign saw BEAR’s cubs protecting their snacks culminating in a mock-protest with angry (but cute!) kids fighting to save their scrummy snacks from pesky parents’ paws. This was combined with social sampling to get the treats into kids’ rightful hands, with kid-oriented packaging design, featuring puzzles, and importantly a coupon to measure redemption. We knew trial was critical in proving to parents that their kids would enjoy the taste.

Paid social promotion included Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Social sampling on Facebook and Instagram targeted individual regions sequentially, enabling us to isolate and measure the sales impact of the campaign more precisely through iRi.

As a final piece to the puzzle, we designed and developed a review email for those individuals who claimed a sample – to encourage reviews. In collaboration with BaazarVoice these were auto-integrated onto the BEAR website.